Monthly Archives: July 2005

Last Saturday I visited the famous Temple of Literature with Pip and her sister. It was their last day in Hanoi. Built in 1070 (can you believe it?!), the Temple of Literature is the oldest temple in Vietnam. The sights within the compound walls include rows of stone tablets espousing Confuscian wisdom in ancient Chinese script, each supported by its own huge carved stone tortoise; lotus ponds; enormous prayer drums and iron bells; a wooden stage for traditional Vietnamese musical concerts; glass display cases holding temple robes worn by philosophers in 1457; wooden stilt houses; and iron pots of incense sticks next to shrines of long-forgotten scholars. All of this under the shade of century-old bhodi trees! It was a beautiful day.

Feeling famished and thirsty, we ate Pho for lunch at a tiny plastic table in a nearby cafe. We chatted with the young ‘waiter’ of 15 years who sat with us in his tank top and short-shorts. We stayed longer than we intended, because we felt it was our duty to dissuade him from his “one true dream”, which was to find an American tourist in Hanoi who would marry him and take him to the States to work as a waiter in a Chinese restaurant.

I said goodbye to Pip and continued on my own in search of the Hoa Binh Hotel, which is famous in Hanoi for its inexpensive and luxurious massage. In the process I became (pleasantly) lost, stumbled upon the Vietnam Women’s Museum and decided to go in.

The museum was more than a little creepy because of the dusty, mall-style mannequins in misshapen wigs which they use to model traditional dresses from the different regions of Vietnam, not to mention the disturbing depth of the Communist propaganda about the Vietnam war. Apparently, I was also the museum’s only visitor that day, so I was all alone. I’m pretty sure those mannequins were watching me the entire time. The most interesting part of the museum was the exhibit called “Revolutionary Women Imprisoned by the Enemy During the American War”, which had distressing photographs of women who had been raped, tortured and locked up in tiger cages.

So far it had been a very history-heavy day. By this time, I needed a massage more than ever!

Back at my hotel, the manager, Miss Mai, gave me a recommendation for a massage center that was only a few blocks away. Miss Mai is an authoritative 40-something woman who wears high heels, rhinestones, bright fuschia lipstick, and tight clothing. She looks like someone who would have run a very successful opium den back in 1940. Her massage recommendation seemed legitimate because she claimed that it was a government-run school of traditional medicine. So off I went, eagerly in search of muscle-pummeling and relaxation. I was not even disappointed by the monsoon-style downpour which ensued on my walk to the massage center, nor the mud saturated in diesel fuel in which I slipped and splattered onto my freshly-laundered pants. When I reached the appropriate intersection, I boldly asked the bewildered lady at the ginseng root booth to point me in the right direction.

The massage center was housed in a tightly guarded Vietnamese government compound, complete with machine-gun-toting men in military uniform who eyed me very suspiciously as I walked past. The cost was 80,000 dong (about US$ 5.30) for 60 minutes, and the receptionist asked me whether I wanted a man or a woman. I asked for a woman, of course, and this turned out to be definitely the correct answer.

The massage was not at all like the ones I had enjoyed in Thailand and Laos all summer. This fact became immediately apparent when I saw my masseuse, who was dressed in a mini-skirt and high heels. I really hoped I would not receive more than just a massage…

What I found especially strange was that I had to remove all my clothing (yes, ALL) and that the room included a uncurtained window which looked out into the hallway where people walked past. During the massage, a man even came into the room with an armload of towels. Lying on the table, I decided I would just turn my head toward the wall and close my eyes, pretending to myself that this was their normal procedure and there was no possibility of people looking in the room. It was all I could do to halfway relax. The massage itself was also very strange and involved a lot of limb manipulation, butt slapping and other peculiar techniques. All in all, it was a good massage, but I must say that I was glad when the doorbell sounded and voice on the intercom indicated that our 60 minutes was up. I never wanted to put my clothes on so badly!

