Home Away From Home, Hanoi
Hanoi and Halong Bay
Greatest Moment: As always, it is the people that make any experience flavor of love and happiness. A very close friend from America come to visit us! It was amazing to have April take off work to fly across the world and spend one week—just one week with us! Not only did she make the experience that much more special, but she also decided on a great trip to the border of China which we originally would’ve never done. In addition to seeing her familiar and lovely face, we were lucky in our acquaintance to get to know Phuong and Thanh and their family. Never have we been so hospitably treated by people we have never known before! They went out of their way to educate us on their culture, feed us incredible Vietnamese cuisine, and entertain us with dinner singing and boat rides. They have two kids that were so sweet and eager to meet us and talk with us, and we look forward to staying in good contact with the entire family. After traveling for 3+ months, it was a perfectly relaxing experience to have our own personal tour guides, local cuisine at our fingertips, and transportation already figured out! We are beyond thankful for this family, and the experience will now be always so special to us!
Also, on a more random note, our love of Harry Potter has been discovered on a busy street in Hanoi! Walking down the street, after literally just buying the Harry Potter book in Vietnamese, (a collection Kathy has started from every country she visits) we fall upon a coffee shop... dedicated purely to Potter fans. Or, "Potter-heads". Such a wonderful find and time well spent reading and drinking butterbeer! Fate at its finest.
Worst Moment: While in Halong Bay, our second day was raining and dark! In a way, it was very romantic—being surrounded by a sheet of fog and limestone cliffs looming into sight at the last second. It was quite fun to be on a boat during a storm, especially one where you had to adjoin your boat with another as you passed a particularly windy section of the bay. The only thing though, is that because it was raining, we were not able to kayak around the bay and into the limestone caves. A let down, but nothing to discolor our overall experience!
Lesson Learned: We learned the techniques surrounding Lacquer painting and using egg shells, gold leaf paper, and engraving to produce this type of artwork. It is an interesting process of utilizing many different materials and using the negative space. Phuong and Thanh’s daughter is particularly wonderful at this, and we saw her artwork of the waterfalls in Da Lat, Vietnam painting.
Cultural Insight: Vietnamese people in general, we are told, fear the sun! Everyone is covered in long sleeves and pants, straw-cone hats, and umbrellas to protect themselves from the sun. And then you have the tourists, in shorts, tanks, and dresses literally perspiring and suffering from the heat of 90-100 degree F days! Also, breakfast is not a popular meal here for locals. They typically eat lunch and dinner, and that is it.
We were shown around the village where Phuong and Thanh send out their orders for the embroidery business. The men and women work very hard in the countryside, making sometimes less than a dollar a day. They work in the rice fields, mainly men, and during their free time the women take on embroidery orders. The young daughters follow this tradition, and begin learning embroidery at a young age.
