Museum exhibits

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Today we visited the Vietnamese Museum of Ethnology here in Hanoi, after being invited to take a tour with a Vietnamese girl that Joelle had met a couple of weeks previous. She's a first year university student and was looking both for a chance to practice her English as well as an opportunity to hang out with some really fun foreigners (us).

We met her and her cousin near our apartment this morning and so it was that I (Steven) proceeded to take my first motorbike ride in Hanoi. (Joelle's first ride was a couple of weeks ago, as she's much braver than I). I rode on the back of the cousin's bike, with a helmet that felt as if it was both crushing my head and choking the life out of me at the same time. It really was rather fun, since Saturday morning traffic is nothing compared to weekday traffic. And we've been getting 'acclimatized' to Vietnamese traffic over the past month, so that close encounters with honking buses no longer faze us as they used to.

The museum was quite fun; it consisted of both some typical indoor exhibits with artifacts from various ethnic groups in Vietnam as well as an outdoor section with pretty authentic-looking houses built by members of the different groups (there are 54 distinct ethnic groups in Vietnam, according to our friend/tour guide who showed us around.)

During the tour we couldn't help feeling as if we ourselves were part of a museum exhibit, due to the large number of Vietnamese who openly stared at us and followed us from place to place, forming something of a paparazzi entourage. At one point, a college-aged girl walked up to Joelle--possibly mistaking her for Angelina Jolie--and asked to have her picture taken with her. This emboldened her male friend, who also had his picture taken with Joelle, which in turn drove a group of three more girls to jump in on the photo op. Steven--whom no one mistook for Brad Pitt, mysteriously enough--stood back and took pictures of the people taking pictures of Joelle.

A few minutes later we were approached by a smiling Vietnamese woman who explained that she was an English teacher for a class of university students who were at the museum on a field trip and wouldn't we please join them for a small party in fifteen minutes. We tried to explain that we really weren't famous, and were in fact quite normal people but she would have none of it, so we hung out and talked with her class for a few minutes. The small party never really materialized, but we did get to chat, walk on stilts and have our picture taken with them.


We wrapped up our adventure with a nice lunch at the cousin's house. As we were getting ready to climb on the back of the Honda motorbikes for our trip home, the cousin said to me in his somewhat broken English, "In Vietnam, Honda has slogan: I love Vietnam. I hope soon you can say 'I love Vietnam' too."

Language Lessons and Mexican Food

This entry is primarily about our language study. Unfortunately language lessons don't make for very interesting pictures...and yet a blog entry without pictures is like a burrito without guacamole: far below its real potential. So I've just tossed in a few random, unrelated pictures from our life here in Vietnam. They have little or nothing to do with language study, so don't get confused.

Our blog posts to date have, admittedly, been about things of a rather silly nature (swan boats and wardrobes and such). Fearing that some like our friend Erek might begin to believe that we've got too much time on our hands here in Hanoi it's time to let you know some of the less silly things that we've been up to.

Our primary purpose in being here has been to learn as much Vietnamese as we can in four and a half months. So far we've had ten lessons and have learned somewhere in the vicinity of 22o different words which (we're told) is pretty good. For many, the term "language class" probably conjures up images of sitting in a stuffy high school classroom with 30 other drowsy teenagers listening to a teacher explain irregular verb conjugation and such. That's not the case with us, fortunately.

Officially we are students at the Hanoi University Vietnamese Language Center. What that boils down to in reality is two very nice ladies--one a mother of two and a former Russian teacher, the other a student getting her masters in economics--who take turns coming over to our apartment for three hours of language instruction each day.

A typical day of instruction has us involved in six or seven different activities. We learn new nouns and verbs by pulling out pictures of various objects and actions. Our instructor will say (in Vietnamese, of course) "This is a dog. This is a dog. This is a cat. This is a cat. Where is the dog?" And Joelle and I--like the linguistic infants that we are--will do the only thing we can which is point to the one we think is the dog. We proceed like this until we have a table full of pictures of various animals and can at least semi-accurately point to the ones our teacher calls out. Our lessons also involve playing with dolls, Pictionary-style games, counting and eating M&Ms, and a fair bit of laughter. We record key parts of each activity so that we can go back and review them on our own.