Stay tuned for more adventures when our hero returns from the remote villages of the north central highlands…

Ballroom Dancing
Lastnight at 8:00 PM my co-worker Ha picked me up on motorcycle to take me out ballroom dancing with her dancing club friends! It was really great to zip through the Hanoi streets on a Friday night and see all the twinkling lights and beautiful people.

The ballroom was huge and wonderful, a truly authentic Vietnamese kind of place, with Christmas garlands strung from wall to wall, monstrous crystal chandeliers, flashing lights, gold decor, and the craziest music you’ve ever heard! Also, people were dressed up as though it was their last day on Earth! Ha and I were with two young married couples from her dancing club. Everyone was really nice and always applauded me after each dance, even though I must have looked like a large, klutzy imbecile next to them! The men from the couples danced with me often because they didn’t want me to feel left out. One of the waiters even taught me how to dance the rumba, and he smiled the whole time despite the fact that I think I broke four of his toes.

The funniest part was when I was dancing the “Boston”, which is a very turbulent type of dance, like a waltz, but at breakneck speed. It also makes you want to vomit because it involves so much spinning. It’s loads of fun, though! At one point when I stuck my huge American foot out, I tripped two little Vietnamese ladies and they flew across the room and landed on top of each other. Luckily, they got up and laughed about it. After that, the Boston was deemed to be “too dangerous for Crystal”. I also did the slow waltz, the Laos, the samba, the cha-cha, the Be-bop and the tango. I had so much fun that I didn’t even want to go home. I hope they let me back in that place next time…

Vietnamese lessons
My Vietnamese is rapidly improving, thanks to lunchtime mini-lessons from my co-workers and my wonderful young teacher, Hien. My second lesson with her the other day was excellent. She finally got the idea that I actually would like to speak like a Vietnamese caveman. NO fancy long-winded sentences with extraneous words, just the basics. Everytime she would teach me a sentence, we would look for new ways to simplify it and cut out more words. We laughed so hard when we found out that the whole time I thought that I was telling the hotel’s bellhop that the TV was not working properly, I was actually saying, “Hey big brother, the television is bright pink, okay?”

Silk village
On Thursday all the ladies from work cut out early to go on a shopping trip to Van Phuc (pronounced Vahn FOOK), the famous silk village 8 kilometers from Hanoi. Ha took us to her favorite store and for an excellent price, I took care of all my gift shopping for the next four months! My favorite purchase was a pair of pink silk pajamas for my own self! Wooooo! I’ve never slept so comfortably!

The Golden Coq
Forgot to mention that two weekends ago, Carly and I went to a gay bar in the Old Quarter called either The Golden Cock, or the Golden Coq, I can’t remember. It looks just like an Irish pub but it’s run by very young, streetsmart Vietnamese kids who speak perfect English and play really good hip-hop music. The sign outside just says G/C. Awesome!

The Temple of Literature
This morning I am taking a walk to Hanoi’s famous Temple of Literature which was built many, many centuries ago as a place of learning for the great Confuscian scholars. It’s one of Vietnam’s oldest temples.

Stay tuned for more adventures of the Amazing Crystal! I’ll post again when I’m back from the boonies. Have a great weekend!

This Sunday afternoon I leave on a 5-day site visit to the field with my co-workers Khanh and Phuong. We will travel by car to Nghe An province, located in the impoverished North Central highlands of Vietnam. When I say countryside, we’re talking dirt-floor houses made with mud walls and bamboo supports, and yearly per capita income of just US$ 200! We’ll visit a village called Quy Hop and also three small ethnic minority communes in the Nghia Dan district, where our next program will be implemented. The program will probably be called “Improving Household Income and Living Conditions in Nghia Dan District: An Integrated Community Development Program”. At least, that’s the name I’ve come up with so far. They’re letting me write the concept paper for it, which we’ll submit to one of our major donor foundations next month!

The goal of our visit is to prepare the Program Management Board (PMB) to conduct a planning workshop with the community. The PMB is a five-person executive team made up of village leaders, local Women’s Union leaders and province-level government authorities, and it’s in charge of making all the decisions about development in their community. At the workshop, the PMB and the local farmers will discuss and prioritize what types of development activities they want to implement. That could mean anything — pig raising, fish farming, sloping crop models, sanitation systems, hygiene or reproductive health education, irrigation system improvements, micro-credit savings programs, buffalo breeding, composting, whatever.

