A Quy Nhon Christmas

All smiles.

So it's not quite Christmas yet, but we thought we'd post this video Christmas card for those of you who keep up with us.  Last Friday, Steven and Will (the other foreign teacher at Quy Nhon University) had a party (or actually a series of parties) for all 200+ of their students at our house.  We invited each class of over 50 students to come, one per hour, throughout the afternoon and we had different activities for them to try--games, songs, card making, snowflake making, cookie decorating.  In all, about 120 of the 200 showed up and we had a blast.  An exhausting blast, to be sure, but a blast nonetheless.  You'll get to see some of the party, along with just some pictures of our family getting ready for Christmas.  Maybe post-Christmas we'll post a follow-up video as well.  In the meantime, Merry Christmas and enjoy!

(I apologize for the "squished" look of the video.  Apparently my video editing program is having some problems distinguishing between widescreen and not-widescreen.  We'll see if we can get that fixed.)

The Grand Tour

Here we sit one week from Christmas already!  Where have the last three months gone? We realize we have done a poor job of keeping you up to date on the last months events in our lives - but after we take you on a house tour and get you reaquainted with Quy Nhon, I am sure we will get more regular with updates!

Our first 3 and one half months of renting a house and living in a comunity has proved to be great for us!  

I (Joelle) had some hesitations for sure, but I have loved it.  Now please join Micah as we take you through the house we have come to know as home.

To start with, our house stands like most Vietnamese houses - narrow and tall.

You can see Steven's arm placing our internet wires in the right place. I don't know if he's ever had to hook up his own internet before, but in living here we often find ourselves doing tasks we have not done before.

I have really loved having space for a real kitchen! (If you remember, the "kitchen" in our old apartment was basically just the corner of a room).

We hosted Thanksgiving here and plan to have a group for Christmas as well.  It's been great having a kitchen to do all the prep in for those events.

Excited to go upstairs I guess!!

Here's Micah in his very own bedroom! It's actually the first time we've had the space for him to be in his own room and he's been doing well with it.  We do have a real crib set up for him now, but we keep the travel tent up and ready for when our 7 month-old teammate, Ezra, comes over and needs to have a nap.

Bath time in our beautiful bathroom! This is the more...hmmm...decorated of the two bathrooms we have, and we use it pretty much just for Micah's baths.

The third room in the house we use for storage and Steven's office. It's nice (for me maybe more than for Steven) to have him be able to have a space in the house to work. Nice because he can come anytime I need him!

The rooftop of our house is open-air but covered.  It's nice and breezy and is a good place to hang out on days when the house gets too warm.  It also has a kind of ridiculously over-the-top fish pond (complete with little figurines from the popular Monkey King legend) that Micah is fascinated with.  He can sit for quite a while and make fishy faces at the goldfish.

And finally:  the view from our rooftop.  Mountains dropping into the South China Sea.  Not bad.

Well, thanks for joining us for this brief tour.  Take care and do check back now and then.  We'll try to keep this thing updated a bit more frequently now that we're settled in and going strong.

Touchdown and TVO

The Shetterlys have landed.

As I write this, we're in the middle of TVO (pronounced like the popular TV-recording hardware, TiVO) which stands for "Team Vietnam Orientation." Currently we're at a hotel perhaps an hour outside of Hanoi, on the banks of the Red River. We're here with a group of great people--individuals and families who are dedicated teaching and serving in Vietnam. For some, it's their first week in Vietnam. Others have been here 5, 10 years or more. It's our fourth year coming back, and it really has begun to feel like home.

Our flight went fine, with Micah proving once again that he's a great traveler. The stewardesses on Korean Air only had to employ their patented baby-calming tactics four or five times on the entire 15-hour journey. Our first few days in-country were spent with our old Quy Nhon teammates, the Fizzards, at their house in Hanoi. The Fizzards' two girls, Ella (4) and Madeline (2) were thrilled to the squeaking point to have a new playmate around. For Micah it was a bit of a transition from the Transformers, trains and trucks of his cousins this summer to the dolls, kitchen set and pretty princess blankets of the Fizzard girls but he handled it well. For a one year old boy, a Barbie is just as fun to throw against a wall as a ball is.

With the tropical summer still in full swing, the backyard inflatable swimming pool at the Fizzards offered some relief from the heat and a good deal of fun as well.

One of the favorite new toys, however, isn't really a toy at all (go figure). It's a baby bed/tent that Joelle's folks got Micah for his birthday just a few days before we returned to Vietnam. The tent folds up into something the size of a kid's bicycle tire but, when expanded, has plenty of room for Micah...and a few friends.

(In the picture you can see the Fizzard girls, Micah, and the newest member of Team Quy Nhon, Ezra.)

