Museum exhibits

Click here if you'd like to see the complete photo album of this trip...

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.

The Cyclo, The Spray Paint and the Wardrobe

Sounds a bit like a C.S. Lewis classic, doesn't it? This is kind of a long entry, but worth it (I hope). It was our first real Vietnamese cultural experience...

It all started with the wardrobe. Our apartment was furnished when we moved in—sort of. We had a bamboo table with some bamboo chairs, some other bamboo chairs and a bamboo couch, some bamboo shelves and a bed that feels like it’s made out of granite. In other words, most everything we would need to survive, if not thrive. What the apartment was lacking, however, was any sort of place to put our clothes. I take that back; we do have a tiny built-in cubbyhole that smells like it’s had wet rags stored in it since the 1970s. We elected not to store any of our clothes in there.

Since we didn’t feel like living out of our suitcases for the next six months and since we’d been given some start-up funds by our organization for occasions like this, we decided to get ourselves something to keep our clothes in. With the help of Shelly, our country director’s wife (who speaks Vietnamese), we headed down to “Furniture Street,” about three blocks from our apartment.

When I say “Furniture Street” (not to be confused with “Bamboo Wicker Furniture Street,” which is in an entirely different part of the city) you might well imagine a street with a few good-sized furniture shops on it. You would be wrong. Rather, furniture street is a virtually unbroken string of tiny furniture shops that runs, near as we can tell, the entire width of the city of Hanoi. People make, sell and buy furniture all along Furniture Street, and sometimes even partially into the roadway of Furniture Street. It's also been dubbed “Crazy Street” because it has no sidewalk and though it is only about as wide as a single “U.S.” lane of traffic, it inexplicably carries more scooters and buses than virtually any other street we’ve seen in Hanoi.

With Shelly’s help, we found our way to a relatively inexpensive shop on Furniture Street and chatted with the owner for a while. He offered us a cheaply made but reasonable-sized wardrobe for about $65. We took it, and the fun began.

The question after purchasing the wardrobe then became: How on earth would we get it to our second floor apartment four blocks away? The owner answered matter-of-factly, “Cyclo.” A cyclo (pronounced SEE-clo), for those unfamiliar with Vietnamese culture, is a modified bicycle. Kind of a reverse tricycle, actually, with one wheel in the rear and two wheels up front, with room in the front to carry tourists, vegetables and—apparently—wardrobes. The fact that it would have never in a million years have crossed my mind to try and move a wardrobe with a tricycle didn’t slow the process down a bit. The furniture shop owner got on his cellphone and a few minutes later our cyclo driver pulled up. He and the shop owner hefted the six foot tall wardrobe onto the cyclo, tied it down, and we headed off, walking alongside our driver.

The cyclo driver pushed his heavily-laden trike along Crazy Street and ran with it down a steep drop onto the side street that we live on. Things were going swimmingly for the first two blocks until we reached Obstacle Number One. Our side street is called a pho, which means something like ‘alleyway,’ and which is not to be confused with “pho” which means ‘noodly breakfast soup.’

In any case, our pho is not the narrowest of streets in Hanoi, but it’s pretty dang tight and is made tighter by the fact that there are several cement poles in the middle of it. While trying to negotiate his way around one of these poles our cyclo driver made a slight misjudgment and bashed the top corner of our wardrobe into the pole, gouging the side and partially separating the top piece from the rest of the wardrobe. Whoops.

Without missing a beat, our driver parked his cyclo in the middle of the ally, rummaged around in his belongings for a bit, pulled out a can of dark brown spray paint and proceeded to ‘repair’ the gouge on the spot with a quick shot of paint. Voila, problem solved. (It was pretty clear that he’d been through this routine before.)

We reached the front gate of our apartment building, whereupon the driver parked it again, pulled out his screwdriver, and re-tightened the top section of the wardrobe which had been loosened in the crash. Good as new.

Steven and the driver then picked up the wardrobe and began to carry it into the building. Soon they were confronted with Obstacle Number Two: the tight spiral staircase that climbs up to our second floor apartment. It was at this point that Shelly, our translator, had to leave to pick up her son from school and it was at this point that things began to break down even more. The cyclo driver looked at the staircase, made some “tsk, tsk” sounds, said something in Vietnamese and started to disassemble the wardrobe. He pulled the doors off to make it lighter and—as we later discovered—to keep them from getting gouged all to heck. Then he and Steven lifted the wardrobe again and started up the stairs.

At the first hairpin up the stairs, things got ugly. The wardrobe jammed tight between the wall and the railing and would go no further. The driver—who was lifting it from the top—started motioning and saying a lot of words in Vietnamese to Steven, who was lifting from the bottom. He could have been saying “push it,” “turn it,” “move back,” “I quit,” “why don’t you let your wife do it,” or any number of more colorful sayings—it didn’t matter, though, because Steven couldn’t understand a word of it. Though the wardrobe was clearly stuck, Steven just kept lifting and pushing, for lack of any better ideas.