The donor provides the funding for trainer compensation, pilot-models, and micro-credit loans, while S-CODE provides the guidance and training for whatever the community decides are its biggest needs. Training might include new agricultural techniques, how to manage loans and household budgeting, and understanding investments and the market economy. The PMB and the local Women’s Unions then organize additional trainings for the poorest members of the communities, and they all implement the activities themselves.

Past projects like this have actually helped whole minority communities up and over the poverty line. An example of the results: The farmer learns how to prevent soil erosion from his fellow farmers at the training and thus can maximize his crop yield. He also has a micro-loan of US$ 20 and with it he applies the new techniques he’s learned. The loan also gives him the ability, for the first time, to repair his water pipes or buy fertilizer. This turns one yearly rice crop into three, allowing him to feed his family, have enough rice left over to sell for profit, buy a new water buffalo, pay back the micro-loan and put some money into savings or another investment. The program busts him out of the poverty cycle.

This entire development model has been working well for S-CODE over the years, and I can’t wait to see it in action. Apparently I might even get to cook with the villagers and ride a water buffalo. Wish me luck!

Ah yes, here’s an interesting news story about a fellow (“a recovering methamphetamine addict and occasional hip-hop master of ceremonies”) from Lawrence, Kansas. Apparently he has an ‘attachment’ to his foot. Hahahaha! One thing’s for sure: I’m glad my name isn’t Ezekiel Rubottom.

Pip, Hanh and Crystal on the steps at the S-CODE office.

Hey everyone, check out these new albums full of photos:

Crystal in Hanoi
Travel from Thailand to Vietnam

Use the slideshow feature – it’s more fun!

No icecream for you!
In Hanoi, it’s easy to distinguish the government establishments from the private ones, simply by the faces of the workers. During a recent trip to the post office, even my best chicken jokes could not make the stamp lady crack a smile. At a famous state-run ice cream stand near Hoan Kiem Lake, the vendors act more like they’re selling coffins than ice cream. They take their jobs (and ice cream) very seriously. The other day at 5:59 PM, Pip and I bought some Kem Com (rice paddy ice cream) from the ice cream man. But exactly one minute later (closing time, I guess) when others tried to order, he shut off the soft serve machine, took off his apron, and said “No ice cream for you!” before exiting the building, leaving a crowd of very upset and ice cream-less Vietnamese people pushing toward the counter as though it were a Russian bread line. Apparently this is quite normal.

Vietnamese lesson
This past Monday was my first official language lesson with Hien, a 20-yr-old university student who started her own business teaching Vietnamese to foreigners. She rode her bicycle to meet me at a cafe near my hotel, and we got down to business. Disappointingly, the lesson was very ‘by the book’ — similar to Vietnam’s public education model, with the emphasis on rote learning and much memorization. I told her that I was not really interested in repeating the alphabet over and over again; rather, I wanted to practice simple conversations using everyday phrases. What she ended up teaching me were long, formal and complicated Vietnamese sentences. When I showed my Vietnamese co-workers, they said that no normal Vietnamese person even talks that way! On a positive note, I did learn that the phrase I’ve been using all along to tell people I need to go to the bathroom is much too vulgar. According to Hien, it’s the equivalent of “Yo man, I gotta take a &%$*#!!”

Lotus restaurant
Thursday after work, the S-CODE staff (9 of us total, including we two volunteers and Dr. Long’s small son, Lin) went out to dinner to say farewell to Pip. We raced across town together on motorcycles to Hanoi’s beautiful West Lake to dine at a fancy floating restaurant surrounded by water lilies. We walked along a long wooden boardwalk to get there, including a very cute little bridge. Dinner was a feast! We ate snails, shrimp and lotus salad, corn soup, lemongrass beef, fried rice, and many other things I don’t know the words for. Dr. Long ordered a bottle of banana rice wine for our table and kept filling up all of our glasses. I had to tell him that I needed to drink slowly, or else I’d drop my chopsticks! The view from the restaurant was spectacular. In the dusk we watched a gray sky churn with storm clouds over a sunset horizon. The wind ruffled the lotus leaves, giving us the impression that a large, ominous creature snaked along under the water, moving the lilies from below. Yesterday (Friday) was Pip’s last day at S-CODE.

