Construction...

There is one aspect of being in Hanoi (besides it being a really big city!), that has taken some getting used to. And that aspect is the constant buzz of construction. In our old apartment and now our new, it is typical to be woken up at around 5:30 or 6 because of the clanking and banging of the construction men hard at it already. Even when looking at apartments we were told that there is really no place in the whole city where you can get away from the construction. Hanoi is a city that is ever changing and ever growing to supply the demands of new business, expats living there and to support the wealthy Vietnamese living there.

This was nothing like the Vietnam I remember, although the parts of Vietnam I traveled to were the smaller towns and countryside. Hanoi is actually a fairly expensive city (contrary to what I had told Lance about Vietnam being so cheap!). You can still choose to eat cheap by eating at local food stalls or restaurants but it is also not hard to stop at the loads of non-Vietnamese restaurants and spend close to what you would back home for a meal.

It seems in so many part of the world that the rich are getting richer and the poor are getting poorer....and that seems to be the case here in Vietnam as well, from what we have observed and heard. I really don't know how some of the people survive here with how cheap it is to buy their goods off the street. And when you buy stuff off the street it is all about bartering....which you can't help but feel bad about because of the small price you are bartering over! Sometimes you feel angry because you know that they are trying to charge you double because you are a foreigner. In the end you know that it is not a significant amount and usually give in.

Tipping at restaurants is not a common thing. It is a very hard thing for me to not tip, being a former waitress! I had heard and read many different opinions on the topic. First, I have been told that it is considered rude to tip (maybe as though they feel they are being pitied by your tip). I've also heard that at nicer places you can tip a little if you want. We are still trying to figure out if for delivery we are supposed to tip. There is usually a delivery fee, but we feel that we should still give a little something. The times we have done that, we have found the delivery person to give us a huge smile when we give them a tip that is around $1.

Lance and I are still trying to get used to some of the "ways" of the people here. This mostly includes the driving! Since we have started renting motorbikes and driving more in the city, our anger and frustration has only got worse! Besides the fact that the traffic is just plain crazy here from the masses of cars, trucks and motorbikes, it is crazy because of how the people drive! There are lanes that are clearly marked, although I'm not sure why, because in a 2 lane you will see up to 4 vehicles side by side. People here just seem to be rude, uncaring and unknowing of what is going on around them. Even when walking people push to get in front of you and talk really loud and don’t seem to understand that they are being rude! When we walk to and from school we are constantly being honked at, flashed (by car lights!), almost driven into and yelled at for a taxi ride. This wouldn’t seem strange but these taxis are RIGHT IN PLAIN SITE IN FRONT OF US!  We don’t understand how THEY don’t understand that we SEE them and that if we actually needed a taxi, we would let them know because we can see them!

Back to the traffic. I don’t think that the word “yield” is in the Vietnamese vocabulary. When someone is turning onto a road you are on, there is no yielding or even looking to see if traffic is coming. I think it is expected that the people in that ongoing traffic will just move over and let you in. It’s a bit scary when you are driving a motorbike and people are coming at you! And you are supposed to move over but there are 15 motorbikes next to where you want to move over! There is a constant beeping and honking that we should maybe be used to by now because we were told that the do it mostly out of “hey I’m coming around the corner or hey I want to get around you” or something like that. BUT again, when you are actually driving in this madness it seems like a different story. For example….I’m driving with a car behind me and like 30 cars/motorbikes in front of me and around me….and this car behind me keeps beeping. I wanted to turn around and scream “I CAN’T GO ANYWHERE BUDDY, LAY OFF! EVEN IF I MOVE YOU AREN’T GOING ANYWHERE!!!”

Patience is a virtue right? Well, we are working on that!!!

Life in Vietnam from a woman's perspective...

