Tet!

Well, here we are again. We made it. It looks like the world is slowly coming down from the highs (lows) of COVID. Here in Vietnam, we had our own scare with something like 900 cases over the past two months. Luckily, the government was very swift in taking action. Whole provinces were shut down; travel limited; schools, bars, gyms and karaoke (very important) closed. We are now back almost to normal. The gym just opened yesterday, so things are basically back to the way they were. Plus Vietnam started its first vaccinations. There aren’t enough doses for the whole country, but at least the health care workers and most at risk can get their shots.

I am also waiting for my job to start at the consulate. I cannot explain to you how frustrating the process is. There is a problem with the backoffice (data entry, etc), and some unnamed, faceless bureaucrat can’t set me up in the HR system, and so I can’t start. Let’s just say both Robert and I are extremely upset about this. But there’s nothing we can do.

We are also waiting on our vaccines from the US. They are supposed to be coming at some point, but not sure when. I will be happy when we get them, although we really shouldn’t be a priority given that Vietnam is not at risk of community spread.

In the meantime, we did get to take a few trips and explore a bit in Vietnam. See picture on the right, from outside a gay bar in Hanoi. Racy, right? Not as prudish or poor as you would expect, no? It’s pretty rare to see overt displays like this. But Vietnam is full on contradictions, especially since Hanoi is not the place you see very forward-looking fashion/music/attitudes. It has its secrets.

I took that photo when we went up for an off-site Robert attended. To be honest the bar wasn’t that exciting - very pretentious. We had much more fun the next day, when we were lucky to get a tour of Art Vietnam Gallery, run by an older American who moved to Vietnam back in 1994. She met up with an artist, in her telling accidentally. He was one of the “Gang of Five,” a somewhat famous group of new artists in Vietnam at the time. She got to know him and his artist friends and eventually opened up a gallery selling their and others’ work. What is so interesting is that back in 1994, the US still hadn’t normalized relations with Vietnam, and Hanoi (well, the whole country) was still very poor. You can read a very interesting interview with her on this site. The gallery was beautiful - it was an old house taken from a mountain village and moved to Hanoi. The bottom part is a normal, concrete Vietnamese house with the traditional one starting on the second floor. It is a nice mix of the traditional and modern, plus there is so much beautiful art.

That night, I organized a private dinner at Kellee and Jim’s house for Robert’s birthday. 38th! [Or the 14th anniversary thereof.] It was Mexican - the husband of a person at the embassy was a chef in Mexico before moving to Vietnam. Quick menu: Corn soup (it was the season), scallops, mole (everyone got the hazelnut and chocolate type - I got the green mole - still good, but I did feel a bit left out), white chocolate mousse, plus a small chocolate birthday cake for the birthday boy. It was all excellent and very fun.

After that, it was all build-up to Tet. Now, you probably have heard of Tet in the context of the Tet offensive, but like everything in Vietnam, the war is basically meaningless in comparison to the actual cultural importance and history of things here. Tet is to celebrate the new lunar year, and it is a very big deal. Most companies give 2 full weeks off. Plus there are parties almost every day in the lead up. It’s like if we rolled Christmas, New Year’s, Fourth of July and Thanksgiving all together into one holiday. That’s the importance of Tet.

Anyway, we were able to squeeze in a quick alumni bar-b-que for University of Wisconsin alumni (Robert is an alum) before the holiday. We also got to walk around and see all the pretty Tet trees. Notably, southern trees are yellow, northern ones are red. They are probably different plants, but I don’t know from trees.

The consulate had its own Tet party. There were performances (judged by Robert and Marie, the consul general), food and drink. It was very fun. Our friend Matt (see picture above right) even performed a rap. It was…well, best to leave it there. He runs the public affairs section, so he is good at getting attention.

Unfortunately, right before Tet, a few cases of COVID were found. Then more. Then a factory started to seeing a large number of cases, plus 38 baggage handlers in Ho Chi Minh City. There were warnings about travel, and we were worried that our planned trip to the mountains would be cancelled. We ultimately decided to go, and it turned out to be the right call. The Vietnamese government showed once again that it could keep things under control.

We flew up to Hanoi with our friend Matt (the same as in that Tet picture above) and met Kellee and Jim (known from previous adventures, see links to these posts on the sidebar) at the airport. Albert and Sue Ellen, also at the embassy in Hanoi, came as well. It was a nice group of 7 of us. We went straight from the airport up into the mountains to Sa Pa town. It was a bit perilous, because of the switchbacks and the extremely heavy fog. You can get a bit of a sense of it from the picture below left. However, it was all worth it.

Our hotel was excellent. The Clay House is very small, just 10 rooms, but it is beautifully perched on the side of the mountain, with views of the rice terraces going down and down. The food was wonderful, all homemade by the family. One guy had worked at the Six Senses, a very high-end hotel chain, so the service was excellent. You can see the views from the hotel below.

Sa Pa is nice, albeit completely deserted at the time. We were there a few days before the official start of Tet, and we couldn’t tell if it was empty because of Tet (people generally don’t travel before or during the first few days of the holiday, except to go home) or because of COVID. The town itself was pretty, and it was nice to be in cooler weather. It was about 50-60 degrees during the day and would get into the 40s during the night. There was a fireplace in the hotel, and we would all sit around it playing games and drinking too much.