I will spend this whole weekend in my hotel room finishing my Thailand course paper.
Wish me luck! And stay tuned for more adventures to come…

We originally had plans to go to the tailor with my co-worker Hanh on Sunday, to spend the afternoon designing and ordering all of our ao dai and my wedding and bridesmaid dresses. But on Friday afternoon, Hanh phoned us from the tailor and told us to come right away. I knew this would be an exciting occasion, and it was my chance to get dresses made with Hanh there to translate, but I was pretty stressed out because I felt very rushed and unprepared.

I ran out the door from work, jumped on the first motorcycle (xe om) I could find and zoomed back to the hotel to grab a groggy and surprised Carly. I quickly explained to her that we needed to go, now! While Carly threw her shoes on, Pip text-messaged us the address of the tailor. Carly and I went outside to barter a xe om. After a few unfruitful attempts, we finally found a driver who would take us for the right price. We decided to get on the xe om together to save time and hassle. Unfortunately, our driver was pretty chubby, so there was no room on the motorcycle for all of our feet. To avoid falling off, poor Carly had to hold up both of my legs with her arms while I held onto her stomach, and we zoomed through Friday rush hour traffic like that!

The tailor’s shop was beautiful, situated on a famous silk shop street near the Kim Ma bus station, full of young assistant tailors and bolts of fancy fabric. Ngan An has won gold medals in Vietnamese fashion in 2000, 1993, 1992, 1989 and 1984. She is also a designer for Miss Vietnam every year and is frequently featured in international fashion magazines. She is especially known for her “fresh reinvention of the traditional ao dai.”

Pip had brought her laptop to the shop, and I had my USB drive with our favorite ao dai photos saved on it. We showed them photos of the ao dai we liked and thought it would be easy after that because we had been so clever. Little did we know that the following three-hour process would be so physically and mentally exhausting!

A flock of crazed Vietnamese women fluttered around us with measuring tapes and notepads, squawking in two languages, while poor Hanh tried to interpret for all of us simultaneously. I was sweating profusely and my throat was parched. I was especially nervous when they measured my rear end. Using the back of a receipt and Pip’s cel phone as a calculator, I strained my brain (and I think I busted some blood vessels) to convert the bridesmaids’ measurements from inches to centimeters. Then in a combination of dramatic role-play and Hanh’s exasperated translations, I think (hope) the crazy tailor women have some inkling of my poor bridesmaids’ sizes…

“Ivory-colored silk instead of white?!? It’s not normal!” they’d say. “But that’s what I want!”, I would say, stamping my foot.

“In Vietnam, the color blue means sadness.” “But this wedding is not in Vietnam!!!”

“If you have a lotus flower, you have to have lily pads too.”
“Who says?!”

“Do you want big sleeves or small sleeves?”
“Huh?!?”

“Regular buttons or Chinese buttons?”
“HUH????!!!”

After quite a lot of sweating and some hilarious multi-cultural debates, Hanh helped us finally get what we wanted. Now we are the proud owners of beautiful, tailor-fitted, custom-made traditional silk ao dai that we designed ourselves! They’re even flying a famous silk painter up from Saigon to put the final touches on mine. And yes, I’ll have the Chinese buttons.

Afterward, we took a taxi back to our hotel, gulped down about three liters of water each and then collapsed in exhaustion. All in all, I’m very happy. Without a doubt, I will have the most interesting (and definitely most original) wedding attire New Orleans has ever seen. And the best story to go with it!

