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…