All in all it's been a more enjoyable, less painful process than we had thought it would be. Our first 100 hours of instruction involve no speaking at all on our part which can be a bit frustrating at times but which will (it is hoped) help us in the long run, since we'll be better able to distinguish and mimic some of the trickier sounds and tones of Vietnamese.

But no matter how good our Vietnamese gets, we will probably never be able to order quality Mexican food in Hanoi because it simply doesn't exist. But by shopping at three different stores and the veggie lady down the alley (and walking a total of about three miles in the process) we were able to find enough ingredients to whip up a fair approximation of fajitas-minus-sour-cream. We leave you now with a picture that has nothing to do with language study, but which warms my heart nonetheless.

Swan Boats in Love

One of the more endearing things we've observed about Vietnam so far has been the large number of giant swan love boats. Let me explain.

Hanoi is a city full of lakes. Walk more than five blocks in any direction and you're likely to run into one. Granted, it may be surrounded by apartment buildings and have bits of trash and dead fish floating in it, but it's nice in that it breaks up the city a bit and gives a convenient place to go exercise or just hang out.

One particularly scenic lake is just down our alleyway and across the main avenue. (Our lake is especially cool in that it has a zoo on the far side.) The common denominator in all of the truly cool lakes in Hanoi is this: giant swan paddle boats. These aren't your everyday, run-of-the mill paddle boats. No, they are giant swan paddle boats and therefore they are romantic.

It was explained to me on one of our first days in Hanoi that a truly heartfelt gesture of love for my sweetheart would be to take her out for a paddle in one of the swan boats. And though we haven't quite gotten to that point yet, we've enjoyed watching them on several of the lakes around town.

Most days, perhaps a third to a half of the available giant swan boats are being pedaled around our neighborhood lake by lovestruck couples but today was different. Not only was it a Saturday, it was International Women's Day (an apparently worldwide holiday that I didn't realize existed until earlier this week). On International Women's Day--much like on Valentine's Day in the US--it is a man's solemn duty to do something over-the-top romantic for his sweetheart. So today, to the surprise of no one, every single swan boat was in use and there was a line-up of folks waiting on the dock for their turn to pedal/paddle their very own Fowl of Love.

We took a walk down by the lake this afternoon and decided that this was a phenomenon that simply had to be recorded for posterity. Steven took some time-lapse movies of the swans from various locations around the lake, as well as a few still shots and regular video. The compilation video below should give you a fairly good idea of just what this little piece of Vietnamese culture is all about.

Birthday party in the 'burbs

The transition for us from living in Nooksack (population approximately 850) to Hanoi (population 3 million plus) has been a bit of a system shock to us, so this past weekend we were glad to escape for a while from the hustle and bustle of central Hanoi.

Saturday morning we hopped in a taxi with our country director David and his family and headed toward the other side of the Red River into what you might call the Hanoian suburbs. Our destination was the house of a family that David and his wife have known for several years--Vietnamese mother, American father and two kiddos. They were celebrating their eldest daughter's 8th birthday party and David and family were nice enough to invite us along as they thought (correctly) that we might need some time out of the big city.

It was the first time in almost a week that we had seen a house with an actual lawn, surrounded not by miles of concrete but by small neighborhoods interspersed with fields, orchards and pagodas. The party was attended by people from the US, Holland, Germany, Burma, South Africa and (of course) Vietnam--a fairly international crew.

Our activities included a group walk/run down the road to some guava orchards in the floodplain of the Red River, as well as numerous silly games.

The main attraction, however, was a virtually indestructible pinata, made by the dad and his daughter out of papier-mache and bamboo strips. Even after all of the kids and all the adults had taken their swings at it, the thing still needed to be ripped apart by hand to get to the goodies. (Pinatas are not really a Vietnamese cultural phenomenon, in case you were wondering.)


All-in-all it was a good chance for us to be introduced to life (a little bit) outside the big city and to begin to get more of an understanding for the country we find ourselves living in.