Stay tuned for more adventures of The Amazing Crystal…

It’s so sad when your stomach is full in Hanoi, because you always find other food that you want to try! For breakfast, I’ve typically been having French bread with fried egg and cucumbers. Yes, those French were good for at least a few things (including the coffee, to which I have now a serious addiction.) Anyway, we’ve also tried other things for breakfast, such as sticky rice and mung bean with fried garlic, served hot on a banana leaf “˜plate’ for 2000 dong (US$ .14) Other days, we’ve had a noodle ‘pancake’ with pork sausage and basil, dipped in fish sauce, for 4000 dong.

The best way to eat in Hanoi is at the street vendors who at different times of the day commandeer sections of the public sidewalk to set up shop. You sit on very low plastic chairs (about 5 inches off the ground, maximum) and scoot yourself close to the vendor lady who is also sitting on a low plastic chair preparing your food right out of her wide, flat wicker basket. You can use another low plastic chair as a table. Because the street vendors typically only sell one thing, you don’t even have to “˜order’ – you simply sit down and they’ll just fix up a bowl of whatever they’ve got. People pass by on the street and laugh at us (can’t yet figure out exactly why, but we must look really funny or something!) or they’ll say something to the vendor lady and she’ll just shrug.

For lunch, my co-workers most often take me and Pip to eat Bún Cha, which is fresh flame-grilled pork in a very delicious broth, to which you add basil, mint, watercress and other greens, as well as rice noodles. It is eaten with chopsticks and a spoon. The ladies at our favorite Bún Cha location also serve us a plate of fried egg rolls (Nem), which they nimbly cut into bite sizes for us with a pair of scissors.

The classic Vietnamese soup Pho originated here in northern Vietnam, however, it is the southern Vietnamese who have perfected the recipe. The southerners make a much more flavorful Pho and have more interesting things to add to it, like lime, basil, mint, bean sprouts, hot peppers, fish sauce and hoisin sauce. Northern Pho, while still good, is bland in comparison, and it is served with weirdly-shaped fried donut things, which you’re supposed to float in your soup and eat with the noodles. Carly says she won’t touch Pho if it’s made anywhere north of Hué.

To get to lunch, Pip and I will usually each ride on the back of a motorcycle with one of our co-workers. The past couple of days, however, only our friend Hanh, the office manager, has been available to take us to eat, so Pip and I have BOTH been riding on the back with her. I’m very afraid of burning my leg on the exhaust pipe, so I sit on the very back of the bike, with my right foot on the foot rest and my left foot sticking straight out, while Pip sits in the middle and does the opposite with her legs. All three of us wear those typical Vietnamese cotton fashion hats and face masks. We must be a sight as we’re zooming down the street toward the Bún Cha restaurant – three giggling, gangly masked bandits on a motorbike, with arms and legs akimbo!

I have a favorite xe om driver – I think his name is Sam? – who takes me to work each day, at least whenever I can find him. He’s a tall old man in his 60s with lots of missing teeth but a very nice smile, and he sits on his motorcycle near “Zip Café” at the corner of my street. I like his motorcycle, which is a dark green Honda, because it has very sturdy foot rests and a good rear seat handle to hang onto. The best part of all is that he’s not smarmy and gross like the pushy young, punk-type drivers who wait for their prey at the opposite corner, picking their teeth all day and insisting on overcharging you. I really try to avoid those guys when I can. The old man already knows exactly where I need to go and exactly how much I’ll pay – 6000 dong (US $.42) — so I just hop on and away we go!

On Monday I will have my first formal Vietnamese lesson through a new business that was started by a couple of university students to teach Vietnamese to foreigners. Their original price was $15.00 for an hour and half, but I told them I wanted to pay $3.00/hour instead, so we said goodbye. The next day they called back to offer $4.00/hour, and I agreed. Hah! I’ll try to do two hours per week, if the first lesson works out well.

