Holidays in Nam

We were blessed with some comic relief through the fall & holiday months as one of my best friends came to stay with us for the months of November and December. I signed Kristina up for a marketing job with a small tourism company, which actually only lasted 2 weeks because she was a little too efficient for Vietnam. She didn’t realize that job security here means find something that nobody else is good at and then TAKE YOUR TIME finishing things. She mistakenly finished a normal 2 month job in just under 2 weeks…which then only meant that she had more time to tag along with me on my adventures and dote on Ginger (who had no words of compliant). I was most surprised while she was here to have realized that so many things about the city and country were becoming the norm for me. When she gaped at the 4 people squashed on a motorbike or the mother passenger side saddling and simultaneously breastfeeding or started dry heaving from the aroma of dried fish in the market, and all she got from me was a “yeah”, I realized I have seen too much already…

But we had planned a beach trip for the first weekend she was there to hopefully draw her interests a little more and avoid her re-scheduling her flight to leave earlier (ha ha, just kidding). We took a short weekend trip to Nha Trang, a coastal resortish area that also offered some good scuba diving since Clayton has had some serious ants in his pants to get into his diving gear in Asia.

Our friends tipped us off to a new resort that was just opening and had great deals on room rates-so we tagged along on their family vacation and drug Kristina kicking and screaming (she really hates just relaxing on the beach). The three of us shared a charming little romantic 1 room bungalow (the resort was nice enough to bring an extra bed which we shoved into the corner for Kristina) and spend Saturday diving. Clayton spent a large amount of his time in college diving, so it was all we could do to keep him from jumping off the boat before the motor was turned off. However, for me it was my first time. There are certain places where we, as humans, just do not belong: outer space and beneath the ocean. I’m hoping that maybe next time my anxiety of being nibbled on by a shark, tickled by a jellyfish, using up my tank of oxygen or being left behind will lesson and I will be able to enjoy the surroundings more. This time it was more a series of: hyperventilating, talking my self into breathing normally, seeing a dark object, hyperventilating again…it just went on and on.

Luckily Kristina also got to HCMC just in time to serve as another of Clayton’s sous chefs for a good old American Thanksgiving dinner…with an imported Canadian turkey which just barely fit in our pint sized Asian oven (I should have thought about that before I bought the biggest turkey I could find).

With a combination of interesting substitutions and recipes made from scratch, we pulled it together to have the feast necessities and invited 2 other Nike families over to break in the new (*regulation size*) corn hole game Clayton had just built and enjoy a normal, loud, crazed Thanksgiving dinner. Followed of course with passing out on the couch during a football game (though we had to download a previous game-so it wasn’t exactly the same...)

Shortly after Thanksgiving Kristina and I took off to join a specialty pain psychologist from Portland, OR on a series of workshops throughout Vietnam on how to treat phantom limb pain. Beth had chosen Vietnam specifically as a great opportunity for education and instruction because of the large number of traumatic amputations still happening today due to left over land mines and other not so nice things from various wars. I found her and her project through the great wide world of google and immediately offered my time and services to help out…as long as I was all the way other here already! A surprisingly large number (up to 80%) of people who have had an amputation also have “phantom limb pain”, or pain from a body part that is no longer there. For a majority of those who do have these sensations, they are very disturbing and painful and up until now have relied on other methods and occasional heavy drug use as an attempt at a solution. Beth’s project and research was on a fairly easy method of tricking the brain into understanding that the severed limb is okay. Since our perception of pain is generated in the brain, the phantom sensations that people are feeling are almost always a “mis-circuiting” of correct information. So, by changing the way the brain understands reality versus a past event, we can control the “alarm” signals of pain and the extremely unpleasant sensations. If the brain perceives our body to be “normal”, it turns off the “alarm” and allows us to function as we always did. But anyway…all that interesting stuff aside, it was a fabulous excuse to travel and see other areas of Vietnam that I had not been to and for Kristina to tag along and see it too!

