Hi Everyone. This is Jonathan. as the events of this day were mostly documented by me, I am writing a guest post on the Blogita. I shall attempt to uphold the proud tradition of blogging that Jill has already established.
Jill woke up early in the morning feeling absolutely crummy. We figured she had food poisoning or something like that because she could not move at all, except in panicked trips to the bathroom. This was really worrying to us because today was the day we were planning on going to Ha Long Bay. Ha Long Bay is something we’ve wanted to see since we watched an episode of Top Gear where they travel across Vietnam on motorcycles. I know that sounds cheezy, but seriously, this was what we were looking forward to!
Around 6 AM, we decided that there was no way that we could go to Ha Long Bay that day, so I went down to the concierge and enlisted their help. They called the cruise company and in no time flat, they had switched our reservation to Saturday rather than that morning (Friday). We were extremely grateful to the good people at the hotel. Seriously, they were amazing.
So, that left us with a day where Jill needed to recuperate. After lazing about for a while …
… I got all our supplies together and I headed out with the kids. We left the hotel and walked out into the heat of the morning to find another beautiful day in Hanoi. The first thing I did was to try and hit an ATM, but unfortunately, all of them were out of commission. So, I decided to see how far we could get with something like 300,000 Dong.
We started by walking around the Lake of the Returned Sword (It was returned to a Golden Tortise God, of course. This story will come into play later).
The area around the lake in Hanoi is beautiful and a lot of people wander around there all the time.
As we walked, all the locals pointed at us and photographed our little group. I decided to stop at one point and let the kids run about for a while and while I was sitting on a bench, a little boy and his mom shyly stepped up and started asking me questions from a sheet of paper. He asked me my name and where I was from. Then he asked me what I liked to do for exercise and what I ate and what I did when I had a cold. It turns out that his mom takes him to the lake every Saturday to practice his English on tourists. While they were interviewing me, a whole group of people took this as a sign that we were approachable and surrounded the bench where we were sitting. Everyone in Vietnam is constantly amazed that we have three kids, so they took lots of pictures with us.
At the end of the interview, one of the local merchants approached us and tried to sell us a bubble wand thing. Clara wanted one (of course), but I really wanted to save what Dong we had for transit if we needed it, so I said we didn’t have any money to buy it. The mom whose boy was interviewing us insisted on buying it for us and I think she negotiated a good price with the merchant.
This is a picture of the little boy after the interview.
I had a tourist map of Hanoi and as I looked around, I thought that maybe we should go visit the Ho Chi Min mausoleum. Not because I particularly like seeing dead Communists, but we’d heard that the grounds were lovely for kids, so I figured “why not?” As we walked, I was struck by how much Hanoi felt like downtown Sacramento. There were so many trees! It really is a beautiful city.
In my naiveté, I thought that the tourist map I had was to scale. But as we started walking towards the mausoleum, I pulled up my map on my phone and realized that we had barely made any progress. We kept soldiering onwards, though, with Jonas in the stroller, Logan in the baby carrier, and Clara walking. Both of the boys fell asleep in the heat.
But Clara was cheerful and walked along with me without complaint. While we were walking, a nice Vietnamese lady stopped and gave us bananas, which was very nice of her. Again, I think that three kids is just something no one sees in Vietnam.
I finally began to realize that there was no way we were going to make it to Ho Chi Min’s Mausoleum, so I pulled up my map and, in keeping with our Communist theme, decided to change course for a park named “Lenin Park.” We made it there and Clara quickly decided that this was a boring park.
There was no play equipment and there were lots of signs to stay off the grass. There was small gazebo thing where a lady was selling tea and cigarettes. She shared some un-roasted peanuts with the kids and invited them to come sit up on the main platform.
I’m pretty sure that I scandalized everyone in that park by letting Logan crawl around on the ground and letting the kids slide on the stair guardrail thing (the “baby slide” as Clara called it).
Also, we were eating fruit snacks purchased at Wal-Mart in the US. Lenin was probably rolling in his mausoleum thinking that his Park was being dishonored so.
And Logan climbed his first stair (at least that I’ve seen) on that gazebo! That is totally fodder for Two Truths and a Lie later in life. “I climbed my first stairs in Vietnam.” The kids don’t realize how lucky they are 🙂
Clara also tried out her bubble wand.
By the way, there are a ton of motorcycles in Vietnam. A ton. This video was taken on a regular streetlight cycle and it really wasn’t that crowded.
After we had been there for a while, we caught a taxi back to the hotel (and Clara stole my phone to film the experience)
Seriously, I have no idea where that little sign off came from. She’s 5 going on 25 apparently.
We crashed for a while and while the kids slept, I got tickets to the Water Puppet show at 8 PM. After late naps, the two older kids and I ventured back out around 7:40 or so and wandered over to the theatre. The water puppet show was fun and the kids enjoyed the various little vignettes that they did. One of them was a retelling of the Vietnamese hero who was given a magic sword to defeat his enemies and when he was done, he gave the sword back the golden tortoise god in the lake in Hanoi. Hence, the lake being named the Lake of the Returned Sword. When the tortoise puppet came out of the water and grabbed the sword from one of the puppets in the boat, Clara turned to me and said “That turtle took that guy’s sword! Is he going to give it back?!”
If you want an idea of what the water puppet show was like, this is a good video on YouTube:
After the show, I ran into a guy named Bryan from my BYU Ballroom Dancing days. Isn’t that nuts?! I guess we can go home now that we’ve seen someone we know, right?
I felt like we needed to balance out our Communist Park visit from earlier that day, so we went to Burger King for dinner. At Burger King, I noticed that the Ketchup packets had wildly inconsistent textures. One would be runny and the next would be thick. At first, I didn’t think about it too much because maybe they were from different batches or something. Juju is a sauce guy these days and he immediately started pounding the ketchup… and then I realized that half the “ketchup” packets where really chili sauce (or “chilli suace” by the label). Juju didn’t seem to mind and we finished it all off.
We got ice cream after that, and ate it on a balcony overlooking the street surrounding the lake.
That night was a weekend market/festival that was even bigger than usual in celebration of Children’s Day, so there were thousands of people. It was a lot of fun to experience.
After that, we went back to the hotel and crashed.
Hard.
