Bagels in Hanoi

Altar at St. Joseph's Cathedral

On Sunday morning, Sarah Jane and I decided to make a trip to St. Joseph’s Cathedral for mass. Just like when going to mass at home, we were running a little late and saw the bus as we were heading out of the dorm.  We chased after it, banging on the side of vehicle, reminding me of every time we used to “coger el guagua” in Cuba. The bus stopped, let us get on, and everyone inside laughed at the two silly foreign girls. All the busses here have both a driver and a man that sits in the bus and sells tickets for about 0.15 USD, and oftentimes these men are not incredibly friendly.  Luckily, we had picked a bus with a really nice driver and ticket guy.  I showed the ticket guy the Cathedral on the map, he shook his head, and kindly told us when it was time for us to get off the bus.

Outside of the Cathedral

Despite the fact that I was able to follow most of what was going in mass because of the universal nature of the Catholic Church, there were some key differences. When the Eucharist was served, instead of going up in an orderly fashion, like at every church I’ve been to in the U.S., everyone stood up and headed to the front of the church at the same time. At the sign of peace, instead of shaking hands, each person simply nodded once to the person to his or her left and right.

Women praying to Mary after Mass.

My sun-dried tomato bagel with cream cheese

After mass, Sarah Jane and I participated in a McGarry, post-mass, family tradition: eating bagels. It is my understanding that there are two bagels shops in Hanoi, a city of 8 million people (i.e. there are definitely not enough bagels to go around).  After three months of eating mostly various combinations of rice and noodles, a good bagel was starting to sound like a need, and no longer just a desire. After mass, Sarah Jane and I made our first trip to one of these shops, called Joma, which just happens to very close to the Cathedral. Walking through the glass doors of the shop was like transporting myself to the United States.  It reminds me a lot of a really nice Panera Bread, or maybe even Jack Sprat.  I purchased a large Americano coffee and a bagel with cream cheese. The food and drink were delicious, and the fact that the store donates to organizations working to end human trafficking was an added bonus.

Sarah Jane shows pure joy after finding bagels in Hanoi

Sapa Trekking

Map courtesy of http://www.ije.com.au

A few weeks ago, the Burch program took both  the UNC and the Hanoi School of Public Health students on a field trip to Sapa.  Sapa is a mountainous city in northern Vietnam, where many tourists visit every year.

The Vietnamese population is made of 54 ethnic groups.  About 85% of the population (and most of the people we meet in Hanoi) are of the Kinh  ethnicity.  Many of the mountainous areas of Vietnam, including the Northwest and Central highlands, are home to many of the 53  ethnic minority groups. While we were in Sapa, we were given many opportunities to meet and interact with people of these ethnicities.  There are many markets, where we were able to purchase clothing, fabrics, and jewelry that is unlike anything else in Vietnam.

In order to get to the region, we first took a very comfortable 8 or 9 hour overnight train from Hanoi to Lao Cai in northern Vietnam.  Much of our trip was spent trekking around the region and taking in the incredible scenery.

Local Hmong women “help” us as we start our trek on our first day

One of the beautiful views while trekking.

After our first day of trekking, the whole group stayed with a family in a village outside of Sapa.  We had delicious food and celebrated with rice wine.

Drinking rice wine with our tour guides and our homestay family

The whole group outside the of our homestay

Our second day was filled with more trekking and beautiful scenery.  We made our way back to Sapa, where we spent the night in a homey hotel called, Thien Ngan.

Terraced mountains for growing rice

More terraces

Water buffalo!

Allison, Burcu, Ann, Divya, and Sarah Jane taking a break after lots of trekking.

Running shoes that were once white after a muddy day of trekking.

After a morning of trekking, we arrived at our hotel in Sapa, where we decided to climb Ham Rong Mountain.  From the mountain, we got a view of Vietnam’s highest mountain, Fansipan.  We all liked to refer to it as “Fancy pants” mountain.

View of the town of Sapa and the highest mountains in Vietnam.

Orange moss?

Sarah Jane, Burcu and I posing on one of the statues on the Ham Rong mountain hike.

Dien and I at dinner in Sapa

Beautiful fabrics for sale at the Bac Ha market

Sarah Jane searching for the perfect skirt

This dog was posing for me.

Everybody on the boat floating down the Red River

While we were in the border town of Lao Cai, we stopped by the Chinese border to take pictures of China.  Strange as it seems, there were loads of tourists there doing the same thing.

