The Spirit's in the House.

Unlike north Vietnam and like Thailand, nearly very home in central Vietnam
has a spirit house nearby.

Built to placate roaming spirits and keep them from entering
the main house, these tiny dwellings feature many different
offerings. The frequency of spirit houses apparently varies
with the religiousness of the population. In Hue, every house
had a spirit house, many very large and elaborate, while fewer than
half the houses in the Da Nang area had one. In Hoi An,
probably two-thirds of the houses were so equipped. In Hanoi,
by contrast, we never saw a spirit house, though every home
and business has a shrine to honor the family's ancestors.

P.

Now We're Cooking.

After our trip to the market, we took a boat ride down the river to the cooking school.

It was a great opportunity to see the market from the other side.

And get a sense of life on the river.

The cooking class was held in a beautiful riverbank villa.

We were given a tour of the grounds, including a wonderful vegetable/herb
garden, where most of the produce used at the school is grown.

It was a lovely venue for the class.

Our chef was very well organized and had a great dry sense of humor.

And helped us turn out some delicious dishes, like this seafood salad in a pineapple boat.

We learned to make our own rice paper wrappers for spring rolls.
A simple, but time-consuming process we'll probably never attempt again.

O. slices and stacks the finished roll.

P.'s fried shrimp roll. Yum!

We also learned to make lovely decorations from a slice of cucumber and a tomato peel.

The final dish was a quick, intensely-flavorful eggplant stew.
This one we'll definitely be making again. Then, we retired to
the open-air dining room to feast on the fruits of our labors.
There was so much food, we couldn't eat it all,
though we certainly tried.

P.

Living in a Foodies' Paradise.

Hoi An being a culinary capital, we decided to take a cooking class here. The first step was a trip to the central market.

There was a vast array of prepared dishes. We could have spent weeks
sampling all the little dishes, but we were on a mission to acquire the
raw materials for a grand lunch.

The meat market emphasized all manner of porky goodness.

Giving the piggy pierna a shave.

Viet tamales: rice paste and ground pork steamed in a banana leaf.

For those who like their pork as fresh as possible.

Banana flowers ready to be chopped up for our beloved banana flower salad.

All chopped.

Snipping a squad of squab.

Fresh and slightly less fresh duck.

A flock of very dead chickens.

It was so hot even the locals were suffering.

As befits a river/seaport, Hoi An offers a plethora of fresh and saltwater fish.

Fish is gutted on the spot.

Ground up for fish cakes, etc.

The food sellers were ready for lunch, and so were we.

P.

Return to Vietnam.

Okay, so my computer is finally back from the shop, so I have the pictures of our last week in Vietnam and can finish the story of our farewell tour.

Return with me now to a time not so very long ago...

Leaving Da Nang, we were driven half an hour south to the ancient fishing village of Hoi An.

We stayed at a lovely resort on the river about half a mile from the ocean.

Our room was beautiful and the grounds were lovely.

We spent the morning roaming through the picturesque village.

The temples feature the same roof decorations as in the rest of the country,
but the style is more whimsical and colorful.

The heart of the town is very traditional, with none of the high-rise
hustle and bustle of modern Da Nang.

There were people in funny hats.

Beautiful old houses.

The life of the town is very much centered around the river. Centuries ago,

Hoi An was the largest trading port in Vietnam. There's still a large population
of Chinese merchants here.

By noon, it was oppressively hot and humid, so we retired to our air-conditioned room.

In the late afternoon, a sudden squall blew in.

The rain reduced the temperature and the humidity, and we had
a lovely evening, with drinks and a superb dinner in the hotel's
open-air dining room right on the river. They had a special meal
planned for us and a delicious Bordeaux at a reasonable price
to go with it. As we ate, the hotel's boatman released a long series
of floating lanterns. It was an impossibly romantic evening
we wished would never end.

P.

Back In The U.S.A.

Taken a while to firmly be back in this time zone. Even though we spread out our trip back, my body and mind were still in the East. Everything I saw looked so completely different albeit familiar. Very odd, feeling somewhat displaced yet so completely happy to be with family...to reconnect with them. Girls have so grown, yet they are the same.

Really, it's like not riding a bike for a long time and then remembering how. The body remembers.

Everything is so familiar yet so foreign, we know how it all works, we just haven't experienced it in a while.