Last night Carly and I had an interesting experience at a Chinese “˜tea house’. We were out after dinner looking for a new coffee house to try, so we walked into this beautiful place that appeared to be a restaurant. It had Chinese lanterns and beautiful vines growing around the building. Once inside, we were asked to remove our shoes before being escorted to a dimly-lit back room with floor pillows, low tables and 80s Madonna songs played in musak style over the stereo. The only other customers were a young couple sitting in the rear of the room who appeared to be cuddling. Carly and I ordered hot chocolate and an avocado shake, respectively. We were also served complimentary hot tea. There was a single candle on the table, and the waitress told us to push a button on the wall if we needed anything. Otherwise, the staff left us alone. Hmm”¦ I plan to ask Hanh about this place. The other day, she explained to me and Pip that, in order to be alone, young Vietnamese couples will either go to the lake or to cafés at night. This must be one of those kind of places.

Stay tuned for more adventures, coming soon…

Today at work the boss’ wife, Huong, came upstairs to show me and Pip the shiny new S-CODE sign they will put on the front of the building where our new office is located. S-CODE’s office opens out onto a very busy street — the address is 321 Vong St: very cute! — where motorcycles honk and swerve in droves around the city buses, and flip-flop wearing shopkeepers with bedhead cross the street to gossip with other shopkeepers.

Fruit and flower vendors in cone hats also cruise up and down the street to sell their wares out of those typical two-baskets-on-a-pole get-ups. Today I had a successful (although slightly stressful) attempt at buying dragon fruit from one of these ladies. I was afraid I was getting ripped off, but an old woman came to my ‘rescue’ and made the vendor give me better fruit and at a low price. According to my co-workers, the amount I finally paid was very good.

Anyway, Huong was showing us this S-CODE sign, and Pip and I were really happy for the staff, because it’s an exciting concept to be at a new organization in a new office with a new sign! We saw a young man outside drilling holes in the side of the building in preparation for the sign. But when we asked Huong if we could take pictures of the staff in front of it today, she explained that she needs to consult the fortune teller before the sign can be hung, to find out which day would be most appropriate (in alignment with the stars or something) for such an event. Impatient, we told her to just give this fortune teller a call. So, she just whipped her address book out of her purse and dialed! But it turns out the guy wasn’t home. I guess we’ll have to wait to see if tomorrow is an auspicious day for hanging signs…

One thing I really enjoy in Hanoi is going to the cafes to drink strong Vietnamese coffee. I order it thick and black over ice, no sugar. This happens once at breakfast, once after lunch and once after dinner. Vietnamese people love their coffee, and I do too!

Another accomplishment of the week: I successfully rode ‘side saddle’ to work on the motorcycle taxi (xe om). I was wearing a skirt yesterday, so it had to be done. The driver was laughing at me because it was obvious that I was nervous, but he drove extra slow just for me. One time, I saw a hugely pregnant Vietnamese woman sitting side saddle on the back of the motorcycle while simultaneously eating an ear of corn AND talking on her cel phone!

Wednesday, July 6th — The Famous Vietnamese Water Puppets
The Hanoi Water Puppet theater is located near the banks of the Hoan Kiem Lake, a very romantic little lake with benches, shady trees (lots of weeping willows) and great sidewalk cafes all around it. It takes about 30-40 minutes to walk all the way around the lake. According to Carly’s guide book, there are huge ancient water tortoises that live in the water too. One extra large tortoise is carefully preserved in a glass display box in the pagoda at the center of the lake, which can only be reached by crossing a pretty, arching red bridge and paying a 3000 dong toll (US$ .20) He is the spirit of the lake and the star of a fifteenth-century Hanoi legend in which an Vietnamese king rows across the lake to announce his victory against an invading army and the tortoise appears to ask for his sword back, which the king borrowed from him for that particular battle. Surrounding the lake is a very, very beautiful and old neighborhood called The Old Quarter, which houses most of Hanoi’s touristy silk and souvenir shops and hotels.

Carly and Erin and I tried to guess what the water puppets were all about before we arrived at the theater. At first we thought they were like marionettes, attached with string from above the stage. Boy were we wrong! The puppets were little fishermen, women with baskets, fish, ducks, boats, dragons, etc. made from very colorful and elaborately carved wood and attached to long poles. The puppeteers were out of the audience’s sight behind a beautiful red facade of a pagoda and grass mats which hung down like curtains. This whole backdrop sat in a pool of water. The puppets would ‘enter’ the water stage by being pushed through the grass mat curtains on their poles. Because the poles were under the water, the audience could only see the puppets.

