Hanoi, Halong Bay and the snake vilage

Oy, I'm behind. Fortunately I've kept up with my journal, so I can hopefully make this fairly complete. First, to address some questions:

-What am I eating?

Many, many delicious things, and a few not so delicious things. I think I eat more vegetables here than I did at home, because they are omnipresent and the meat is not so good. Common vegetable dishes include: boiled cucumbers, stir-fried (?) spinach-ish thing with garlic (I'm not a huge fan of this one), cabbage with carrots and bell peppers, and a bean sprout dish that is usually prepared with slices of congealed pigs blood mixed in. I actually really like the sprout one, even with the pig blood. I liked it better before I really knew what it was, though, and could just think of it as mystery meat. Other things that I eat are the very obvious rice (~2 cups of cooked white rice/day on average, I would say), pho (Vietnamese brothy noodle soup), lots of delicious fruits. My favorite fruit is lychee, although mangosteen and rambutan are pretty amazing, too. Watermelon is the most common fruit that I get with my meals, along with pineapple and pomello. I tried longan but so far only in tea - but it was a delicious tea that tasted like baked apples. I also drink Vietnamese coffee - cafe sua da - far too often, but little cafes are everywhere, and the coffee is only ~$1, sometimes significantly less. I get it iced with condensed milk, as the Vietnamese drink it. I've had a couple of other soups as well, one called, simply, chao, which is like Korean congee, and bun cha, which is another noodle soup, but bun is a spaghetti-like noodle and pho is flatter, and cha means pork while pho is usually served as pho ba (beef) or pho ga (chicken). Bun cha also is delightfully seasoned. I also really like a coconut and pork dish that I get at work sometimes - slices of coconut and pork in a savory light sauce. I need to learn how to cook that one before I leave.

Enough about food. Question 2:

-What am I buying?

So far the only things I've bought are necessity items - I found some cheap sneakers at Big C, which is roughly equivalent to Target or Wal-mart. I also bought a second towel, a pillow, a basket for my shower items, some wet napkins to wipe off the mud after my ride to work, some ballpoint pens, etc. I really want to buy dresses, and at some point I want to go to Hoi An, which is supposed to be the best for getting clothes tailor made.

Question 3:

-Who am I meeting?

Well, I've talked a bit about the American ex-pat that I work with. She seems pretty cool, but I find it difficult to really get to know her the way I would get to know someone that I don't work with... I just tend to get a mental block about fully opening up to people that I work with. I've also mentioned Steve-O, who has managed to get horribly sick, likely due to pre-existing ulcers and deciding to drink the tap water the first week, but it hasn't been determined conclusively what's wrong with him yet. I was spending a lot of time with Matt, previously mentioned, but he has gone back to Canada now. I was also spending time with Kayci, another American, but she left this week :(. I'll mention others as I go through the rest of this entry.

So now, picking up where the last post left off:

On Saturday the 11th, Mat and I had our official VPV city tour which was mildly disappointing... we only saw the museum of ethnology (pictures on Facebook), and did a mini food tour. That was when I tried bun cha, the delicious tea, and a fruit smoothie type thing that comes with a bunch of fresh fruit mixed together in a glass with condensed milk, and the customer stirs it around to mash the fruit, adding ice if desired. I've ignored most of the recommendations in guide books about passing on street food and ice and taking most of my cues from fellow travelers/foreigners, and I've been fine. I had some mild intestinal distress (sorry for the TMI) the first week or so, but it has since passed (pun sorta intended). I attribute it to other things, though, including just a general adjustment to the food, especially the greatly increased amount of fiber from all of the vegetables.

After our tour, Matt and I met up with several others from the house - Alice, Kayci, Brittanie, Maggie (who we all actually just refer to as "Poland", where she's from). We had dinner at a place catering to foreigners, and I had a delicious chicken pesto pasta. We had free drinks from our hostel and then moved on to a bar where there was live music by several groups, kinda like some of the shows I've seen in the US. I chatted a bit with a couple of people from one of the bands because they were from California, and I ran into Ben and Lynnette who I had met at the trivia night. Apparently Sarah was there as well, but I didn't see her.

On Sunday, we started the day with Joma, a little slice of western cafe heaven - I had a bagel with cream cheese and smoked salmon and a latte. We wandered around the shops a bit, but I didn't find anything I liked for what I thought was an acceptable price. We ate lunch at a place that served every Vietnamese dish you could dream of, and I ordered banh mi... but I had to put it together myself and there wasn't much filling, so I was kinda disappointed. After we tried to go to the Ho Chi Minh Trail Museum - not to be confused with the Ho Chi Minh Museum or the the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum - but we couldn't find a taxi driver who understood the distinction we were trying to make, so we ended up just coming back early and hanging out at the house, having dinner at the same pho place down the street that we went to the previous weekend.

I'm going to try to condense the next week a bit more because otherwise this is going to get REALLY long.

At work, I got to do something other than document editing - I have a couple of research projects that I'll be participating in the data analysis of, so I was making dummy tables for that. I also summarized a few project reports for the website, but I was missing several of the pieces for each of them, so I'm not sure how helpful that is/when they might actually show up online. I'm also getting into the swing of English lessons a bit better now - I have a bunch of ideas about how to approach them now, but I haven't tried any of them out properly, yet. Turns out, lesson planning, even informal lessons, can be very difficult.

Matt left on Wednesday, and Kayci left on Saturday. I really don't like all of this leaving that people are doing, and there's more coming up this weekend. I think the hardest part is going to be perpetually changing who my friend group is, saying goodbye to people I've come to like quite a bit and going through all of the same conversations about how long I'm here, why I'm here, etc. every two weeks or so.

We've been doing a semi-regular pancake night with Ashley, a former volunteer who is now living and teaching English (and getting paid to do so) in Hanoi. She comes over and cooks for us to give us all a taste of home. I've actually found my appetite in general is significantly diminished here, and I'm pretty certain I've lost weight, just based on how my pants fit.

On Thursday we went to Pizza hut for the birthday of one of my roommates, Ellie, a (now) 21-yr old from France. She is here with a friend of hers from university - they hadn't originally planned to end up at the same place, but Charlene's program turned out to be not so good, so she switched over and joined us. We recently got another girl from the same university, although she didn't know Ellie or Charlene before arriving, and two more are expected by mid-July, so the French will be running the house at that point.

On Friday night we said sad goodbyes to Kayci, who I've already decided I need to visit. She's going to school in St. Louis, Missouri, so I'm hoping to make a trip out there and combine it with a visit to Anna and Kyle and baby Beckett. I then went into Hanoi with Alice, Lavinia, and John, and we met up with a few others from our house at the same backpackers as the previous week. We went to a Jazz club playing live music, but it was hideously expensive, so we quickly moved on. We headed toward the place where the rest of our housemates were hanging out for the evening and stopped for "smothies" along the way. Translations into English are often terribly misspelled here, but the drinks are delicious anyway. We met up with the others and hung out at the other bar, which was playing reggae music, for a while, then moved on to a dance bar called the Dragonfly. I think walking into it and taking one breath was immediately the equivalent of smoking a pack of cigarettes. I would like it, though, if it wasn't so smoky. I was also really tired, so after hanging out for a bit, I was ready to leave, and so was John, so we meandered our way back to the hostel.

Early Saturday morning, Lavinia (from Austria, although one of the Australian guys in our group likes to jokingly call her Australia and say that he's from Austria... not sure how that started), Alice (from England, and has been here for nearly 5 months), and I left with a tour group for Halong Bay, which is a World Heritage site and thus pretty much the ultimate tourist stop in Northern Vietnam. Pictures hopefully will be posted on Facebook in the not-too-distant future.

Our first day was primarily spent getting to Halong Bay - we took a bus to the coast, which took about 4 hours, got on a boat where we ate lunch and spent the night, and checked our the most touristy cave I've ever seen. It's called "surprise cave" because it has a formation in the third chamber that catches many unknowing visitors by surprise because of its resemblance to a certain male body part. We also went swimming in the bay and I joined several of the more daring members of our tour group and jumped off the top of the boat, which was probably about 20 feet above the water. We had dinner on the boat and then just hung out and chatted with the other people on the cruise for the rest of the evening.

On Saturday we ate breakfast on the boat and then took the boat to Cat Ba island. After departing the boat we bussed from the port to the entrance to the park, where we split up and I went with the group that trekked to the top of the tallest mountain on the island. It was difficult and muddy and I slipped a bit and I was worried about my ankle for a bit, but all is fine. The views from the top were spectacular, though. The rest of the group went cycling to hospital cave, which was used during the war...

After Cat Ba National Park, we bussed to another port area of the island, where we caught another boat to monkey island. We had lunch on the island and then had free time for swimming! After splashing about a bit and tossing a ball around with the others, I decided I had to go check out the second beach, which was around a large rock that came out from the island. When I got near to the rock, I decided I needed to climb it. I quickly realized that the rock and the barnacles covering it were very sharp, but I decided to keep climbing up it anyway. I found a place on the top of the rock that was suitable for sitting, waved and called to the rest of the group, and then just chilled for a bit. I soon saw several others swimming out toward me, and despite my warning about the sharp rocks, they decided to climb up as well. They had the benefit of knowing of safe places to jump back in, though, which I didn't, so I think my hands and feet got cut up the worst. When I got back into the water I decided to continue my swim around to the beach but realized shortly after going around the corner that there was a strong current in toward shore... which I had to fight to get back (because I decided the other beach was too far). Fortunately I can still swim well enough to manage that, but no one else followed me that way. I finally made it back to the beach and then lounged about for a while, drinking fruity cocktails and smoothies and then took a brief shower.

At 5pm I joined about 6 others from our tour (some opted to stay on the beach) for a trek to the other side of the island, where we were supposed to see monkeys. It was a difficult walk, as the "path" was made of more of the sharp rocks I mentioned earlier, and when we got there, there weren't actually any monkeys around... so one of the guys, Evan, from Australia, obliged and imitated a monkey for us. Our guide then pointed out a real monkey which he proceeded to feed peanuts - first tossing them, then allowing the monkey to pluck them from his hand. Several of the others on the tour also participated in the feeding, but I held back, after my previous encounter with monkeys, and took pictures and videos.

We went back to the other side of the island after we ran out of peanuts and lazed around for a bit more before dinner. We got a free drink before our meal, which was appropriately called a "Funky Monkey". It wasn't very good, though, and I think everyone ended up ordering more drinks. I did a side by side taste test of the two most ubiquitous beers in the area and concluded that Tiger beer is milder in flavor and higher in alcohol than Ha Noi Beer for the same price - and got everyone else drinking it as well. Some people played pool for a while, I got some karaoke going and sang one song on my own and two duets with a girl named Carrie, who is from Colorado.

We hung out for a while and eventually ended up lounging on the beach again, in the dark this time. I bonded a bit with Evan over our mutual disinterest in Red Hot Chili Peppers, and I told him about a ban, fun., that I'm very fond of. I didn't have my iPod at the time to allow him to listen to it, but when I did share the next day, he really liked them. He's the second person I've introduced to fun. since I've been in Vietnam, so if they end up blowing up worldwide in the next year or so, I'm claiming partial credit :).

It started raining while we were down on the beach, but it felt so nice that I decided to dance around in it for a bit. Before long I was soaked and decided to join my friends for a brief chat under the cover of an awning before deciding I was already halfway asleep and going to bed.

The following morning I woke up before the wake-up call so I took a stroll around the resort and called my parents to wish them a happy anniversary and Father's day (because it was still Sunday in California). The water at the beach, which had been very murky the day before, was crystal clear and beautiful in the morning.

We had pho for breakfast (along with other options, but I chose pho) and then boarded a smal boat to go back to Cat Ba, where we boarded a bus again and went back to the other pier, waited for a bit because the tide was too low (although I swear it was higher than it had been when we arrived the previous day), and finally returned to the first boat to head back to the mainland. After the boat we got onto another bus and headed back to Hanoi. It was a lot of sitting and not doing anything, but most of us were quite tired from the exertion of the previous day or the drinking of the previous night, so I don't think anyone minded sitting so much. I got in a couple of brief naps, did a bit of reading, listened to some music, and played half of a game of monopoly deal with Alice and Lavinia.

After we got back into Hanoi, Alice, Lavinia, and I met two other volunteers - Ric (Australian, teaching English) and John (American, from Florida, working at Friendship Village) as well as Ashley (mentioned earlier) and went via their motorbikes to the snake village to the northeast of Hanoi and had snake for dinner.We arrived and told them we wanted grass snake, which they proceeded to kill and bleed in front of us. John ate the still-beating heart, and Ric, Alice, Lavinia, and I drank a bit of the blood mixed with some sort of vodka (which John and Ashley didn't try because they don't drink). Ashley sat out the whole meal and was just there to watch us and the spectacle of it, but the rest of us ate a variety of snake dishes - there were a couple of types of spring roll type items, the bones ground and seasoned, fried skin, and little meat patties. At one point, John reconstructed the snake by putting the various items on top of the skin and ate it all together. Ashley, despite refusing to eat any of the snake, was cooperative and let us put our (used) chopsticks all through her hair at the end of the meal (yes, we are very mature). I have lots of videos and pictures of all of it. When we got back, I finally had a chance to shower and soon after I passed out, exhausted from a busy weekend.

I woke up this morning and found out during the course of my Vietnamese lesson, which started late because my tutor was drunk the night before, that there really wasn't anyone in the office and I probably didn't need to go into work. I had no assignments carried over from the week before, so I spent the rest of the morning contemplating the best way to do my English lessons with the staff. I ended up not needing to go in all day, so after lunch I went with the volunteers who work at Friendship Village and met the kids there. Not sure if I've said this before, but Friendship Village is a school/care center for children affected by agent orange. I sat in on a math class and helped with some basic arithmetic for a little while, then moved to a classroom where they were singing and playing and doing origami. I also briefly saw their embroidery class and their flower making class, both amazing. It was nice to have an opportunity to see the project that so many of my peers are involved in.

And now I'm all caught up to the present. If you've made it this far, congratulations and thank you.