Rock the Cat Ba... Island

We had a long weekend during the last week in March, so we decided to make the best of it. Our Jiu Jitsu coach, Aaron, was getting married in a city a few hours east of Hanoi. We somehow convinced ourselves that they were getting married in Halong Bay, which we heard was this beautiful, tropical paradise. So we spent all of our time planning on going there, and we were totally excited to travel to the ocean! The night before the wedding, I read the invitation closely and saw that the wedding was really in Hai Phong. I tried to convince myself that Hai Phong was the same as Halong Bay even though they don't sound the same at all  :( We were told by our friend, Nhung, that Hai Phong looks nothing like Halong Bay and more like Hanoi... which turned out to be true.

Northern Vietnam

We met up with two of Aaron's old friends and our friends, Stan and Marilyn. We loaned our motorbike to Stan and Marilyn for the weekend, so they could get around on two bikes instead of cramming on one. The two of us  shared a taxi with Aaron's two friends and rode to the bus station. One of them spoke Vietnamese and got our tickets for us. Everything went smoothly. We boarded the bus and began our journey to Hai Phong. 

Aaron told us that the buses are always half empty, and that was true for a few kilometers. The bus kept stopping on the road and picking up more passengers. Slowly the bus filled with more and more Vietnamese people. After about an hour there were no more seats left on the bus. I figured they wouldn't stop for anymore people, but I was totally wrong! I saw the look on the first person's face that wasn't going to get a seat... he was completely unfazed. Another guy working on the bus grabbed a little stool and placed it in the center aisle of the bus. The man sat down in the asile. You could tell he had done this before. After another hour, the whole center aisle was full of people sitting on plastic stools. It was totally foreign to us... pun intended :) We eventually arrived in Hai Phong and made our way to the hotel for the wedding.

We didn't know what Vietnamese weddings were like, so we didn't know what to expect. Aaron, the groom, is Australian and his soon-to-be wife was Vietnamese. The first difference we noticed was that when we sat at our table, and it was already full of food. People started eating before the ceremony even started. Then, there was a big show as the procession came down the aisle. Smoke machines and fire works went off when they crossed over the pool on a catwalk. There was a man screaming in Vietnamese on the microphone.

The man kept yelling in the microphone and they preformed a few ceremonies. Once they exchanged rings, huge sparklers went off all over the room (fire code.... what fire code?) One of Aaron's friends was sitting next to one of these flame throwers when it went off... he was about 10 cm away from cremation. We didn't get any pics of it, because we were terrified and unable to think at the time.

After the ceremony, there were several music performances and everyone kept eating. Not long after that, people started leaving. We were totally confused. We had been waiting to go out on the dance floor (we had spent several minutes earlier trying to figure out what area would be used for dancing) It turns out that at Vietnamese weddings, there isn't always dancing (maybe never, idk) and people leave as soon as they have finished eating and congratulating the newlyweds.

We considered going back to Hanoi, because we didn't want to stay in Hai Phong. It was Aaron's friend who narrowly escaped death-by-inferno earlier who suggested we go ahead with our original plan and finish the trip to Halong Bay. He also suggested going to Cat Ba Island. Then, Aaron's other friend who speaks Vietnamese said she could talk to the hotel staff and get us a car to drive us out there (it was about another hour and a half East) We thought about it for about 2 seconds... we were going to Cat Ba island in Halong Bay. We didn't totally know what that meant at the time, but it certainly sounded like an ideal opportunity for another adventure :)

A nice black car picked us up at the hotel. It felt strange hiring a private car and driver, but I quickly got over it. Usually when we travel I am paranoid about people stealing my stuff so I always try to avoid doing things that would make me an easy target... I did the same things in Texas. It's just that in Vietnam, you find yourself in a crowd way more often than you do in Dallas. So my guard is always up, but on this day we were able to throw our bags in the trunk without any worries of theft. It was so relaxing, I slept almost the whole way there.

In the car

It was nice not having to drive, navigate, deal with traffic or any of the other fun things that comes along with driving.

Along the way we got a text from Marilyn (we loaned her our motorbike before we left) saying that the weather was bad in Hanoi and they decided to go to Cat Ba instead. They would beat us there by a few hours.

We arrived in Halong Bay in the early afternoon and went straight to the port. All the ticket counter workers told us that there were no more boats going to Cat Ba until 11:00 a.m. the next morning. We weren't giving up that easily. Losing 1 out of our 4 nights in Cat Ba was not an option. We could see an island off in the distance, and both of us assumed it was Cat Ba. We figured we could just pay some guy on a little fishing boat to take us out there.

When I asked one of the guys in Vietnamese "How much... Cat Ba" and pointed at the island, he looked at me like I asked him to eat broken glass. Then he quickly sputtered away from the crazy Americans. Then a young girl could see what we were doing and came to talk some sense into us. She said we needed a bigger boat, but I didn't agree with her at the time. I mean, I could see the island... it wasn't that far away!

Then we walked down the line of boats asking everyone to take us. Some offered to take us, but wanted too much money, so we kept going down the line. I wasn't going to pay too much, because I could see the island with my own eyes! My strategy was to let everyone see us walk away. I knew someone wanted our money and would be willing to deal. We finally found a boat (double-decker) that was willing to negotiate. We made a deal and set out for Cat Ba.

So far today, we have hired a private car/driver and chartered a private boat! I can't let these sort of things get to my head, but that doesn't mean I don't enjoy it :)

We had this huge boat all to ourselves. The bottom deck looked like a nice restaurant and the top deck had several wooden benches so you could sit and enjoy the breathtaking view. It turns out that Cat Ba is just one island in an archipelago. The island that I saw from Halong Bay was not Cat Ba... not even close. After about 30 minutes floating through these amazing cliff islands, we laughed as we remembered the look on the face of the old man in the fishing boat earlier. He looked at me like I was crazy for a good reason. It took us over an hour, maybe 2 hours, to get to Cat Ba on a very large boat; I don't think we would have survived the trip on the little fishing boat, and the old guy knew it :)


Traveling through these small islands made us wish we had a professional camera, because you just can't see the colors in the pictures from our iphone. The green trees were so thick on the islands that it looked like they were covered in tons of moss. There were no beaches on most of them. Cliffs just shot straight out of the water several meters high. It looked like something out of Lord of the Rings!

It looked like a maze - crazy beautiful!

The dragon on our boat

My gorgeous bride on the boat :)

On the upper deck

Sweethearts inside the cabin :) Hi Everyone!  This is Jenni and I have to add that we had such a wonderfully romantic time on the boat too!  During the ride Johnny played one of the first songs we danced to at our wedding and asked me to dance!  The whole dining room became our dance floor and it was such a special time - marital bliss!  (Our private guide that we were having tea with even left for a bit so we had the whole place to ourselves.)  We are so fortunate to have one another and to be so happy and healthy :)  We are very much enjoying starting our lifetime of adventures together and want to thank everyone again that loves and supports us so much!!

The fog and darkness started setting in....

We were on the boat so long that it got very dark and we could only see the faint silhouettes of the surrounding islands. Then we saw this light in the picture below. It was the north pier of the island. All of the hotels were on the south end, 30 km away. So we hoped there would be a taxi there, because we didn't come during a scheduled boat ride.

When we reached shore, there was only one taxi driver there. He wanted a ton of money and wasn't willing to negotiate. Jenni was worried (so was I, but I wasn't going to show it to the driver) so I told her that we would pretend to start walking the 30 km to get the guy to come down. I knew he had an advantage, because he was the only taxi, in the middle of nowhere, but I also knew that I had the advantage of pretending to be stupid :) I also knew that he needed to drive back anyway, so he might as well make some money. We took about 12 steps before he stopped us and negotiated a reasonable price. I think part of the reason he stopped us was because he thought we would get lost and/or hurt :) Victory yet again!

We met up with Stan and Marilyn and got a room with a balcony view of the beach. It was the perfect view for the dragon dance and fireworks show that Jenni wrote about before. Here are some pics of Cat Ba:

Jenni says this was actually from when we went out to dinner  a little before the Cat Ba trip

Some scary-looking critters

A parade went down our street

The Dragon Dance

The only thing left to tell you about was our "guided tour" that was supposed to take us kayaking and then to a lovely little place called Monkey Island. That colorful story is going to have to be a blog post all by itself :)

Thanks for reading,

Johnny

I got into an argument with this little guy... I'll write about it soon

realistically....

First things first - I installed a gadget (I think successfully,) so that you can enter you email address and get an email to let you know when we've actually updated this thing!   It's the box at the top of the blog.  Just put in your email, it will have you punch in a code to verify you're not a robot, and you get an email to accept notifications from us!  There's no other catch, no spam or anything, I even tried it myself, so what are you waiting for - put in your email already!  (We know how tough it must have been constantly checking back to see, hoping, that we'd updated the blog, just to be disappointed to find out that we hadn't.  Alas!!  You sorrows shall be lifted with this wonderful little gadget do-hickey!)