The best part of the show was the fantastic traditional Vietnamese music, performed by a troupe of eight musicians who played old-school Asian instruments (such as a wooden flute; a zither; a sort of upright violin-like instrument; something that we decided looked like chopstick castonets; something that looked like an ancient banjo; and big drums, among others) to narrate the puppet stories. Two women (one old and one young) sang heartbreakingly beautiful songs, wearing traditional costume and holding big red fans. Each song was a new puppet story. We really couldn’t understand it all because it was in Vietnamese, but we really loved the way the puppeteers made those puppets move and dance in the water! Much color, splashing and excitement! Most of the stories were really funny and some were sad! Apparently, water puppetry was invented long ago in the Vietnamese countryside as a form of ‘rice paddy entertainment’. (I guess they used to do this stuff in the rice fields way back when there was no television. Haha.) We had bought 2nd-class tickets to the show, which meant we sat 4 or 5 rows back from the stage with a whole busload of Chinese senior citizens who thought the puppets were a real hoot. They spent the entire show wearing toothless grins. We also received paper fans as souvenirs. It was awesome!

Saturday, July 9th — The Perfume Pagoda
Yesterday we went on a tour of the ancient Perfume Pagoda! We were picked up at our hotel by a fancy 15-passenger tour bus and driven two hours outside of town with about ten other foreigners and a young Vietnamese guide. I loved the ride in the bus! We journeyed down a bumpy country road and out of the windows watched hundreds of farmers –men and women– wading into the water with their pantlegs rolled up, planting little bunches of rice plants. Tiny children sat on water buffalo and swatted them with long sticks. We saw one little boy chasing a brown cow down the edge of a rice field while holding onto the cow’s tail and a women riding a bicycle with her baby in the front basket.

We arrived at a small town on a river filled with lily pads and lotus flowers. There we boarded three little red metal boats (4-5 passengers each) with one sweaty man each to row us far down the river, for about 1 hour, to the foot of a forest-covered mountain. Our journey in the rowboat, aside from the heat and sun, was extremely quiet and pleasant. We used umbrellas to shade us and watched fishermen cast nets and haul up long rattan fish baskets from among the rushes.

Our mountain ascent was very hot and sweaty and took a little over an hour. I had to stop and drink sugar cane juice along the way and fan myself. The juice was so cold and good — squeezed fresh right into my glass by a mechanical press. The trek boasted some dramatic views of the mountains and hills of the northern Vietnamese countryside, with lush green forest and tropical foliage as far as the eye could see. Finally we reached the top and passed under the arches of a very old stone gate with Chinese characters carved into it.

What we saw next was breathtaking: an incredibly long, wide stone staircase that led down into a great cave in the center of the mountain. Clouds of incense smoke floated out of the darkness and up into the late afternoon sunlight that glinted through the trees. Far below, from the inside of the cave, a monk was singing an sad, eerie song. The change in temperature was very dramatic as we descended the stairs. The outer section of the cave was as big as a cathedral but had cold, dripping stalagtites and families of bats flying in and out of it. Careful not to slip on the guano, we stepped further down into the cave by following its candle-lit stone staircases. At the bottom we visited a beautiful red and gold shrine and found a group of monks kneeling in meditation. The Perfume Pagoda is over 2000 years old! On the way back down the mountain, we stopped at a little mountainside restaurant. The tour included a huge lunch of watercress, tofu, beef, omelette and rice before our journey back to Hanoi by rowboat and bus.

My first week of work at the Center for Sustainable Community Development (S-CODE) has been very good, and I love the six people I work with: four Vietnamese women, one Vietnamese man named Dr. Long (the director) and one Australian intern — a 24-year old girl named Pip. (Pip came with Carly, Erin and me to the Perfume Pagoda!) I am working on a big project right now, a consultancy proposal for a Gender, HIV and Anti-Trafficking Prevention Program from the Asian Development Bank. Wish me luck, because I have a deadline of Friday by 5 PM!

More adventures coming soon…