Speaking of friends, Micah has around 89 million of them here in Vietnam. Soon he'll need his own tour bus and roadies. Although reaction to him was halfway subdued while we were in big, cosmopolitan Hanoi, we moved an hour outside the city and all stops are removed. Micah is the cat's pajamas and the bee's knees all rolled into one cute little frame.

Joelle and I made the classic blunder of showing up about 10 minutes early to lunch at the hotel's restaurant our first day here. Since the wait staff had nothing else to do, they swarmed on Micah, coo-cooing with cellphone cameras at the ready. Micah--who's grown a little more attached to mom and dad over the summer--wasn't quite sure how to take all the attention. It's something he's going to have to get used to, whether he relishes the attention or not.
Being back in Vietnam has been great and we're enjoying our time together as Team Vietnam, but we're even more excited to get back to Quy Nhon, unpack our bags, meet old friends and students and stay in one place for a while. In the one and a half weeks between leaving the States and settling in Quy Nhon, we will have spent the night in seven different places. We're ready to stop moving for a while.

Our journey south begins tomorrow as we take a bus back into Hanoi. We'll spend one more night in a hotel in Hanoi, then fly out for Quy Nhon with our new teammates, the Bankstons, on the 6:30 flight Sunday morning. Looking forward to it.

Windy City Wanderings and Ponderings

Time for a Stateside blog. Time for any blog, for that matter. It’s been forever since we’ve updated. See what happens when a baby comes along? Blogging is the first thing to go when things get busy, apparently.

Well, it’s late July and that means Steven is doing time at Wheaton College outside of Chicago. Ok, “doing time” isn’t exactly a fair description of what Steven has been experiencing. He’s about ¾ of the way finished with a Master’s degree in Teaching English to Speakers of Other Languages (mercifully shortened to TESOL by most people). He’s taking classes through a program generously offered by our teaching organization, which is paying his tuition. It’s designed for teachers, thus classes are offered in intensive blocks in July and January. And by "intensive" they mean "really, really difficult." Fitting six credits worth of graduate studies into a 4 week period is a challenge for everyone involved--professors and students alike. It translates into long days in the classroom and longer nights spent reading, writing papers, developing curriculum, designing phonological diagnostic tools, etc. Coffee consumption climbs to record levels. Dreams at night consist largely of phonetic symbols dancing on desks, or various educational theorists chasing you across a landscape composed of PowerPoint slides. But enough complaining.

It's actually been a really fun summer session. The classes have been useful (if a bit demanding) and a number of our friends from Team Vietnam have been studying in the program as well, giving a sense of camaraderie to the whole endeavor. Even better, we found some cheap last-minute tickets so that Joelle and Micah were able to fly out from Washington for several days to visit. There's nothing that brings a little sanity to situation quite so much as a beautiful wife and a 10-and-a-half month old with a huge, dimply smile who waddles around making dinosaur noises and throwing things. That's just plain good for the soul.

Steven worked a little extra in the days leading up to Joelle and Micah's visit, so we were able to have some downtime together without 20-page research papers looming in the shadows. On Saturday we stuck Micah in his REI backpack and headed down the block to catch the commuter train into Chicago. It was Joelle's first time in Chicago and Steven's second, so we didn't really know quite what to expect. Turns out the excitement started before we even got off the train, as every car was full of Cubs fans on their way to Wrigley Field. Apparently an important part of getting ready for America's Favorite Sport involves drinking a lot of America's Favorite Beverage: really cheap beer. It seemed that everyone on the train (minus us) was holding a can, cup or brown-paper-sack-wrapped bottle of something. The three guys sitting across the aisle from us had nothing at all to hide, with a 12-pack open on the floor between them. I was beginning to wonder if perhaps we'd accidentally found our way onto a chartered train headed for a Lake Michigan Booze Cruise.

Whatever the case, we arrived safely in the city and realized promptly that we looked really out of place. The picture below says it all: earth tones, Chacos, coffee in hand and child in backpack. We look like we're ready for a hike in bear-haunted wilderness (or at least a mildly rustic Bellingham park) rather than a stroll through the business and cultural capital of America's heartland. Proving, of course, that you can take a family out of the Northwest but you can't take the Northwest out of a family.

Despite our utter failure to blend in with the locals, Micah made friends wherever he went. He waved at and played peek-a-boo with everyone on the L-train, and got waves and laughter in return (Safety note: waving at and playing peek-a-boo with people on the L-train is highly inadvisable unless you happen to be a really cute 10 month old).

Eventually, via the L-train and good old fashioned hoofing it, we found our way a bit north of downtown to Lincoln Park, location of a fairly sweet free zoo. Since free is a good price any day of the week, we walked in and introduced Micah to his first giraffes, rhinos, lions and, yes, garbage-can-dwelling-aardvarks.

