October: Settling In and Our Trip to North Vietnam

This past month finds our family settling into work, home, and relationships, while keeping travel at the heart of our year abroad.

Scout’s first term at ISHCMC has gone well–she made two “best friends”; she is slowly figuring out how to learn Spanish (daily practice!); she volunteers for her school’s Empty Bowl Project and gardening club; and she LOVES her product design and visual arts classes! It is great to see her thrive in the IB program, where they integrate studies and provide various forms for assessment. I wish Anchorage School District would follow suit with IB for middle school years (they only offer IB for year 11-12).

Shannon is mastering Vietnamese cooking in a our limited kitchen–which means, we still eat well at home. 🙂 I gave up running here after only 1 month, but every other morning at 6, Shannon runs an 8 kilometer route around Thao Dien’s sleepy yet hazardous streets. He breaks up his online teaching by interacting with our security staff: Mr. Phouc wants to learn English, so daily he works with Shannon, and Shannon learns some Vietnamese from Phouc. Shannon also masterminds our adventure travels. Out big October trip took us around North Vietnam.

(My next blog will be about my work, relationships, and activities.)

October 11-12 Hue: While I attended a 2-day VietTESOL conference, Shannon gave a lecture at Hue University on the influence of Asian poetry on 20th century American poetry. In his words, Shannon was treated like a “rock star.” He was given a campus tour, greeted by top administrators, advertised, photographed, given flowers and gifts, treated to meals, and eventually written about in official publications.

I started this trip with a bad cold, which limited my conference participation. However, I learned a lot about current research into teaching reading and successful online educational language tools. I met a couple of young American women who are currently on special one-year assignments to teach English in Vietnam. Most of the attendees were Vietnamese public school English teachers. Since 2008, Vietnam has taught English as a second language beginning grade 1, but they have had difficulty with this since the Vietnamese teachers do not know much or any English. Therefore, there are TESOL conferences, workshops, etc., going on somewhere in Vietnam about every week to help the public school teachers.

Transit: We spent a miserable day at the Hue airport. We arrived four hours before our flight, and then the flight was delayed by almost two hours. In smaller VN airports, you are not allowed inside the secure area until 2 hours before your flight; thus, we waited in a tiny area with limited seating, food options, etc.

Lesson: NEVER get to an airport more than two hours before departure!

We arrived at our Hanoi hotel, The Golden Rooster, about 11 pm. We were tired from being stuck in a small airport for hours, I was coughing, and we just wanted to sleep. Because the ceiling in our room was extremely low, we felt cramped, and the air conditioner system blew oddly, leaving us sweating on top of our beds throughout the night. We were miserable, we couldn’t sleep, and woke believing the hotel was not a place we wanted to sleep in again.

Lesson: Arriving late to a hotel is not optimal; if it occurs, take the time to figure out how to control temperature and air flow, no matter how long it takes, especially if you are sick.

October 13-15 Sapa: The rest of our trip was fantastic! We had a great guide (Mr. Nhà) and the best driver (Mr. Long) for 5 days. We didn’t know what to expect. It took most of the first day to drive to Lào Cai Province. We spent each of our trip’s 4 nights staying in ethnic minority “homestays” as their guests, which included eating authentic home meals with them.

Once settled at our first homestay, we took a walk in the misty rain around the village and then treated ourselves to a mineral “tea” bath. A young professional family (he, a Vietnamese from Hanoi, is a school principal and she, a local from the village, works as a tour guide) hosted us for dinner and breakfast.

We spent the next day trekking about 15 kilometers in the local hills. Three H’mong women followed us for the first few hours, carrying baskets with goods to sell. We only had 700,000 dong (about $30 dollars) with us on the trek, so eventually we did purchase a few beautifully hand-stitched tapestries from them. (These now hang in our villa bedroom.)

October 15-17 Ba Bể National Park: We spent the next day on a loooooong van ride from north-central to northeast VN. This is when I learned how incredible our guide and driver were: Because they could not find a restaurant “good enough” for western tourists, they commandeered an empty restaurant, paid to use their kitchen, and cooked us a wonderful meal of rice, vinegar cucumbers, tofu, warmed peanuts, and soup….more than we could eat, but so delicious!

I had two favorite moments from this northern trip. The first was about an hour before we reached Ba Bể Park: We stopped at a mountain top and watched as 2 dozen goats were shepherded. I loved the sounds of their clanging bamboo bells.

The second was the next day after we arrived at Mr. Linh’s homestay: We hiked for a few hours to a remote H’mong village; then we participated in their harvesting of rice. For lunch, Nhà and Long made a picnic out of hard boiled eggs, rice (wrapped in banana leaves) topped with vinegar cucumbers, tofu, and peanuts. We ate looking out over the farmers and mountain valley, eating the best food this world provides. I wanted to stay in that place. Something felt beautiful and right. However, as a tourist, I have no concept of the reality of living in this Khau Qua village.

We met people who lived in the poorest conditions I have yet to see. Much much much poorer than any Alaskan village. No windows in their homes, dirt floors, smokey kitchen fires that blacken the walls. Girls age 15-17 who are married and have babies and work in the fields all day. People with blisters on their legs; elders with blackened teeth.

Oct 18-19 Hanoi: This old city feels more crowded than Saigon. We returned to our same The Golden Rooster hotel and the same room, but this time, we were refreshed and figured out how to control the air flow! The next day, we were given a tour by our first female guide, Ha. She showed us all the local historical sites. We began with Ho Chi Min’s life: his mausoleum, Hanoi home, and museum. The Russian influence, especially the architecture, was obvious. I learned a lot about this famous Vietnamese leader–“Uncle Ho,” and can appreciate the conflicting narratives about him. We also toured “Hanoi Hilton” (where John McCain was imprisoned). I am reminded of my friend Henry Graham’s note about Japan’s World War II museum propaganda when he visited there as an 8th grader; like the Japanese, many of the northern Vietnamese people are proud of their 1975 success over the United States.

Our last day in Hanoi we spent biking around their great lake with our previous guide, Nhà. It was crazy car and motorcycle traffic, and after 2 hours, Scout needed to stop. Nhà treated us to a fantastic lunch before we taxied to a ceramic village. It seems that every piece of pottery and ceramic we see in Vietnam comes from this one village.

October 20-21 Ha Long Bay: Our final two days we spent on a mid-size cruise boat (15 cabins). A gorgeous bay, just as all the pictures show. However, this is tourist central: the bay was packed with boats and our hike through the caves was packed with a steady stream of people. We did find our peace while on the cruise boat–great food, staff, and one of my best night’s sleep of the trip! We even fished for squid (with no luck) off the back of the boat for hours in the evening.

Thanks for reading!