The Chinese border!

The best pizza I've had in Vietnam. Our tour guide chose it for dinner before the train ride back to Hanoi.

The Hanoi train station after our 5:30 AM arrival.

Hue City Field Trip

Hey again everyone!  I am so sorry that it’s been so long since my last post.  We’ve had a busy couple of weeks with a field trip to Hue, midterm presentations, and papers. I hope you all enjoy seeing some of the pictures I took while I was in Hue, and I’ll try to get another blog post up as soon as I can!

Map courtesy of wikipedia.com

Hue city is located in central Vietnam and served as the capital of the country during the Nguyen dynasty (1802-1945).  We flew from Hanoi to Hue after class on Thursday and spent the weekend there a couple weeks ago. Hue is a truly magnificent city, and it’s amazing architecture helped make it a UNESCO world heritage site.

The trip was planned by our UNC Professor, Trude Bennet, with the help of one of her travel agent friends. On our first day, we visited the Hue Medical school, which houses the Office of Genetic Counseling & Disabled Children (OGCDC). We received a short introduction to their programs, and then toured a few of their facilities.

One of the programs we visited was an orphanage for both disabled and non-disabled children run by Buddhist nuns.  The head nun gave us a presentation about the orphanage, which was incredibly inspiring.  The orphanage raises the children and sends them to a nearby school. When we asked the nun if any of the children had been adopted, she told us a story of a time when  a foreign couple asked to adopt a child many years ago.   When they got the children together to see if anyone wanted to be adopted, they all gathered together and said they did not want to leave each other.  Since then, no children have left the orphanage until they are ready to get jobs and live on their own. My favorite part of our visit to the orphanage was the baby room.  Of course, we all picked up the babies and immediately fell in love.  They practically had to pull us out of the room when it was time to head to lunch.

Kavya, Tara, and Divya with some more babies

Burcu falling in love her with her baby

Sarah Jane with her baby

From left to right: Danielle, Ann, Divya, Kavya, Tara, and Joey (with babies)

The Buddhist nun in charge of the orphange

The Vietnamese version of Madeline.

After lunch, we visited another school for older children with disabilities.  We had the opportunity to observe some of the classes, where the teachers worked in pairs using Montessori techniques.  We observed a music class, where the children performed and then taught us a Vietnamese song.  It was really cute!

That night, Kim, Burcu and I wandered around the city, found some delicious dinner, and drank a bunch of soy bean milk!  We ran into the rest of the group at a beautiful cafe just inside the citadel.

Burcu with fresh soy bean milk!

Beautiful cafe inside the Hue Citadel, where we got coffee.

The following day, we went on a tour of Hue city with an adorable, pregnant tour guide named Binh.  She first brought us to the beautiful Thien Mu pagoda.  Inside the worship space of the pagoda, there was only one Buddha. This is different than the pagodas in northern Vietnam, which feature many different Buddhas.

Inside the grounds of the pagoda, Binh showed us the car that carried the Buddhist monk, Thích Quảng Đứ, to his public self sacrifice in Saigon in 1963.  His self-immolation was in protest of  the mistreatment of Buddhists by the Ngô Đình Diệm government. This act became incredibly famous around the world because of the Pulitzer prize winning photograph taken by Malcolm Browne.

My study abroad group outside the Thein Mu Pagoda

Inside the Thien Mu pagoda

The car that drove Thích Quảng Đức to his now famous self-immolation.

After the pagoda, we visited the tombs of two Nguyen dynasty kings.  The kings built huge complexes where they stayed the last few years of their life and then were buried after death.  There were many tombs throughout the complex, and Binh told us that still no one knows where the king was actually buried.

My guess is that this is not where the King was buried.

Tara learns to make incense

Rows and rows of incense lined the streets on the drive back to Hue.

The city of Hue is geographically split by the Perfume River.  On the north side of the river, a citadel was built in 1805 to protect the Imperial City. The Imperial city had four main buildings where the king, his family, and his mistresses lived.

The main gateway into the Imperial City.

One of the gates to the citadel, which protects the Imperial City.

Close up of the citadel gate.

Another close up of the mosaic covering the citadel gate.

Kim jumping in front of the citadel!