             I have had the pleasure of having some heart to heart conversations with a few young Vietnamese woman and found their stories to make me feel for them.  The first conversation I had was with a young gal that worked at the orphanage I volunteered for in Dalat, Vietnam.  She voiced her concerns about how the Vietnamese men do not treat their women very well.  She said that the men don't work, all they do is drink beer and smoke cigarettes.  She voiced how she really wanted to get married, but knew that she probably wasn't going to because she didn't want a man like that.  I remember her asking me if American men were like that.  I said that there are some that you don't want to be with, but there are also some good ones out there.  Through facebook, after leaving Vietnam the first time, this friend of mine saw that I got married and asked me about my "prince" that I found and said that she was so happy for me!  Again I felt sad for her that she wasn't going to find her "prince."
            My second conversation that was very similar was with a young Vietnamese woman that works at my school. We drove together on a motorbike and she was asking me all sorts of questions and telling me about her life. She asked me about being married and what it was like. She asked if once I have a baby if I can still work.  She told me that it used to be that Vietnamese women were just expected to stay home once they got married and take care of the kids, clean the house, etc.  Now, they are expected to work, but once they get home from work are supposed to take care of the children, clean the house, cook, on and on.  Vietnamese men do NOT take care of the children she said. She voiced how the Vietnamese men are barely at home because they are out drinking and smoking.  She has told me before that she wants to marry a foreigner...I assume because she thinks they would take care of her better. Most Vietnamese women are very small (thus why I feel like a white giant most of the time!). This friend said that she is "big" for a Vietnamese women...and Vietnamese men only like the small women.  Men are allowed to do whatever they want, whenever they want, but if women do any of those things, especially certain things, they are looked down upon and thought of as not being a suitable wife.  Just like my other Vietnamese friend, she makde it sound like getting married was something she didn't want to do, just because of the status of women and how they are treated by the men.
      I wish I could find a Prince Lance for them!  It does make me thankful for growing up where I did and made me more aware of how other women my age view situations.  It seems that women are sucked in, in Vietnam, just like America, about how they "should" look and what men "want" and it is not beneficial to their self esteems.  I hope for both of them that they can find men who aren't as conservative and traditional, who will treat them as great as they should be treated!

Birthday ups and downs!!!

7:30pm - Get on an overnight bus for Cao Bang - we got to enjoy a couple hours of delightful Vietnamese singers and actors on a TV at the front of the bus at an usual high volume! We were the only 2 foreigners on the bus.

 6am - We arrive in Cao Bang - it is raining and we are getting hassled by taxi drivers!
We see people selling meat, from a sheet, on the street, in the rain!

6-9:30am - We walk around the entire town and stop into EVERY hotel and ask about getting to the Ban Gioc waterfall.....where in every single place either got a response of a shake of the head, a no or something that was NOT helpful! In the wonderful, sacred Lonely Planet travel book, it assured us that any hotel will be able to hook you up to get to the falls and will be able to arrange the police permit that you need to go there. Unfortunately, hardly any of the hotel staff spoke more than a few words of English and had no idea what we were talking about, even when we pointed to the huge picture of the waterfall that they had in the lobby of their hotel! 

9:30am - We catch a break and find a man at a hotel who doesn't speak a word of English, but for whatever reason is very eager to help us! Long story short, there was a man who came who was to take us to the waterfall! We were still a bit skeptical about not having this police permit, but we decided to go with it!

10am - We were finally off!
The taxi driver dropped at the side of the road for me to pee. I went behind an abandoned building and found that it seemed to be a hot spot for doing heroin!

12ish - We arrive at Nguom Ngao cave which is 7km long and used to be a shelter for the Vietnamese when they were at war with the Chinese back in 1979. There is a 1km long section that you can actually walk through. Lance and I agreed it was the coolest cave we had ever been in! Our driver/tour guide, spoke a little English, but wasn't helpful with getting any background information!

 

 

 

 Organ pipes!

 This picture reminded me of home with the sections of beans and corn (minus the mountains of course!).

2pm - We take off for the waterfall....which we had been in anticipation of for almost 6 months...ever since Lance had found a picture of it and showed it to his students when he was teaching them about Vietnam!  We came around a corner and there it was!
It seems as though I insist on standing like my wonderful mother in most of my pictures!

  It was truly breathtaking! We paid a little money to have a local take us on a bamboo raft to get as close as we could to the falls! This waterfall is in the very most northern part of Vietnam and on the other side of the waterfall is China.

Our driver also served as our personal photographer and kept wanting to take pictures of us! We decided that we took more pictures together in that day then we did combined for our engagement and wedding pictures!

 

 

 

5pm - We head back to Cao Bang. Unfortunately, this was not a calm, relaxing ride back to town. Our taxi driver, whom I assume was feeling the effects of a long day, decided to drive like a bat out of hell, driving very fast and crazy around the winding roads and through villages. It was dusk, nearing dark and he seemed to not slow down for anything. The strange thing was that there were people on bicycles, walking, children playing, in the dark, right on the side of the road. I seriously thought that if I were to take my eyes off the road, that we weren't going to make it. To top off this stress, our driver also really liked his "boom boom" music....and decided that he needed to play it at an absurdly high volume. I couldn't even hear myself think! Strangely enough, neither Lance or I had the courage to nicely ask him to turn it down...instead we just suffered!  I gave Lance a huge hug when we made it back safely!