The second area we went to during the workshop was in Hue, a city in central Vietnam that is within an hours drive of an area that was heavily bombed and so has a large number of traumatic amputations still happening. Hue itself is an interesting city, recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site with a large number of tombs leftover from the Nguyen dynasty. The tombs were built for the emperors of the Nguyen dynasty (17th-19th century) often long before they actually died and so also served as their homes. We only got the chance to see one, because I thought it would be a fabulous idea to rent bikes and ride around to see them (not realizing that the one we wanted to see-the tomb of Ming Mang was a much farther trek then expected…).

But the ride through the country side was littered with old relics and tombs scattered through the rice fields and cute water buffalo roaming through the area, so the ride itself was an adventure worthy of our last afternoon. Plus, who doesn’t like getting lost in the dark on bicycles in a new city!? Additional information on the tombs: http://www.haivenu-vietnam.com/des-hue-royal-tombs.htm.

Then we were off to Hanoi, the capital of Vietnam (the capital moved from Saigon to Hanoi after the “reunification”-or when the North won and changed Saigon to Ho Chi Minh City and moved the capitol to the North). I had heard that Hanoi was very different to HCMC in many ways as it held to the more traditional northern ideals and was also closer to China, so had more northern influences. I was surprised to find that the people there were equally as accommodating as what we found in HCMC and the rudeness I had expected was absent.

However, the pollution was terrible-we scheduled a private car to drive us out of town to a “national park” just to get some fresh air. We were running around like freed prisoners in the fresh air and did not welcome the smog that we eventually returned to. I refused to go for a run even around a park in the city because it was so bad. And as bad as it was, Clayton said that most cities in China are 10x worse. Gross. What is the matter with us?? When it becomes the norm not to be able to see because there is a haze so thick that it obscures your vision-something is WRONG! But the national park was a fun adventure and I’m pretty sure it was the first time the driver had ever been there. In fact, I had only read about it on 2 different website sites, and pieced together information on how to get there and what there was to do. Our hotel that booked the car thought we were crazy to want to go there explaining that most tourists go to the “Disneyland” of parks in the area-“no way” we said.

Happy to return to HCMC, we soon began preparing for Christmas-and the arrival of Kristina’s boyfriend for Christmas eve. As Clayton says, “its just not the same-Christmas isn’t supposed to be hot!” But we decorated a tree & the house for him anyway, hoping to brighten his pouty mood for having to be stuck in HCMC for Christmas. Luckily he had the forethought to get a copy of National Lampoon’s Christmas Vacation before we moved over last year. It really would have been awful without that... But though there was not a snowflake to be seen, we managed to have a pretty great Christmas dinner anyway.

New years was probably the highlight of the holidays though (minus the following day...). Traditionally, New Year’s is not hugely celebrated, though since the western world has infiltrated most places, it has now become a huge holiday-though not as big as the Lunar New Year (which fell on Jan 23-28th this year). Never have I seen so many people all crammed into one place. We had to bail out of our taxi in the middle of the street on the EDGE of downtown at 9pm because the area was so jam packed that nothing could get through. We weaved our way through the bumper to bumper motorbikes and ran smack into a wall of people that were not going anywhere and were so thick that even Kristina couldn’t squeeze through. After backtracking and re-routing a few blocks, we found a tiny gauntlet to pass through to get to our destination. We had intended to leave the bar a few minutes prior to midnight to see the show that Heinekin so thoughtfully sponsored in the street, but after the spectacle getting there I was in no mood to head back into that... So, we rang in the New Year’s downtown in a bar and when we thought it was safe to leave ventured out to try to find a taxi. Luckily we all ran in an empty one as it was rolling down the street just in time because Clayton and Kristina were about 30 seconds away from dropping like flies. The next day wasn’t any fun for any of us, partly because of the events the night before, but mostly because we had to say goodbye to Kristina and Joel who were leaving HCMC and continuing the last of their travels in Thailand.

Shortly after that Clayton and I shoved off for our visit back to the states for the necessities: see friends & family, ski, shop at Trader Joe’s and Target...oh how we have missed you TJ’s! Couldn’t fit the whole store in our suitcases though. Damn United and their stingy baggage policies! Now we are back, with a few headaches thrown in along the way...but ready to start on year #2!