Hoppin' Around Hanoi

Midway into week two of Hanoi, and I am just as amazed by this city as I was the first day we arrived. My roommate Natalie and I spent the better part of last week getting to know our host family a bit better, and have become a lot closer with our mother and her sister, who both speak English. A common theme that my fellow students and I have picked up on is that our host families here are VERY interested in learning/improving their English and do not have any qualms about hiding it. Allegra's family is an extreme and are trying to pawn her and Kiana off to another family for two weeks so their children can learn, but most families are just very interested in asking questions, having conversations, and learning more about America. Natalie and I ran into a bit of an awkward situation Saturday evening where our mom wanted an English lesson and got a bit frustrated towards the end because she wasn't learning as fast as she expected. We tried to explain that we have really never taught English before, especially formalized lessons, but I think our apologies were a bit lost on her. Everything is fine now though, and I think she, Natalie, and I are working towards better understanding each others conceptions of the whole “homestay process”, what's realistic and what is not.

But anyways, back to the weekend. Friday night Natalie and I stayed in (what's new, I'm INCREDIBLY lame abroad) and woke up Saturday morning and traveled to a cafe on West Lake with our sister, our mother, her sister, and their cousin for coffee and ice cream. A thing that's a bit hard to get used to in Vietnam is their coffee. I'm used to drinking my coffee either black or nabbing a latte, but the coffee here is brewed with tons of sugar and loaded with sweetened condensed milk. In fact, I'm under the impression that all milk here is sweet to some extent and Natalie and I had an awkward time explaining to our mother that we don't drink milk, especially sweet milk, confounding her claim that “In all commercials of America I see, everyone is drinking big glasses of milk”.After the cafe we were whisked away to a temple (this sounds AWFUL but its a week in and I have seen so many that I can't keep the names straight), where we milled around for a bit and took pictures. We then grabbed a quick lunch of snails, fried shrimp, and veggies and headed home. After some much needed decompression time in our beds, our family decided that we were to go to the Night Market in the Old Quarter and walk around for a bit. I had expected to get some good souvenir shopping done and halfway through our cab ride there realized that I had left my wallet at home. It was for the best though, because as soon as we got there we realized that 95% of the things there were knockoff, cheap, or “Made in China” crap. The market was unique in the fact though that it starts at 9pm and runs throughout the night, bringing in tourists and locals alike to nab some of the best deals they can find at an hour thats most convenient to them. While we didn't buy anything, it was still nice to walk around and eat some delicious sesame and bean patties and fruit beams with the family. After the market our family decided to treat us to a cyclo ride around Joan Kim Lake like the good tourists we are, and I am not embarrassed to say that I had a ball whipping around street corners and weaving in-between motorbikes on a three-wheeled bicycle. I haven't been on a motorbike yet, but it made me a bit less nervous to take on the road.

Sunday we left the house at 8am with the host family, grabbed a quick bowl of pho around the corner, and headed to Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum. I had no idea what to expect when we got there, but boy oh boy was it an experience. Although its free to go in and pay your respects to the very dead Ho Chi Minh, you must wait in a ten minute security line in order to give up any camera or recording device you have, and then wait another fifteen minutes in a second line to get into the behemoth sized tomb. Under the watchful eye of the military officers stationed around the building, you silently shuffle around this class case where Ho Chi Minh was laid to rest in 1969. I wish I could convey to y'all via blog just alive he looked but I could do it no justice. Let me just say it looked like he could wake up at any minute he was so perfectly preserved. Afterwards we walked around the Presidential Palace grounds where our host dad travels to every day to pick up the Head of State, and then took a trip to the beautiful Temple of Literature. Since the temple is the oldest university in Hanoi, current university students come every year to rub the old stone tablets for good luck on their finals. The day we were there it was college graduation and students were milling about in their graduation gowns, taking pictures of each other and celebrating.

