Cute Monsters

Some of my students:

Hanoi Take 2

The first time we went to Hanoi was right when we landed. The 20 plus hours of travelling and the complete newness/strangeness of everything, as well as the fact that we had our gigantic luggage to lug with us everywhere, made it a less than fantastic visit. Luckily, our second trip was much better - except for the fact that I managed to get sick exactly the day that we left, and stayed sick the entire time we were there. But with enough fluids I was able to overcome my illness enough to enjoy the city.

Hanoi is beautiful - much prettier than Hai Phong. But there's also a hell of a lot of more tourists there, and I had kind of gotten accustomed to being one of the few whities around. We didn't really do any of the usual tourist activities, though. We attempted to visit the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum - supposedly his body is like, right there - but as is often the case our plan didn't work out since it closes at something like 10 in the morning (wtf?). So instead we checked out this lovely park right down the street.

I've been missing parks because there's nothing even close in Hai Phong. This one was huge and beautiful and awesome: it had old women doing Tai Chi, people decked out in ridiculous outfits taking their wedding pictures, a very handsome peacock.

And...

That's right. More monkeys. More hilarious monkeys. A few local kids were giving candy to them and they were, well, going apeshit for it.

And this is what they look like when they don't get the candy.

Watch Your Tone

I've started taking Vietnamese lessons. There's something like 3 different a's, 2 e's, 3 o's, 2 u's, along with 5 different tones (up, down, short, and the other 2 I can't even explain). All are equally difficult to say (and some are so similar I can't even hear the difference), and of course each word means something completely different if you say it wrong. My teacher is pleasantly suprised everytime I manage to say something correctly (and she also likes to laugh whenever something's said wrong). I'm thinking it's probably gonna be a while before I've reached fluency.

And Now for Some Traffic

From a bar in Hanoi:



From a taxi in Hai Phong: