First day in Vietnam: Traffic and Food

Well, I have safely arrived in Vietnam and settled in to the hotel.

The flight landed yesterday at around 9:00 pm, I almost left my book behind on the plane but a very nice lady saved it for me. I got to meet a bunch of the other Fulbright ETAs in Tokyo--Vanlam, Claire, Justin, Jess, Amanda, Koua, Kate, Michelle and Lindsay. I was a little nervous about meeting everyone but they all seem really nice.

Our landing in Hanoi was a little chaotic, after about 20 hours of travel we were all exhausted. We somehow managed to fit everyone and their luggage into one car and van and drove into town and checked-in. I was too wired to go to sleep so I was up for a couple of hours unpacking and surfing the web.

This is my room in the Rising Dragon Grand Hotel

Double bed, good-size closet, A/C and fast internet along with a nice bathroom and a flat-screen tv. I'm feeling quite spoiled over here.


For our first day in Vietnam, I woke up at 8:00 to a nice complimentary breakfast provided by the hotel.    I got to meet Amelia and Quan, two other ETAs, and then I headed out to explore with Jess, Amanda, Koua, Kate, Michelle and Lindsay.

First important experience of Vietnam: the traffic

Ah, the traffic in Vietnam. A beautiful, chaotic melange of motorbikes, scooters and taxis zipping along without regard to any traffic laws a Westerner would recognize. Horns sound constantly as drivers pass each other constantly, drive the wrong way through traffic and attempt maneuvers that would get you arrested and/or killed in the States. Here, right-of-way is determined by the size of your vehicle. Motorcycles defer to cars, cars defer to vans and everyone deters to buses. When you see a bus barreling down the road, you get the hell out of the way.

Oh, and there are no crosswalks and nobody stops for pedestrians.

Good luck.

I have been to Vietnam before, most recently a year and a half ago, and I lived for a month in Cairo which has a similar driving culture, so I am somewhat prepared for the traffic here. However, there is nothing quite like crossing the street in the middle of heavy traffic. If you stop or make a sudden move you make it harder for the bikers to steer around you, so both the impulse to wait for traffic to pass you and the impulse to dash across the street must be controlled. Instead, you must walk slowly but steadily forward as motorcycles whiz by you, desperately praying that the motorcycles will pass around you.

When we last visited Vietnam my father's tip for crossing the street was "Don't look at the motorcycles.  If they don't think you see them they have to avoid you." This advice is quite true in my experience. It is also quite insane.

Our first destination in Hanoi was Hoan Kiem Lake, the lake in the center of Hanoi. According to legend, when Le Loi was leading the Vietnamese in a revolt against the Ming dynasty in the 15th century, he received a magical sword. Upon achieving victory, he cast the sword into the lake and a golden turtle rose to retrieve the sword.

Hoan Kiem Lake, with the Turtle Pagoda

On the lake

Statue of Emperor Le Loi

The lake is also a place where people do a lot of their outdoor activities, such as running, martial arts, badminton... 

...and jazzcercise.

There is also a really beautiful pagoda in the middle of the lake, the Ngoc Son Temple, and we went to see it. 

One of the turtles that supposedly returned Le Loi's sword to the lake

My fellow Fulbrighters!

Back row: Jess, Amanda, Lindsay, Michelle

Front row: Koua, Kate

Outside the pagoda

On the bridge to the pagoda

After visiting the pagoda we went to the old quarter of Hanoi, the marketplace where everything can be bought. We went by Dong Xuan, a massive marketplace that is what happens when you mix a shopping center with a bazaar. I didn't get any particularly great photos of Dong Xuan, maybe I'll try again later.

At this point everyone was feeling a bit exhausted and jet-lagged, so we headed back to the hotel. On the way we stopped for lunch. Now, normally I am strictly against posting pictures of food (man's gotta have principles) but in this case I think its allowed, because this picture is documentation of the first time Jess has ever tried Vietnamese food.

An historic event

On the way home we stopped for coconuts as well. 

The rest of the afternoon I worked out in my room, browsed around on the internet and did some other fairly trivial things. 

As we were heading to dinner we ended up meeting Andrew, a Fellow at the U.S. Embassy who is our Teaching English as a Foreign Language instructor, in the lobby of our hotel. We wandered around until we found a small Banh My (Vietnamese sandwich) shop. At first they tried to seat us upstairs, and charge us 60,000 VND ($3) each for a banh my. That seemed high to me, so I suggested we move downstairs and sit on the ground floor at the street. There the price was only 20,000 VND ($1) for a banh my. I was pretty proud of myself for avoiding a tourist trap in Hanoi, one of many that I am sure we will encounter.

On the way back from dinner it started to rain pretty heavily. I guess this heralds the start of monsoon season.  

Tomorrow is the first day of our training and I am super excited but also really nervous. I have very little teaching experience, so I'm going to try and pay very close attention to everything. I'll keep all of you posted.

Peace,

Jefferson