What happened to the Vietnamese man after he spilled bia all over himself?
He got a little Hanoi’d
14th-17th January 2020
The hotel Fluent Education had booked for all 140 of us turned out to be nice, I think we struck luckier than most, because we had come as a couple we were given a mini apartment with living room and kitchen in, it did take us four days to discover that everyone else was sharing one room with a person they’d only known a matter of hours.
After moving in, spreading our stuff around the room and completing our health check we finally got the chance to see some of this amazing city.
Our first proper outing was to a pagoda on West Lake
This place was beautiful, we had a slightly worrisome minute when we thought the locals outside with dozens of caged birds were selling them to eat but I turns out they release them for good luck which is a lovely idea until you see the salesmen go in and recapture all he birds again.
A trip to see the tomb of Ho Chí Minh was also an essential part of our pretending to be tourists week
This day had many learning curves in it, such as remembering to bring loo roll if you’re out and about because the whole bum spray washer thingy is an art form that you cannot perfect on your first day, do not annoy the guy all dressed in white with an official looking hat because he will get very grumpy if you cross his yellow line, plus he has a whistle (and a gun) lastly, 20,000 dong and 500,000 dong notes look very similar!
We saw another temple type thing that afternoon (only mildly felt like hearded sheep) this one was on another lake but right in the middle of Hà Nội old town which was mental but amazing!
This temple had a cool story about a turtle and a sword
In the 15th century, the legend says, a nationalist hero borrowed a magic sword — possibly from a dragon king — fought with it to drive out occupying Chinese forces, and returned it to a turtle that surfaced in Hoan Kiem Lake, the “Lake of the Returned Sword,” in central Hanoi.
We’ll go anywhere where reptiles get to carry swords, plus Dan was in his ninja turtle element!
The following day Dan had to go to the British embassy to swear that he was who he said he was because the people at his uni didn’t include his middle name on his degree and therefore it could be someone else’s (apparently). This as far as I could tell was alot of travelling, sitting and waiting for a two second thing but it meant I got the chance to go be an architecture nerd and look at the pretty buildings in a traditional vietnamese village, which was very cool.
The tiny blue sign on the front is telling us that it is under construction. We discovered this after we had climbed up to the platform and found a bunch of vietnamese men inside who were still building it and who all looked surprised to see us poking our heads through the door.
It was interesting to see the variety of techniques used to build them and the craftsmanship that’s gone into some of the details.
With Dan back from the embassy a trip to make pots was in order (obviously)
We headed for Bát Trang the home of pottery in Vietnam
One minor concern of mine, going back to the crazy roads, was that people didn’t seem to care whether they drove their motorcycle outside or inside the buildings and they were not the slightest bit bothered if inside the building was a ridiculous amount of very breakable objects
Our attempts at potterymaking were slightly (only slightly) less successful than the ones being sold
This is my beautiful pot, yes I’m very proud of it, no it doesn’t have wiggly edges because I couldn’t make straight ones
This is Dan’s lovely pot, he was making it in the style of practical rather than pretty
By the end of this activity Dan definitely had more clay on his jeans than on the wheel and had decided pottery just isn’t for him.
Throughout this entire week of random activities we had teacher training which left us all knackered and wondering why exactly we put ourselves through this.
As a farewell to Hà Nội we consumed all the beverages, which would’ve been less intense if our new friend Amy hadn’t bought three 750ml bottles of vodka (between three of us) and only two bottles of coke, but at least none of us were drunk enough to attempt karaoke!
The people travelling with us to Hai Phong seem like the best of the bunch so we’re totally smashing it!
B
Beth and Dan go to Vietnam 