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…
