My Weekend Getaway

Hi All!

This blog update is coming a few days later than I promised, and I apologize! I was actually in the middle of writing another post on Friday afternoon during a slow time in office hours when some of my students came into my office and announced that we were going to play football (soccer) in 15 minutes. When I arrived in Thanh Hoa and learned that many students here enjoying playing football, I told them that I also loved kicking the ball around, which was met with lots of laughter and responses such as “but women here do not play football…” That is not entirely true; in some areas of Vietnam, women do play soccer, but in areas such as Thanh Hoa, only young girls play and once they become teenagers, it is less socially acceptable for them to run around and get dirty playing such sports. Taking advantage of an opportunity to promote the Fulbright’s mission, cultural exchange, I proceeded to talk to my students about the fact that in the United States, women of all ages were welcome to play football, whenever, wherever, and with whomever. This explanation was met with surprise and a bit of laughter, but led to my male students repeatedly asking me if I wanted to play soccer “some time in the future.” I would always say, “yes, absolutely… when?” and they would respond by saying something along the lines of “well, women do not usually play… we will see… maybe in some days.” Therefore, when the invitation to play finally came, I immediately seized it, closed down Microsoft Word (without saving my blog post, naturally) and ran out the door to change my clothes. Word spread quickly that I was going to attempt to play soccer and when I arrived at the field, located about a kilometer away from the university, a healthy crowd of students were there, laughing and cheering. I joined one of the teams as an “extra man” because they thought that I would be a non-issue, and immediately set out to prove to them that I wasn’t crazy for wanting to join in the match. My teammates did not pass me the ball at all initially, so I soon realized that I would have to start chasing down loose balls if I was going to have any part in the action of the game. My opportunity came about 5 minutes into the game when I chased down a stray ball and ended up colliding with a member of the other team… he ended up on the ground, and I jogged over, picked up the ball that had gone out of bounds just past the end line for a corner kick for my team, and kicked a corner kick to the head of one of my team members--- he almost scored--- from that moment, my team started passing me the ball, and a defender from the other team was assigned to mark me and we ended up having a wonderfully fun match that ended in a tie. After the game was over, I received an open invitation to play football any time that I was free, and I happily accepted.

I do want to tell you more about my other responsibilities and activities here in Thanh Hoa, but I first want to talk about my past weekend. A couple of days after I moved into my dorm room, I met a woman named Chinh who quickly became one of my good friends here. Chinh is a students in the project that I am a part of (and will tell you more about later…) but is not one of the students that I have in class every day. Her English is quite good, and it has been so nice to have another girl around to talk with about life, family, friends, boyfriends, future plans, etc. etc. over meals and during walks around the campus. Last week, Chinh invited me to spend the weekend with her at her family’s house in the countryside, I immediately accepted, and on Saturday morning at 8:00am she and I took off on her motorbike.

The drive to Chinh’s village took about an hour and a half which is a short time in a car, but quite a long time to be sitting in the hot sun on the back of a motorbike and by the time we arrived at Chinh’s home, I was rather sweaty, and quite ready to be off of the bike. That is not to say that the ride was not fun—on the contrary, I had a wonderful time looking out at the many sights to see along the road, from the motorbike drivers laden with assortments of cargos to seemingly endless green rice fields, to the lakes that dot the entire country. I thought of you all and tried to take lots of pictures to show you—they should be going up on facebook soon.