On the first full day, we walked around the town ending up at the market where Kellee met a woman selling lots of embroidery and other handicrafts. I was thinking about buying a shirt, but couldn’t fit it over my head.

One of the problems of a dead town is that most restaurants aren’t open. So we ended up going to a hotel for lunch. That hotel was designed by the same crazy architect that did our Christmas-time hotel (see here for pics for that hotel). The Hotel de la Coupole has a similar wacky concept as the one in Phu Quoc: a restored 1920s French couturier. The views were spectacular, and the ceiling of the dining room on the top floor must have been at least 30 feet high. Unfortunately, the hamburger (yes, I needed a hamburger at that moment) was about as tasty as a hockey puck. The experience and view made it almost worth it. Plus, I knew I would have a good dinner back at our more homey hotel.

The next day we went trekking. It was cold. It was rainy. Most of us did not have the correct footwear. We got lost. (Actually our guides got lost, that’s how bad it was). But Robert laughed the whole way. And it was ultimately a spectacular trip. It is hard to get your head around the beauty of Vietnam.

I loved getting out and seeing nature. That was one of the nice things about Washington - nature was just a few minutes bike ride away. Unlike in Ho Chi Minh City, where it is one motorbike repair shop after the other.

We also got a bit of a history/engineering lesson. To this day the Vietnamese use wooden waterwheels to irrigate the rice fields. It’s very low-tech but they last forever and require nothing but a few pieces of wood. When you get around a bunch of them, you hear them almost moaning, which is a bit spooky and atmospheric. Below, notice the old-time bridges made out of bamboo. I put my foot through one of them, which scared the bejeesus out of me, although I was fine.

After that, we went to a restaurant that served the food of one of Vietnam’s 53 ethnic minorities. It was very good, but not sure I could tell you the difference between that and regular Vietnamese food from the area. Final stop was the hot springs, which were stinky but quite nice. Good for the muscles and such, I’ve heard.

The next day we woke up and discovered that the mountain overlooking Sa Pa, Fansipan, which happens to be the highest mountain in South East Asia, was covered in snow. Not just a small amount, either. So we made our way up there.

The company that owns the crazy hotel also owns a small amusement park and a gondola that takes tourists up to the top of the mountain. The ride up was uneventful for most, hair-raising for others who happen to be scared of heights. It seemed safe to me, if long - almost 30 minutes up there. At one point, we went through clouds or fog and then arrived on the other side with views like the picture above to the right: a spectacular winter wonderland.

No one was prepared for the snow. Not us, in our hoodies and cloth shoes. Not the Vietnamese, who were running around taking millions of pictures. And definitely not the company running the mountain top, which had not even started shoveling snow off the stairs at 10:30am when we arrived. Luckily, the pristine snow was great for the pics.

It is hard to express how weird it is to see any snow, let alone more than 2 feet of it, in Vietnam. We came from Saigon, where the average temperature varies between 80 and 90 degrees the whole year. If it ever gets down to the high 60s, people freak out and wear all of their clothes. Literally, just pile them on. Hell, people wear jackets when it’s in the 70s!

Everyone was giddy. People built snow men. Jim made a snow angel. Instead of falling down the stairs, people just got on their butts and slide down. There was a snow fight, actually several. The Vietnamese were just as star struck (snow struck?) as us, although they had even worse footwear. It was spectacular and something that I will never forget.

The trip down was just as uneventful, except I did get a picture or two of the view from above (below left).

Luckily that was our last day in Sa Pa, so we didn’t have to worry about being disappointed with what we did next. The family running the hotel invited us to a Tet dinner that night, which was very exciting. We got to have all the traditional Tet foods, none of which I remember - there was a lot of rice wine. But it was extremely fun and tasty. Plus many foods I would never have tried on my own.

We had a lot of fun that night. Actually every night we were there. It was a fun group. We overheard the Romanians (who came in as we were leaving) wonder why the hotel didn’t have any wine left. The hotel told them that the Americans drank all that they had.

We got to sleep in late before heading back to Hanoi the next day, where we stayed with Kellee and Jim for one more night. We were going to go out to dinner, but we ended up ordering from home out of fear of (1) COVID and (2) traffic, which is even worse than COVID. The next day we walked around and tried some Hanoi favorites (pho spring rolls among others), before heading back to Ho Chi Minh City.

It was nice to be home, and very quiet. Everything closes for Tet. In fact, companies have to pay 3x wages for the holiday, so even the places open are more expensive. Our local sushi place added a 20% bump to our bill just because of Tet, not that we really complained. Because of COVID, even the normal Tet stuff was closed or restricted, like the flower festival and the open-air markets. I don’t think we will stay in Saigon for Tet again. Best to get out and explore elsewhere, because it is a bit boring. But it was a good learning experience. Plus, we did get around a bit and slept off our taxing vacation.

At the end of the holiday, we had all of the senior management of the consulate over (those in town) for our Mardi Gras party. I made duck gumbo served over potato salad (thanks Darin for the example!). Robert made deviled eggs (successful, surprisingly, since I find the concept disgusting) and jambalaya that was excellent. Of course, we ended with a home-made king cake which was fine if a bit dry. They always seem to be. But I did up the colors and everything, so at least it looked authentic. And we had the Mardi Gras plates that Shannon gave me years ago. They were perfect, so thanks!