Sheish!!  Okay - so realistically - writing about our life in Vietnam could be a full time job in itself.  There's just so much, and it's so vastly different from our life in America.  Plus we've been super busy with our actual full time teaching jobs, (which are going great, by the way.  It's hard work but it's also very rewarding, and our kiddos are showing tremendous growth already!)  Then there's the whole trying to figure out "life in Vietnam" thing.  Add that all up and we just don't seem to be able to keep up on documenting the entire journey!  So instead, we're hoping to at least capture a little bit of it by basically making this a random compilation of the various experiences, thoughts, observations, ideas, pictures and who-knows-what that we do manage to jot down.  And of course we want all of you (yes, I think all 10 of you that read this,) to know what we've been up to! 

So I'll go ahead and apologize right now for the run on sentences, the fragments and the otherwise poor grammar that would normally reflect poorly upon a teacher.  I suggest you either get over it now, or stop reading now, because there's just not enough time to edit my stream of consciousness. 

On a side note, I'm really starting to like Vietnamese music - who'd of thought?!  Yeah....M-TV, probably sad, I know.

Road side fires - everywhere!
It's one of those things that we found really strange at first, but there are seriously random fires on the sides of roads everywhere.  People burn stuff like crazy - everything and anything.  At first we thought maybe it was just because of Tet but the fires are here post-Tet too. 

One day we were pulling up to Metro on the motorbike and we saw this wall of smoke - I thought it might actually be a fire like we used to think of fires - unplanned and uncontrolled - you know, dangerous and alarming.  Nope - there were 12 neat, small fires burning in a ditch.  So weird.  But people tend to them - I guess it's a good way to get rid of your trash....?  And then there was the day that we were at jiu-jitsu - training as usual on a Saturday morning - and then all of the sudden you can smell the smoke - lots of it - so much that on a warm day in Vietnam we still decided to close the doors to the dojo.  There were these two or three ladies outside all burning stuff - we speculated there could be a competitive edge to it - who can burn more junk?   I think my favorite part of it was the plastic.  Yes, you read that right - plastic - as in we could smell the plastic burning.  How lovely.  Seriously, there's nothing like breathing in carcinogens while you're exercising!  Who wakes up in the morning and thinks - "hmm....I think I'll go burn some plastic today!"?  Maybe next time they'll fill the plastic with styrofoam first - that might be a nice touch.  In all seriousness thought it's not that big of a deal (I say that now while I'm cancer free - which is the way to be!)  It's just different.  But we haven't seen any of them get out of control - and people generally seem pretty responsible with them. 

Update - (since I started this entry many, many weeks ago and never finished it.  Which has happened 2 times over now - I resolve to press the post button before I get up, whether I'm done with it or not!) - Anyways, the update - since summer has started rolling in, it seems fires are at least more so at night, I imagine because of the heat during the day.  I myself could not imagine going outside at night, when it's still 33 out (somewhere in the low 90s) and tending to a fire.  I don't know how people do it.  

A random roadside fire - nothing like the whole rows of them, but  this is nothing uncommon.

Milk
It costs approximately the equivalent of $8 a gallon here, which sucks, but we still buy it.  It's cow's milk and somewhere in-between skim and whole, so it's drinkable for us, and it does a body good!  It's just kind of expensive.  Needless to say we no longer go through nearly as much as we used to!

Eggs
We've eaten a lot of different kind of eggs since we got here.  We usually buy duck eggs, which are surprisingly harder to crack than the eggs we're used to at home.  The quail eggs look cute, yet gross and are surprisingly tasty!

People
The people here seem different in many ways.  And I don't just mean that for the first time since third grade that I feel tall.  Or that short little me can look over the seas of people in a store or market and easily see my equally short husband several meters away because we're both a foot taller than everyone.  (And that's with tons of ladies wearing 6" heels.  Johnny wonders why they bother wearing them - after all, they're still only 4'10" with them on....)  But what I mean is that the people here seem more communal.  (Don't get me started on the "communal cup" thing though - yuck!)  It's not my place to make any type of evaluation of society or culture, but it just feels like everyone has a bit more of a human component here.  It's just an observation.  Maybe it's harder to overlook people when you're living in a developing country - because they're just right there.  The overwhelming differences in the have and have-nots is a little bit disturbing.  Take for example where we live - Ciputra.  Johnny and I are very fortunate to live in an such an amazing international city.  We're a little spoiled here.  We live in nice high rise (which our very American selves were scrutinizing at first - shame on us and our first world eyes.)  The landscaping is gorgeous, not to mention immaculate - it compliments the fountains and statues beautifully.  Our buildings are filled with great facilities, amenities and conveniences.  Yet just outside the 24 hour guarded gates are some of the saddest shambles of homes that I've ever seen people live in.  I won't go into our thoughts or theories, but it's just kind of sad and makes you really appreciate what you are fortunate enough to have.

And of course I didn't finish that entry, but I"ll finish it now.... :)  (Read here, yet another time I didn't finish it - shame on me!)