We get behind the wheel of a car and drive like we were just driving yesterday, amazed that there is such a thing as right-of-way for cars as well as for pedestrians. Traffic is orderly, so one is trying the crowd/push their way through each and every small opening. Sidewalks are for walking, not for motorbikes, parking and/or street vendors.

No fires and smoke on sidewalks and front doorsteps. No outdoor kitchens.

It's so odd to be able to go to one place to buy any kind of food. And to have so many different choices, not just one type the same few products. All neatly arranged and fresh and clean. You can actually walk down the produce aisles without dodging speeding motorbikes. And it's all perfectly familiar--the same products are on the same shelves on the same aisles as before we left. I don't even have to think about where my favorite cereal is, it's right where it's always been. So everything is so utterly familiar that dealing with the world is pretty much automatic in a way that it never was in Vietnam, where even the simplest trip to the corner market was fraught with odd encounters and interesting discoveries, even after a year.

O.

"Devon, People Do Not Have a Thorax."

Devon and Syona, two of our granddaughters, are proving a hoot. The other day, they were both jabbering at the dinner table as usual, and Devon, 7, was singing a little song about parts of the body when Syona, 10, interrupted her. "Devon," said the voice of authority,"people do not have a thorax. You are thinking of ants." Then they both had to sing us a song they learned in school listing the parts of an insect's body.

It was both edifying and amusing.

P.

Return to (Sur)reality.

Well, we're back in California, and I've recovered from a particularly intense bout of Kim Jong-il's revenge I picked up during our stay-over in Seoul. I'm better, but I just found out that my Macbook will take yet another week to fix, so all the pictures of the rest of our farewell tour of Vietnam are still unavailable. Oh,well, if we learned anything from our time in Vietnam it was the value of patience.

Our re-entry into American life has been disturbingly smooth. Everything about life here is so familiar and unchanged that the whole of the past year seems to have completely disappeared, leaving only a series of very vivid memories, like flashes from a particularly intense dream. It truly feels as if we'd never left, except that our two granddaughters have grown tremendously. Very surreal.

P.

So Long, Thang Long!

Ever since we got to Hanoi, I've seen signs that read Thang Long. So ubiquitous that I assumed the it was the name of a big local conglomerate. But lately I found out that it is the ancient name for Hanoi. It means rising dragon.

So we've left Vietnam for Seoul, then Vancouver, then home. We will miss a lot: friends, food, etc., but we're really looking forward to seeing family and friends in the US.

See you soon!

P. & O.

Waiting For The Resurrection.

I am in deep morning for my computer which died in Da Lat on Sunday. First the Internet went out over the whole province for two days, so we couldn't post or Skype or email, then my Mac refused to start up. I'm posting this from O.'s computer, but all our photos are on my hard drive and therefore inaccessible. I was hoping to take the computer to the Apple dealer now that we're back in Hanoi, but it will take them a week to fix it, and we have to leave in two days. That means I'll have to wait to get it repaired until next week when we're back in the US, and you'll have to wait to hear about the rest of our farewell tour until then.

Meanwhile, wish me luck with the withdrawals.

P.

I Guess It Can't Be Paradise Without a Little Touch of Hell.

We were stunned by the sheer expanse of China Beach when we arrived
at the aptly named Sandy Beach Resort.
(If you click on the picture, you can make out a white dot on right side
of the island in the background. That is the world's largest statue of Kwan Yin,
hewn from local marble, and about 200 feet tall.)

It was baking hot, but look at all that empty beach to loll on! Paradise!
Turned out that there was a good reason why the beach was empty--the sand
was like burning coals. Even wearing flip-flops, the few grains that touched
your feet from time to time were very painful. And the air was so hot
that lolling was insufferable, even in the shade.

Ditto for the pool and the tiled deck around it. You're looking at third-degree burns
in seconds if you're barefoot.

The grounds, however, were lovely.

As was our beautiful air-conditioned villa.

King bed (most unusual in Vietnam).

Two bathrooms and a spacious sitting room.

Everyone emerged from their rooms in the late afternoon. A cool breeze
wafted in from the sea, and the temperature became quite pleasant.

The sunset was gorgeous, though it was odd seeing it over the land,
rather than the sea.

Truly idyllic until we walked down to the section of beach were the locals hang out.
There was trash everywhere. Very depressing.

They just dump whatever, wherever. So much for paradise.

P.