hanh's day 2

sorry about the delay ya'll, but last night both computers at the hotel were occupied by michelle and vicki (who just arrived from a week up north). they hadn't had email access for a while, so i thought it would be nice to have them have all the access they wanted.

so onto day 2... slept on the couch because hieu and tho slept in the room was sleeping in. ya know how my dad feels about family members of different genders sleeping in the same bed. so be it. i slept on the couch in g-ma's room. not the most comfortable, but when you are exhausted with 5 hrs of sleep a night. you conk out.

di van (the 4th kid, lives in orange county), dung (her hubbie), amy, will, michelle, vicki arrived from a 31 hr train ride from the north to the south. as we sit eating our free breakfast, they tell us about rat feces, train rides where the bathroom is simply a hole in the train, meaning whatever you elmininate falls directly onto the train tracks. eek! they went to sapa, which is a beautiful mountaineous part of hanoi. the gang interacted and bought some bracelets from mong people. they also visited hanoi, hai phong (where they have mouth-watering seafood), and the town that dung was born and grew up in.

my parents were so intrigued by what di van and dung shared about their touring experience in the north that we changed our itinerary to include sapa. ya know what that means? i'll get to see a part of joey's ancestry! who would have thought?! :)

afterwards, we went to ben thanh, a huge open market where you can get lots of souvenirs. it's a like a huge farmer's market, but less food, more stuff. shoes. chopsticks. tea sets. purses. bracelets. superfluous stuff. fun though. i remember being at the place. glad to have my aunt and cousin to bargain with us. it's a major tourist attraction because the open market has been there a little over a century.

what weirded me out about this experience is that vendors spoke to me in english. did i look american? or maybe korean (thy thinks i look korean, but she think minh-tu looks more korean, hieu looks the most viet, minh-anh is next in line)? i think it's because they want me to feel at ease, but it made me feel uncomfortable instead. why are they speaking to me in english when i'm in vietnam? their english was pretty good, but i responded in viet. sometimes, i responded in english, and i wanted to bust out into some fancy questions that they wouldn't understand, but i refrained such as "can you dry clean this purse if it gets dirty?" sigh.... viet is changing so much. so much commercialism. nokia, sony, vita, and other corporations strut their power with billboards that block my view of the blue sky.

after ben thanh, we shop for shoes for minh-anh and minh-tu on a street where there's endless shoe vendors reside. we experience an afternoon rain. refreshing but wet. we have lunch that's kinda like a refined buffet. women in traditional wear make food on the borders of the restaurants, customers walk around, see what they want, scribble it on paper... sit down at their table (in our case, it's a party of 16), then boom the food comes. it was supa fly!! i finally got a bowl of the bun rieu that i have been craving for months. damn, it was good. we had bun rieu, banh uot, banh cuon with grilled shrimp on a sugar cane, banh khot, banh beo, banh tom and some yummy fruit shakes. i had a sopodila shake, oh so yummy...

then we went to diamond department. a mall. felt like i was in the us. had some brands there that the mall in kc doesn't have. weird. very weird. at least they spoke to me in viet. we tried on shoes at the converse store. nibbled on some banana jackfruit ice cream with coconut juice.

then we took the hotel car back to binh dien (the 'burb so to speak that the cousins live in), and it was raining like crazy!! omg... felt so bad because tho was on the moped, and he only had a cheap rain poncho that we bought about a minute before our adventure. talk about privelege, yo. the sibs and i were all in this ford explorer. tho was on his modped fighting against the wind and rain. in retrospect, if we were to think a bit ahead, we would have left the moped at the hotel and he could have came in the car... we took a different way to my aunt's as well. a longer way... so that we would avoid traffic, which meant tho had to fight the rain for even longer!! damn we felt bad about it. when we finally arrived in binh dien, tho had a headache and was obviously super drenched.

we hung out at ba ngoai's house. you see, there's 4 uncles in 'namers. 3 of 'me live next to each other. one of 'em lives not too far away. dinner at my uncles' pad is so good!! we hung out for a while in ba's house.

gotta go. write more later.

have a good 4th!!