Yeah, I was going to mention that it's a more trusting society and all the jazz but in short, you'll still get swindled and pick-pocketed very easily if you don't watch yourself and your stuff.  (Hasn't happened yet, knock on wood or the next best thing - my head!)  But you're way less likely to get stabbed or shot.  Most of the "cops" (there are several types) don't even have guns.  They have whistles and beating sticks :)  Imagine America with cops that only have whistles and beating sticks!  Anyhow, one more weird thing that I've noticed about the people in this environment - like I mentioned it's hard to overlook people because they're just right there - right next to you.  (On a motorbike it's actually considered rude and inconsiderate not to creep up so that there's only 2 cm between you and the next bike - plus if you don't, someone else will!) but people really don't hold back too much.  If you walk up while they're picking their nose (sorry Mom, I know you think it's gross to even talk about,) but if you do, they won't stop.  They just keep on digging until they get what they went in there for.  Then they'll brush off their boogers and go about their business as usual.  Heck, they'll still be polite and shake your hand.  People do seem to spend more time outside here too.  I guess the upside to having that kind of "up close and personal"-ness with so many people is the helpful and kind human component.  For example, when we saw a family drop their motorbike, everyone around them rushed to help them up and get back on it.  No one tried to jack their groceries from their bags, everyone just immediately stopped what they were doing, got off their own bikes if need be, and went to help them.  It was kind of refreshing to see. 

And now some random pictures to hold your attention...

We're doing well - as strange and as happy as ever :)

Sorry about the red eyes - I suppose I should fix it - but nonetheless, this the beautiful place we live.

Here are my handsome guys! I'll have to take pics with all the flowers around now - but this place really is very beautiful!

My tired guys trying to wait up for me :)

Being US
Being us gets us noticed here, quite easily actually.  People take random pictures of us - that took a little getting used to.  Now we don't seem to notice as much, but it still happens.  Sometimes I find it funny to just strike a pose when people are trying to be discrete (but not doing a good job.)  I remember the first time I had my suspicion confirmed - it was at the fireworks show during Tet.  I was wearing a bright yellow West Point hoodie, and I kept thinking this guy was sort of following me with his camera and taking pictures of me.  Low and behold he was.  I finally made a quick turn and saw him reviewing the images and sure enough, I could spot myself, front and center (in multiple photos.)  He was surprised that I was watching him that time around, so he laughed uneasily and kind of flashed the screen review at me.  I smiled and we went over and looked at the pictures - none of which were very good.  So instead, so he could get a descent picture, we posed for him.  We took pictures together too - he and his whole group of friends found it so entertaining and so interesting.  People here love practicing their English with you too, although sometimes you're just not in the mood for it.  Most of the time we're good sports about it, but I have also found that just switching to Spanish is sometimes helpful.  The first time we had the whole weird picture taking thing happen, it was just to Johnny and he wasn't so keen on it.  Some guy in Metro was following him around, taking his photo, and then when Johnny would look at him strangely he would continue taking pictures of oddball thing - trying to make it seem like that was what he had been doing the whole time.  Well we mentioned to our friend Aaron, who is an Aussie that as it turns out, deals with the same thing.  He swore the easiest thing to do is just throw up the peace sign and say cheese.  If they have a kid, stick your arm around their shoulder with a thumbs up and let them take the darn picture.  So we finally gave in and tried, and it is easier to just do it and get to move on with your life.  Plus, if you give in to the picture and don't want to stay to talk, they're more forgiving and don't follow you around talking to you (read - making you feel like a jerk for having something else to do other than helping them with their English.)  I think one of the best times was at a local park which we took Dex to - oh boy did everyone want pictures then!  I'll let Johnny tell that story though.  I finally asked for a photo with all them, which they got a kick out of.

This was at our Tet celebration at school.  We volunteered to  participate and were dressed up in traditional attire.

Even the Vietnamese staff that we work with everyday wanted pictures with us that day.  

Okay, I can't seem to find the pictures of the people in the park - but I will find them and post them soon.

There's so much more to write about - like Dexter practically being a circus dog, about how when I run I feel like I'm chasing butterflies in a tropical paradise garden (providing I'm not nearly dying because of the humidity and heat,) the driving, the amazing and wonderful people we've met, Johnny's new hog (he no longer says "Hop on my piglet babe!"  Now we actually have a nice motorcycle which we have adoringly named "Bacon."  Anyways, all that more to come.  Make sure to sign up for these thing and who knows, maybe we'll actually start getting better at updating it!

Oh and at least an extra picture or two - here you go!

Johnny chillin' on the piglet

Johnny's new hog!  More pictures to come :)

We hope all is well with everyone back at home! xoxo

Next time will be more pictures, but for now, I will at least press the post button!