7pm - We arrive back in Cao Bang and decide to check into a hotel and grab a bite to eat. We very quickly realize that it is a huge possibility that we might not get a hotel room because in this small town there is some celebration going on in which every room is booked! We looked at over a dozen hotels...all with no rooms.  We decided to call our old buddy and pal taxi driver from earlier in the day. He took us to a few more hotels, all with the same luck and then we told him to just take us to the bus station. He didn't seem to understand the sense of urgency we had in potentially missing the last bus and not having a hotel room and not knowing what to do! He makes a call and I kindly say we need to get going! He zooms by the bus station and we try to tell him he passed it. He tells us, it's okay, it's okay.....(we do NOT believe him!).  He continues his stellar driving habits and drives 80kph through town, laying on his horn the whole time! 

8:45pm - The next thing we know we are on the side of the road and there is a bus and he tells us to get on it! We thank him and we are off....on our way back to the Hanoi!

5am - We arrive back to Hanoi and sleep the rest of the morning after our exhausting 36 hours of madness!

In the 5 plus hours that we spent walking around this town of Cao Bang, we realized that this town didn't see many tourists....we didn't see another foreigner the whole time.  We realized tourists must be few and far between because of the stares, points, laughs and looks we got! It was to the point that it made us feel uncomfortable.  Also, all younger children and older too, would say "Hello, hello!" and then giggle.  I even got asked to take a picture with, like I was some movie star or famous person! The young girls thanked me endlessly for the picture.  It was definitely an interesting experience!

Perfume Pagoda

This past weekend we took a day trip to the "Perfume Pagoda" which is about 2 hours from Hanoi. We traveled by boat again, but this time we were in groups of six. I just can't emphasize how nice it is to get out of Hanoi and float on a boat! It was a great ride, other than the one aggressive vendor. On the drive there we saw that it must be the high time of the harvest of rice! It's quite interesting how they go about harvesting, drying and reaping the harvest.  Here are a few pictures to show how they do it.
She cuts, he gathers...

 Running the rice through a machine to separate...

 Burning the remains...

 Drying....and what better place to do that than on the road that motorbikes, cars and trucks drive on!

 Turning the rice...

We got there around 11:30 and it took about 1.5 hrs on the boat to get to the mountain. It was a glorious site being in nature hearing the sounds of the paddles on the water.

We stopped and had lunch, and looked around at the vendors goods before we headed to the cable car for the trip up the mountain. It took about 15 minutes to get up the mountain by cable car and then it was a short hike to the Pagoda. It is a cave in the mountain with a large structure at the front and then an opening behind it. It looks a lot like an open mouth with tonsils!

 These little guys were for sale.....I assume to munch on!

 Gifts for the buddha...

 A stick bug....

 It is remarkable how this structure formed and all of the time it took. Its a sacred Buddhist Pagoda and there are alters and incense around the cave. I don't know what to think exactly of some of the offerings as its a lot of junk-food. We hiked down the mountain which took about 45 minutes. We had a peaceful, serene boat ride back to the dock as the sun got lower and lower.

School and new abode!

School has continued to go well. It is still a lot of work, beings that we are 5 weeks in and I STILL don't have any textbooks!  I'm still spending a lot of my planning time researching for material to support the standards that need to be met.  I spend my afternoons doing curriculum development and because I'm in a room by myself and have no distractions I am quite productive! :)  It's amazing to me how fast the days go by.  Time flies when you're having fun!  I'm just hoping that when the books do come, it doesn't throw off everything I've planned!
Here are some pictures from the past month of my students and I!
Studying the continents!

 My 3 students!

 Our school rabbits! Unfortunately we are already down to 2!

 Our garden!

 Working on spelling...

 Since we just opened our elementary school we are trying to get the word out.....and the next thing I knew I was on the school banners that were hung all over town!

 Mr. Friesen in his office....he's kind of a big deal!

 Success!

We have been in Hanoi now for 2 months and moved into our 3rd apartment!!! The 2nd one we were in was temporary for just a month because we were waiting for the one next to it to become available. It is more spacious, has a spare bedroom, a full size refrigerator (which you never see!) and an oven (which you also NEVER see!).   

Thank goodness this little guy (well actually like 3-4 inches with wing span so not "little" in my book!), who was on our bathroom wall, was in the apartment we were just moving OUT of!

 Here is the Vietnamese money, it's very colorful and feels like plastic!

 A menu at a restaurant we ate at......they had a lot of specialty items! I think the seasonal cicadas were flown in from South Dakota! They also had buffalo, frog, snake head, pigeon, squid, octopus, ostrich, crocodile ribs, snails, oxtail, duck, jellyfish and more!