He had a blast. Since he's learning different animal sounds, it was fun to see him smack his lips at the fish, make dinosaur roars at the rhinos and say mboooooooo mboooooo to just about everything else that had four legs ("mbooooo" is his approximation of "moo" which--strangely enough--is the first animal sound he learned). After we had made noises at every animal in the zoo, we headed back to Wheaton for some dinner with our soon-to-be Quy Nhon teammates Will and Kristin (and their 2 month old little guy, Ezra).

Joelle and Micah headed back to Washington on Tuesday morning, so Steven is left by himself to weather the last few days of class. He heads home on the 30th and is looking forward to some time with family and away from textbooks.

Hard to believe it, but a month from now we'll be back in Vietnam for a week of training with the whole country team. After that, it's back to Quy Nhon and life in a place we're growing to love. We're really looking forward to this coming year and thank you for keeping up with us. We'll be sure to fill you in on all the latest...whenever we find a free minute or two. :)

Could it be a new video? Yes, it could.

Well, it's about time isn't it? Here are some highlights from the last few months in video form. Thanks for your patience with us. Somehow there just isn't as much time as there used to be for making videos and writing blogs. Hmmm. Curious.

For those reading this on Facebook, click here for the video.

More Micah and a trip to Thailand

For those of you who aren't on Facebook (all three of you) I'm posting a link to some sweet recent Micah pictures that I posted to our online album right about...HERE.

Saturday we fly down to Saigon, spend the night and then head out the next day head for Chiang Mai, Thailand where Steven will be taking his TESOL Master's classes and we'll be attending our organization's annual conference. We're looking forward to seeing the rest of the members of Team Vietnam, as we missed being with them at the usual beginning-of-the-year festivities. All told we'll be gone about 3 weeks, so we might not be quite so able to stay in touch in the near future here.

Rest assured we're all well, Steven taught a couple of classes this week (and loved it), Joelle has made banana bread for half the city in celebration of the Lunar New Year and Micah continues to grow. And smile. And look really cute.

Laters.

Gimme a brrrrrreak!

Well, it’s gotten down to a bone-chilling 68 degrees here in Quy Nhon, so I guess you could say winter has arrived.

Actually, the weather has been cloudy and cool (for the most part) since we showed up in early December. The lows get down into the upper 60s and let me tell you—that feels plenty cold for Quy Nhon, especially with a fresh breeze blowing in off the ocean. Joelle and I can’t recall a stretch like this where we’ve been comfortable wearing long pants and long sleeves (even socks and shoes!!) outside for such a long period of time. Come April when it’s 85 degrees at sunrise I’m sure we won’t believe it was ever this cold.

When the temperature here drops below 70, the locals start piling on the clothes. Layers and layers of clothes. Jackets with fur-lined hoods, turtlenecks, big puffy ski-type jackets, gloves. Kids run around in full snow-suit outfits complete with ski masks. It looks a bit like that awful movie The Day After Tomorrow (if you’ve never seen it, you’re fortunate). This screenshot should suffice to give you the idea:

Anyway, in the midst of all this wintry weather, Joelle and I regularly take Micah out for walks in his stroller along the beach. In fact, we consider this to be ideal walking weather because a) we’re not soaked in sweat within 30 seconds of leaving the apartment and b) the normally crowded sidewalk along the beach is often almost deserted at this time of year.

The Vietnamese we do see when we’re out think we’re downright nuts, I’m sure, and neglectful parents to boot. I mean, we’ve got our four month old baby outside in 68 degree weather wearing nothing but long sleeves, long pants, socks and a blanket. For shame. Where’s the snowsuit? Ski mask? Scarf? Moon boots? Some of them just look at us, look at the stroller and shake their heads. Others stop and take the time to explain that it’s certainly not weather for babies to be outside in. They point to the cloudy skies and we hear two words repeated again and again from many different mouths: lanh (cold) and gio (windy).

An interesting side note here: In traditional Vietnamese belief, “bad wind” is responsible for just about every malady known to man. When it gets windy, people start dropping like flies. I was made aware of this during my first year of teaching when one of my students fainted in class and had to be carried back to her dorm room by some classmates. Why had she fainted, I asked her classmates, thinking that perhaps dengue or malaria or at least a good strong case of typhoid fever had been the culprit. “It’s windy today,” came the reply. Ah hah.

In windy weather, children should—at minimum—be dressed like this one:

In any case, we often either smile and nod knowingly at the advice folks give us and keep walking or else we explain that Americans like “cold” weather, that the current temperature back home is somewhere around 35 degrees, that Micah was born in America and that the inside of our house was around 68 degrees for the first few months of his life. So khong sao. No problem. As if bad wind ever hurt anyone. Pshaw. Now if we can just get over these darn colds…