We arrived at Chinh’s house a little before 10am and I hopped off the bike eager to meet her family and see her home. Chinh’s home was absolutely lovely and consists of a few parts. The first was the main family room/house where meals, sleeping, and visiting take place. The main room has doors all along one side that are primarily left open to help move the air and contains two beds in the corners, a small coffee table in the middle with two wooden benches on either side, an altar area that serves as the area to give gifts and burn incense to and for the family’s ancestors, and a small open floor space where bamboo mats are placed during meal times. There was also another room off to the side of this main room that contains only a bed for Chinh’s parents. Chinh has two younger siblings, Loan (M-22) and Chinh (F-24… the names look the same here, but the Chinh that I know best has a toned accent on her name, which, as I’ve learned in my Vietnamese lesson completely changes the sound to a native speaker, and therefore makes their names not really all that similar) and when they were at home, they slept in the beds in the living area. Outside of the family room there was a small concrete building that served as a bath house and had a sink and a spout closer to the ground. When it was my turn to take a bath that night, I went into the bath house, filled a basin that I was given with water, and then used another bucket to pour the water on my body and hair. The cool water felt so good after a day of sitting in the sticky heat of Vietnam and I think that I could definitely get used to cold baths were I to live in such weather conditions permanently! Next to the bath house was another water spigot that was used to wash the dishes and collect water for cooking. Behind this spigot was the kitchen building that contained a gas and a wood stove as well as the dishes used to cook and serve the food. There was also a toilet room located a small distance away from the other areas which contained a “squat toilet” which is very common in Vietnam (typically most restrooms here (including the one in my teaching building have “Western” and “squat” toilets.) Finally, there was a building that the family used to raise chickens, which ran relatively freely around the property. We ate a couple of the chickens throughout the weekend, and when it was time to have another, Chinh’s mother would simply grab the closest one to her, bleed it from the neck, and then pluck and cut it up. Here, they use and eat every part of the chicken, and we even used the blood to sauté the intestines, liver, and kidneys for lunch one day…delicious. In addition to the chickens, the family has a couple of dogs, 3 adult cats, and a couple of new litters of tiny kittens. They were about 3-4 weeks old and absolutely precious… I couldn’t stop staring at them, which made their mothers a little nervous. Chinh was surprised when I told her that I had only one cat at home and that she had had a surgery to make it impossible for her to have babies.. “why?” she asked… I told her that my parents didn’t like cats enough to take care of more than one, which is…well, very true. The animals provided most of the outside noise for the weekend, which was such a nice shift even from Thanh Hoa, which is a rather quiet city, but still has plenty of traffic noises throughout the day and night.

Chinh’s family was also just wonderful. Her father is a rather tall man who works in the local office of the provincial government and her mother is a farmer who grows rice and, as I said before, raises chickens. I did not get to meet Chinh’s brother, who is currently in Hanoi studying to be a police officer, but Chinh, Chinh’s younger sister, and her soon to be husband also came into town for a visit. (The concept of a fiancée is not a familiar one here…you are either in a relationship or married… but Chinh and her boyfriend are due to get married in either November or December of this year--- They met in January (!!) and Chinh (the younger) told me, in rather limited English, that “we meet, and then, in one week…we love!” with a huge smile on her face… I simply said “wow! Fast!” which was met with laughter by both of the Chinhs.) Chinh’s younger sister, like Chinh, is so sweet and was constantly trying to make sure that I was happy, which was easy, because I couldn’t stop smiling the entire weekend. I also met Chinh’s numerous aunts, uncles, cousins, and father’s parents when either they came by the home to see the family and meet me, or Chinh drove me to their homes. It seems that most of the townspeople are related to Chinh’s family in some way, because we made a lot of visits throughout the weekend, and we passed by a lot of houses that Chinh said belonged to her family. I particularly enjoyed the visit to Chinh’s grandparent’s home, located about a half a mile away from her house. Her grandparents are quite old but still work as rice farmers each day. The life of a farmer is hard in Vietnam, as it requires constant work and pays very little—her grandparents, she told me, eat only 2 meals per day to save money—but her grandparents built a lovely home for themselves that looked very much like Chinh’s house, but had a small man-made pond in the back with a beautiful hand-laid (by Chinh’s grandfather) wall on one side of it. There were plenty of fish swimming around in the pond that her grandparents eat on a regular basis.