Hanoi Food 1

As many of you know (or have realized from my blog), I believe that cooking, eating, talking about food, and thinking about food are some of the most important activities anyone can partake in.  This is especially true when traveling to a new place with new flavors, food combinations, and cooking techniques.  I’ve been doing my best to photograph as much food as I can.  This collection of photos  is going to growing pretty quickly as my time in Hanoi passes, and so I thought this would be a good time to write my first food blog.  Luckily for me, I don’t think food needs that much explanation, but please let me know if you have any questions!  And before you ask, yes, I do plan on trying to learn to cook some of this stuff while I’m here…

Dien, Sarah Jane, and Danielle cooking on the street!

Xôi trứng - sticky rice with an egg and soy sauce. Sticky rice is served for breakfast with eggs, pork, or greenbeans.

Bánh xèo - a pancake made of rice powder, tumeric, and water - cooking in the street

The pancake is then wrapped in rice paper with lettuce, carrots, herbs, and bean sprouts. If you dip it in spicy fish sauce, the flavors really come together.

The mother of my roommate, Nguyet, made us lunch and dinner when I visited their home last week

The lunch she made was bún cá - a noodle soup with veggies and fish - served with shrimp flavored rice chips

Dinner: Nguyet's mom stuffed tofu with beef and then pan fried it. She also heated up some leftover greenbeans wrapped in beef. Yum!

Pappa Rotti (definitely not traditional Vietnamese, but still delicous) - sweet bun that kind of tastes like a pancake and is filled with butter

Ngan, Nguyet, and Sarah Jane eat bánh báo.

Bánh báo - a steamed bun filled with pork and two quail's egg - delicious

Trưng vit lôn ("duck egg flipped") - hardboiled duck egg with baby duck inside - this was delicious, believe me.

Dien and I eating our duck eggs!

It's persimmon season - only 75 cents per kilo.

My name is Maeve, and I am 21 years old

Since arriving in Hanoi two weeks ago, I have had way too many wonderful experiences to recount them all on my blog.  I promise I am working on it though.  Last week, a woman who works at the Hanoi School of Public health asked if any of the UNC students would be interested in teaching an English class for children.  Since I love children (and speaking English), I volunteered with Kim and Allison to teach the first lesson.

The parents of the students put some funds together and gave us money to take a taxi to a classroom about 30 minutes away from our dorms.  As soon as we got out of the cab, I heard shouts of, “Hello!” “How are you?” and “Hello teacher!”  We made our way into the classroom and met our six 8-year-old students and some of their parents.  The kids are adorable, and they already speak English surprisingly well!

They all study English at school, but their parents wanted them to have extra practice with pronunciation and listening to native speakers.  In our first class, we went through two units in the textbook and taught them to how to say their names, ages, and if they had siblings.  After the lesson, we taught them a song to learn the days of the week.  We were planning to teach them “Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes,” but they already knew the words!  It was soo cute!

On Monday, Kim, Allison, and I went to class again.  It was just as fun, and I got some cute photos!

The students help Allison learn some words for different fruits in Vietnamese

 

Our adorable students!

After class, we decided to do a little exploring away from the dorm to find dinner.  We turned down a street where restaurant after restaurant, there were groups of men grilling pigs’ feet.  We decided to keep walking and luckily stumbled upon a packed street-restaurant with huge grills filled with chicken, pork ribs, sweet potatoes, and bread.  We decided this was the place to stop.  It was sooooo worth it, even though it was a more expensive meal costing 90,000 VN dong (4.50 USD).  While we were there, we just happen to meet some adorable little kids who wanted their pictures taken.  Not a problem.

Pork ribs. Delicious.

Kim (with grilled sweet potatoes) and Allison (with grilled, sweet bread)

Our new friend, Thai.

Thai's little sister, who wouldn't tell us her name. (If you can't tell, she's just waving her arms really quickly in the picture)

Mid-Autumn Festival in Hanoi

In Vietnam, the Mid-Autumn festival is celebrated on the 15th day of the 8th month of the lunar calendar.  Luckily for us, this day just happened to be during our first weekend in Hanoi.  The Mid-Autumn festival is one of the most important holidays to the Vietnamese, and it is especially exciting because it means that cooler weather is coming!

One of the traditional customs of Mid-Autumn festival is to buy mooncakes and give them to your family and friends.  For a few weeks proceeding the festival, there were red stands throughout the whole country selling a fantastic variety of cakes.  Flavors include: lotus seed, red bean, fruit and ham, among many others.  The cakes come in baked and steamed (these are much sweeter), and each one has a hard boiled egg yolk in the middle.  By Tuesday morning after the festival, the stands selling the cakes (and the cakes) had disappeared!

