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…

You know you're celebrating Christmas in Vietnam when...

You know you're celebrating Christmas in Vietnam when...

• the refrigerator you bought for Christmas is adorned with a massive sticker of the not-so-well-known superhero, Mr. CoolPack.
• one of the main selling points of said refrigerator is that it can "stay cold all day when the power cuts out."

• finding a real, honest-to-goodness turkey breast at the supermarket is one of the highlights of the holiday.
• the only thing around that smells remotely like an evergreen tree is the scented candle someone gave you from the States.

• Christmas breakfast consists of eggs, bacon, Swedish tea ring and fresh mangoes, guava and dragonfruit.
• your visitors from "freezing" Hanoi go swimming on Christmas Day. In the ocean.

It's been a great Christmas--there were 13 of us who got together to celebrate. Seven friends with our organization came down from Hanoi to spend the holiday with us--a family of five (the Breedens) and a retired couple (the Davenports) spent about five days here enjoying the warmer weather, ocean views and quiet life of Quy Nhon. Since this city can feel a bit isolated at times--especially during the holidays--it was a blessing to have such fun people to share a few days with.

A few days after Christmas we decided to give a belated gift to the vendors of Cho Khu 2, the market where Joelle usually shops. These ladies have gotten to know Joelle over the past couple of years and--as Vietnamese women are prone to do--asked her repeatedly when she was going to have a baby. After all their asking, they were thrilled last year to learn that Joelle was pregnant, and even more excited when she returned this year without the belly. But where was the baby?? After several solo visits to the market, Joelle felt that a riot was imminent if she didn't bring Micah soon.

Yesterday, they got their first chance to meet Micah, in all his cute foreignness. The resulting chaos is chronicled on this video, which I shot while Joelle fielded questions and fended off pinching fingers. So, for a glimpse into Vietnamese market culture and the excitement surrounding babies here, watch below. (For those reading this on Facebook, you need to click the underlined title of the video, which takes you to the page where you can watch it).

Micah's Market Adventure from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

That's so METRO of you (and other stories from our first two weeks back)

Since our time back in Vietnam thus far has been fairly chaotic, this is going to be a hodgepodge of snapshots from what we've experienced.

Snapshot 1: It's Tuesday, this must be Quy Nhon...
So until recently, Micah hadn't slept in the same place for more than a couple of nights ever since leaving Washington: the plane, a hotel in Saigon, the first hotel we stayed at in Quy Nhon, our apartment, a different hotel where we had a retreat with our teammates, and now back at our apartment. The poor kid has no idea where he is going to be from day to day. We've finally settled back into our apartment for the next month or so (until we head to Thailand for our winter conference), so that should provide him a little stability. He really does take most things in stride, and although he's been poked and squeezed and tugged at and sniffed (yes, sniffed) by more people than we can count since coming back, he almost always has a big, dimpled smile for new folks that he meets. Kind of irresistibly cute, really.


Snapshot 2: That's so METRO of you
Honestly--and perhaps sadly--one of the things we were excited about upon returning to Quy Nhon is the fact that METRO has arrived. What is METRO, you ask? Well, to Westerners like us you could say it's a little slice of paradise.

First, some context. Imagine, if you will, living in a city of a quarter million people where practically the only baked goods available are little loaves of French bread and little rolls with cheese and mystery meat baked into them. Imagine a place where ice cream comes in flavors like "Taro Root," and tastes like they forgot to add the cream. Where the only condiments you can put on a sandwich are mustard, mayo and ketchup (if you're lucky). Where you have to bike a mile and a half across town in hopes that the one bakery in town where they sell cheddar cheese won't be out of stock (again). Where the only two breakfast cereals readily available are corn flakes and something called "Honey Stars" which tastes like sweetened, ground-up drywall. It comes to this: The Vietnamese do a wonderful job of cooking Vietnamese food. In general, they could care less about Western food and thus they don't stock any of it in their stores.

It makes a lot of sense, but for those of us who like a bit more variety in our diets, we're kind of out of luck. Selection is limited, and tends to be scattered in stores across town, so that if you want to make burritos for dinner you end up biking six miles and visiting four different places for all the ingredients. A good way to keep in shape, for sure, but a little disheartening as well.

Enter: The Game Changer. METRO is a German-owned company (we think) that tends to sell things wholesale to businesses. Think Costco. This October, they opened METRO Quy Nhon, and eating will never be the same again. We visited it for the first time this past week with our teammates and I think I walked through the whole place with a dazed smile on my face, whimpering under my breath in shock. It's as though Santa Claus himself opened a warehouse and stocked it with stuff just for me.

Australian ice cream. (Mint chocolate chip, even!) Salmon. Washington apples. Whipping cream. Massive blocks of New Zealand cheddar. Balsamic vinegar. Hershey's and Dove chocolate (all of which are locked in individual cases with electronic alarms). Multigrain bread. Shall I go on? Dried cranberries. A dozen different kinds of cereal, including All Bran (hello, bran muffins!). Hot chocolate. Tons of colored paper and office supplies for teaching. Tasteful Christmas decorations. Barbecue sauce.

We truly have no idea who in Quy Nhon will buy most of these products, other than the 15 or so foreigners who live here, but man is it fun to see all of that goodness in one place.

So then, what will this do to all the mom-and-pop businesses that you find on every street within the city? My guess is: Not much. We, for example, will still buy our fruit and veggies and meat at the local market. It's fresher, cheaper and very relational (really, how many mega-grocery store checkers pat your butt and tell you that you look more beautiful today than the last time you were in? This is the kind of personalized service Joelle gets--for free!--when she goes to visit the local market ladies) Presumably, most Vietnamese realize this as well and only the ones drawn to the "modern" (expensive) way of living will be tempted to buy lower-quality produce at higher prices. But if we get a hankering for rocky road ice cream or a vinaigrette salad dressing or (heaven forbid) Hershey's dark chocolate, it's nice to know where we can find it now.


Snapshot 3: Meet the Rowleys
One big change since last year is that our teammates are new. Our good friends and teammates of the past two years, Jill and Jason Fizzard (and their two girls Ella and Madeline), have accepted a position with our organization's leadership in Hanoi and are relocating there.

Our new teammates, Jeremy and Laura Rowley and their son Isaiah arrived in September and by all accounts have done a great job of getting settled into teaching and daily life here in Quy Nhon. We feel kind of bad that they were here for three months without us, but they seem to be doing swimmingly. The Rowleys are from Manitoba and, like us, prefer the quieter, slower pace of life in Quy Nhon to the hustle and bustle of the bigger cities. They also like the outdoors, coffee and U2. We should get along just fine. :)