I'm skipping ahead to Tuesday just to give a brief overview of the most amazing site visit that I have been on so far in this program. A third of us students had the opportunity to tour Blue Dragon, which is an Australian non-profit dedicated to rescuing street kids, children who have ben trafficked to garment factories in China, and girls who have been trafficked to Chinese brothels. Their CEO Michael is an Aussie born and bred, but moved to Hanoi after college to teach English. Every day walking home from work he would take a coffee break and found himself frequently approached by street kids offering to shine his shoes. Growing up poor, he found himself uncomfortable at the idea of letting these kids pamper him, and instead offered to buy them a meal and get to know them better. His interest in helping these street kids got him involved in Blue Dragon, and now himself and his staff of 65 run a shelter/safe space for street kids as well as conduct rescue missions for those who are trafficked across the border. Basically, these girls are tricked by boyfriends or friends to houses where those who are running these trafficking rings are hiding and are brought over the border to brothels. If they eventually get a chance to use a phone, they usually first call their mother and then their mother calls the Blue Dragon. Blue Dragon then sets up a STING type operation where they cross the border into China, find where these girls are, and then in a very small window end up rushing the place and rescuing the girls. They have had an 100% success rate, and are surprisingly partially funded by the US State Department as a part of their JTIP (Justice Trafficking In Persons) program. I could go on and on about how amazing these people are, but a point I found particularly salient was when the culture of human trafficking in America was brought up. Dismayed, Michael lamented that “if America can't stop it, what chances do other countries have”. Many of the organizations we have met with during this program frame their issues as either non-existent in America, or glamourize the work they are doing/the time it takes to reach their goals. As depressing as a realization this is, his proclamation just goes to show the issues that are being swept under the rug in America, yet acknowledged and publicized by the government in other countries.

Host sister and aunt just sippin' on some coffee 

Fisherman at West Lake

Fineshrine 

Turtle Tower at night

Ho Chi Minh is in there!

We are giants here. 

Graduation day at the Temple of Literature

I think it is also very necessary to acknowledge the recent storm that hit the Philippines and Vietnam for a bit in this blog post since Sunday night and Monday were clouded by fear, apprehension, and uneasinesses for all during Typhoon Haiyan. Early Sunday morning we were informed by email that classes were to be cancelled Monday due to an almost “imminent threat of flooding” within the city and our whole program was really nervous, as lame as that may sound. Natalie and I spent Sunday night glued to the television in horror, watching the situation in the Philippines unfold and repeatedly refreshing our internet browsers to assess the storms threat on Vietnam. It started raining around 11am Sunday, and we fell asleep listening to the wind howling and rain pouring that night. When we woke up Monday morning we expected to see flooded streets, downed powerlines, and empty roads. This was not the case at all and we can thankfully say that albeit for some flooding in a few areas, Hanoi was spared from Haiyan. I can only imagine the struggle that families in Cebu or Tacloban are facing currently, and my deepest condolences go out to anyone and everyone who was affected by this disaster. Although I have no right to compare my experience with the experience of the families directly affected by the storm, being so close to a natural disaster of this magnitude was an experience that was both eye-opening and terrifying. I am ashamed to admit that when I am in America, it is quite easy for me to acknowledge natural disasters such as these and then quickly replace my feelings about them with trivial things such as papers, work, or gossip. America is so uniquely geographically situated and is fairly safe from natural disasters of this magnitude, making storms such as these completely unrelatable to most because, quite simply, our lives are not on the line. While my life was not at all in danger, this was the first time I felt close to a natural disaster, and the feelings I experienced of complete powerlessness and lack of control during the storm were emotions that were foreign to me in this respect. Our program had an evacuation plan in place in case the storm reached a certain level of danger that consisted of the 35 of us packing our bags and flying our of harms way to China (that's basically all we were told...) which did not sit well with any of us. The fact that we had the option to escape a disaster, leaving our host-families, Vietnamese professors, and friends to suffer the inevitable, speaks highly to the amount of privilege we as Americans hold. As hard as we “globalized citizens” try to assimilate into the place of anywhere we travel, and as earnest as our desires to better understand another cultures way of life are, I would argue that this is impossible when we have the privilege to escape, a fact that I have taken for granted until this moment.This feeling of privilege is one that I have been struggling with throughout our travels, but it hit me the hardest during this disaster.