Speaking of food… wow… this was a weekend devoted to eating! Chinh told me that weekends are a time in which activities revolve around cooking and eating, and I experienced this lifestyle in all of its glory for the two days that I was there. The first meal that I was there, lunch on Saturday, we cooked fish, chicken, fried pigeon (a delicacy here, so as the guest I was fed lots of it!.. it is actually quite good!) fried water spinach, and, of course, bowl after bowl of rice. All eyes were on me as the girl who occasionally spoke a fully correct sentence in Vietnamese and had hair and eyes that Chinh told me fascinated them, so my bowl was constantly being refilled with meat and rice, and I was totally stuffed by the end of the delicious meal. They were all surprised that I ate everything I was given because even the chicken and fish were cooked in a way that I was unfamiliar with, but I assured them that I was willing to try most anything. Luckily, I was not asked to eat the head of the chicken, because it is apparently a highly sought-after delicacy and will result in one becoming a successful leader so Chinh and her sister agreed to split it amongst themselves. I certainly hope one day to serve others through having a leadership role in whatever vocation I pursue, but I think I’ll risk it and not eat any chicken brains to get there! Dinner on Saturday night consisted of the leftovers from the lunch, which had been sitting out all afternoon and made me a little nervous in terms of getting sick, but I ate what I was given (and I was given a lot) and everything was fine!

The next morning, however, was the true culinary adventure of the weekend, as I woke up when Chinh did (we shared one of the beds, which was just a flat wooden surface.. not all that comfortable, but once you curl up the right way, you can sleep quite well) around 6:30 and we went out to start cooking breakfast, which her parents had already started. I grabbed my camera to take some pictures of the morning light and when I went outside, I saw Chinh and her father sitting on the ground with a bowl of snakes… yes snakes… in front of them. They were peeling the bones out of the freshly killed snakes and laughed when they saw my face (I hate snakes) and asked “will you eat snakes?” I swallowed hard, and said “absolutely!” and they smiled, and said “thank you… we are having rice soup with snake meat for breakfast and we worried you would not eat it.” As it turns out, rice soup with snake meat is really delicious, and I enjoyed my many bowls of it (Chinh’s mother, I think, put herself on “refill Hayley’s bowl any time she stops putting things in her mouth” duty for the weekend, which was so kindhearted and generous, but even Chinh thought it was hilariously excessive and tried to get her mother to stop when I got that “I’m going to literally pop” look on my face toward the end of each meal. After breakfast, we walked outside, and Chinh’s younger sister and boyfriend grabbed a bucket from inside the kitchen and walked outside. I followed them to see what was going on, and just as a stepped onto their level, Chinh accidentally dropped the bucket and about 15 still-live snakes fell out on the ground. Everyone started laughing and grabbing for the snakes in order to finish killing them for lunch, and though I did my best to be helpful in all tasks throughout the weekend, I must admit that I did not join in. Finally, the snakes were all corralled, killed, and turned into a few dishes that we ate for lunch with our rice: snake sausages, which were crushed up snakes with onions and spices and fried in a skillet (pretty good, but didn’t really enjoy the crunch of the bones as I ate them) and another dish of snake meat boiled in snake blood and then cooked with parts of the banana tree plant that I actually thought was quite good. Beyond the food being delicious, I loved mealtimes sitting cross-legged with my bowl and chopsticks with the family because it gave me the opportunity to watch them all interact through conversations, jokes, and laughter… I didn’t understand a word of what they said, but I knew what was going on and that I had joined, even for a short time, a loving family like my own, and it made me feel so safe and happy, and “at home” in a place very different from Huntsville, Alabama.