Finally, the driver decided to take matters into his own hands. He handed the top end of the wardrobe off to Joelle and somehow contorted himself around it and down the stairway to take the bottom end from Steven. A few vigorous jerks of the head and more Vietnamese words made it clear that Steven should go elsewhere. So he clambered his way up the railing of the spiral staircase to help Joelle at the top end of the wardrobe. After another minute of lifting and gouging, the wardrobe somehow came free and squeezed around the hairpin. From there it was a straight shot into the apartment, thankfully.

After setting the wardrobe down in our apartment, the driver—looking somewhat sweatier and less congenial that he had initially—gave the wardrobe a few more shots of fix-it-all spray paint and left without saying a whole lot further. For our part we laughed and decided a couple of things: 1) It would be good to learn some Vietnamese if we’re planning on living here and 2) Though we’ll be moving elsewhere in six months, the wardrobe isn’t coming with us.

Vietnam first impressions

Well here we are. Our heads are still spinning a bit, but we're beginning to get settled in. If you'd like to see our entire online photo album with pictures from the last few days, go here.

And now a quick run-down of the details for you, in case you're interested:

We took off from LAX at 10:20 PM for a marathon 15 hour flight to Hong Kong. We got to watch in very slow motion on the little map as our plane flew north all the way to Alaska (we waved as we flew over Washington), curved over the north Pacific, and came sailing down over Japan, Korea and finally into Hong Kong. "Fun" is about the last word we would use to describe that part of the trip.

Hong Kong airport was quiet when we got there, so Steven took a nap in the corner while waiting for the connection to Vietnam. It came soon enough and, after our 15 hour trip, the 2 hour hop to Vietnam flew by. We were greeted at the airport by David, our country director, who loaded us into a taxi for the drive into town.

First impressions of Vietnam consisted of the smell--a hard-to-define mix of diesel, food, humid air and a few other things. We also marveled at all the scooters--some carrying entire trees, some carrying cages full of pigs, some just carrying people--that make up the majority of traffic here. Our driver laid on his horn and drove through the crowds of mopeds as they parted before him, Red Sea-style.

We got settled in to our apartment for a little while, then went right out to lunch with a number of folks from our team here in Vietnam. They were all great people, though neither of us remember much from lunch since we were only partially conscious. Right after lunch, a couple from our team around our age took us out on the town. Though Joelle had been to Vietnam before, Steven had a chance to experience his first Vietnam bus ride and first Vietnamese coffee. By the time we were done with our first tour, we were both ready to collapse. It had been around 48 hours since our last good night's sleep. We stumbled back home and crashed. Of course it still took Steven another 2 hours to actually fall asleep, thanks to the Vietnamese coffee.

Though we're still getting tired around 8 PM and getting up around 4 AM, we're slowly adjusting. Yesterday Susan, our Personnel Director, showed us around town a bit more and explained how language school would work for us. We start lessons tomorrow, which should be dang interesting. We'll let you know how it goes.

There's so much more to tell, but it'll have to wait. We leave you now with this fantastic time lapse video of Hanoi traffic on a lazy Sunday afternoon:

Chillin in Cali

Hi, and welcome to the blog if you've never been here before! Chances are good you heard about this through our newsletter or in an email, and we're glad you've stopped by.

Right now we're in cloudy southern California--the weather was gorgeous when we left Seattle on Tuesday, but by the time we landed in Ontario, CA it looked like the Pacific Northwest again. Bleak, rainy, with a lot of freeways and 70s era strip malls. Kind of like a supersize helping of Tacoma.

The last few days have consisted of visiting some friends in the area, meeting up with the staff and other teachers from our organization at the airport, eating a lot of food, and sitting through a great deal of good but slightly overwhelming information. Orientation has been scrunched into basically two days for us which is great in the sense that we get to head to Asia quickly, but our heads are brim full of organizational info right about now.

We have one more day of orientation tomorrow and then it's off to LAX for our overnight flight to Hong Kong. We leave a little after 10:00 PM California time and get in around 5:40 AM Hong Kong time. I think it's around a 15 hour flight. Bleah.

One big praise: When we arrived in CA two days ago, our organization still hadn't received our passports with our Vietnam visas back from the consulate. The consulate got our passports in late January, right before Tet--the Vietnamese New Year. And unlike us stodgy Americans who take just one day off of work for New Years, the Vietnamese take around two weeks off, so they didn't so much as look at our passports until mid-February. Considering the fact that our flight was already booked, we were starting to get a wee bit nervous that our passports were sitting in an office in downtown San Franciso. They showed up this morning, though, with a little over a day to spare. So it looks like we're goin'.

In other news, Steven bought a beard/nosehair trimmer on a great sale at Ross yesterday. Seeing as how neither he nor Joelle currently have a beard you can guess which attachment was used the most.



Anyway, there'll be more to come soon (I'm sure) so keep checking back. We love you all and will be in touch!