Before we left on Sunday, Chinh took me to see her village’s “town of dead people.” During my time here in Vietnam, I had seen areas in the countryside that had small buildings that looked like miniature houses or pagodas, and wondered what they were. As time went on, I started thinking that they were probably cemeteries, and I was hopeful that if they, in fact, were, that I would have the chance to learn more about them and perhaps see one up close. On our drive to her home, I saw one such sight and asked Chinh if it was a cemetery. She didn’t know what the word cemetery meant, but said that it was “the town of dead people” and told me that her village had its own “town” that I could see if I wanted. I eagerly accepted, and Chinh and I drove there in between breakfast and lunch on Sunday. Besides a cow grazing in the grass growing in the area, we were the only people visiting the cemetery that morning, but it was clear that many of the graves had frequent visitors by the sight of freshly burned incense that stood at the front of many of the gravesites. The graves were aligned from South to North, and I asked Chinh if this had any significance. She told me that it did not, and asked why I was curious about the directionality of the graves. I told her that in most cases in the U.S. bodies are buried facing eastward; she responded by saying “I guess in the United States people want the dead to see the sun rise…” I told her that she wasn’t too far off… She then told me that the towns of the dead typically face the road that they are closest to, but that there may be a deeper custom of which she was not aware. In the cemetery, each family has a burial area that is marked by stones and in most cases, there are miniature “houses” that serve as the markers of the bodies. Often there is also a gravestone or marker with the person’s name and date of birth and death. Chinh first took me to her father’s side of the family, and showed me that there were no houses or stones to mark the bodies, but only mounds of earth to show where the bodies were buried. This, Chinh told me, was because her family was very poor and could not afford to purchase homes. Throughout the weekend, Chinh told me of her plans to study abroad in order to get a good job upon her return to Vietnam so that she could support her family. The purchase of homes for her ancestors, she told me, was just one of the things she hoped to be able to do after she received her master’s degree. Chinh then took some time to pray to her ancestors, which, as I’ve written about before, is a practice of roughly 90% of the country. After visiting her father’s family, she took me to the gravesite of her mother’s side of the family. Her side, she told me, has lived in the town for a shorter period of time, and therefore only her grandmother is buried here. Rather than purchasing one of the typical houses that I saw throughout the area, Chinh’s grandfather built a cylindrical concrete home to mark his wife’s grave. Chinh told me that she did not know why her grandfather had chosen to build the home in such a way but that she had not asked him. Chinh also told me that many times in Vietnam, families bury their dead in a really unique way: the body is first buried in a coffin, but after a period of 3 years, the family has a ceremony in which the body is exhumed and the bones are removed from the coffin and placed in a new container that is then reburied. It is not until this time that a house is placed over the grave. I had never heard of this tradition and have tried to find more information about it upon returning home but found none, so I am not sure if perhaps this is a tradition isolated to Chinh’s area. In any case, it was fascinating to hear about. After spending a few more minutes looking around in silence, we walked back to the motorbike and drove home through the enchanting rice fields, and I looked out in awe at the backdrop of the beautiful Vietnamese mountains sitting in a backdrop of a gorgeous clear blue sky and could hardly believe that I’ve been given such an opportunity as this… that feeling hits me roughly once per day and it never gets old.

After our lunch and daily nap on Sunday (it is the tradition here to take a nap after eating lunch, simply because it is too hot to do anything but lie still with a small fan blowing on you) Chinh and I left to come back to Thanh Hoa City and arrived back here around 5:00pm. I worked a little on lesson planning, but was rather exhausted from the weekend and went to bed early last night. It was sad to leave Chinh’s family as they were so wonderful to me, but they invited me to come back for Chinh’s sister’s wedding, so I hope that I will get to see them again.
I’m back to my life of lesson planning, teaching, enjoying Thanh Hoa and, of course, dealing with some of the daily frustrations that have come along with this working experience that I really shouldn’t go into much at all. The next post from me will be about my working and daily life here, though I am quickly coming to learn that there is no such thing as a “regular schedule” in my life here at Hong Duc, which I am learning to laugh about, pray about, and take in stride, rather than allow my blood pressure to take a hit during the particularly tough moments. Talking with and teaching students here is absolutely fabulous and thinking about my moments with them helps me to see past acute frustrations with a bit more clarity and peace. Hearing from you about your lives is also so nice and I sincerely thank you for keeping me updated and hope that you will continue to do so. Know that you all are in my thoughts and prayers, and until next time, I hope that all is well.

Lots of love to you all!