My Mid-Autumn celebration began with a trip to one of the moon cake stands with my roommate, Nguyet, and one of my UNC classmates, Burcu.  We chose one coconut and one green bean cake and brought them to a nearby bubble tea cafe to devour.

Moon cake - tastes like a fig newton cookie shell filled with all sorts of crazy flavors.

Burcu and Nguyet enjoy bubble tea and moon cakes

On Monday night, we had the opportunity to participate in the annual party that the students hold for the Mid-Autumn festival.  First, we helped make a million fresh spring rolls. Then we helped eat an enormous feast of fresh spring rolls, fried spring rolls, cucumbers, soup, juices, watermelon, guava, and pomelo (giant grapefruits!).

The filling for the fresh spring rolls - pork, egg, rice noodles, carrots, and herbs

Kim and I with some of the Vietnamese students

After we ate dinner, a few of the Vietnamese students told a traditional Mid-Autumn Festival story.  Another student performed a couple of songs on his harmonica and guitar.  They asked the UNC students to perform, and so we sang a NC classic, “Wagon Wheel,” with Kim on the guitar.   We closed our performance with the UNC Alma Mater and Fight Song.   The Vietnamese students also asked that my classmate, Joey, help with the traditional lion dance performance.  While the students played the drums,  Joey did a great job jumping around and dancing like a professional!

Joey in the the front of the lion costume

After the performances, the Vietnamese students showed us a traditional Vietnamese dance.  The idea is to dance through 6 moving bamboo polls, while keeping a rhythm and not falling down.  We danced around for a awhile, and many of the UNC students tried moving the bamboo polls.  After we had done the traditional dance for awhile, the DJ turned on some modern music and we had a true dance party.  It was a great way to bond with the Vietnamese students!

Polls are lined up on the floor and they are moved to the rhythm of the music

Tara and Sammi through the bamboo together, while Burcu and Tuyet get ready

I ate a silk worm in Hoi An

In order to get to Hoi An, we left Nha Trang at 7:00 PM on a T.M. Brothers sleeper bus.  12 hours later, we arrived at our last stop before Hanoi, the Greenfield Hotel.  Hoi An is a beautiful, colonial town located on the South Central coast of Vietnam.  Since many of the buildings have been preserved and repaired over the years, Hoi An has been named a UNESCO world heritage site.

Much of our time in Hoi An was spent walking the streets of the old town, shopping, and visiting the ancient homes, pagodas, and temples.  On our first day, we came upon a large store called Thong Loi.  We hadn’t read anything about it in the guide books, but for some reason we decided to go inside.  We were greeted by a young Vietnamese women who spoke perfect English.  She gave us an overview of the silk making process and showed us the store’s merchandise.

Our tour guide showed us a 17 day old silk worm

After they grow to full size, silk worms form white or yellow, fuzzy cocoons

After our tour guide showed us the cocoons, she brought us to a spinning wheel next to a boiling pot of water.  A spool was dropped into the water where it attached to the cocoons and brought the silk to the wheel.  Our guide then asked us if we wanted to try a cooked silk worm.  After a short hesitation, we each put one in our mouth.  It actually tasted pretty good – a little like a soy bean.  Since being in Hanoi, I have noticed them offered in many street stalls (and I’ve added them to my meat and rice dishes).

The cacoons are put in boiling water - from here the silk is pulled out of the cocoons

Silk thread is woven into cloth using a loom like this one

The store had beautiful clothing, woven art, and accessories.  After such a lovely tour, I couldn’t resist buying a couple of lanterns as souvenirs!

After a full day of shopping and site-seeing, we decided to have a meal at a beautiful restaurant in the Old Town.  We ordered fried tofu, garlic sauteed morning glory, and a seafood noodle dish.  Soooo goood.

Yummm

Sarah Jane and Allison in front of the river in Hoi An's old town

On our walk home from dinner, we chose to go in one of the millions of shoe stores that line the streets of Hoi An.  Instead of being pushy like the other store owners, the woman that greeted us was warm and motherly. I must have already missed my mom at this point because I definitely fell for it.  Each of us chose a shoe design, and the owner measured our feet.  She also commented on the fact that my feet are very skinny and two different sizes…  For 12 USD, I bought a pair of original sandals made just for me!

Sarah Jane and Allison discuss shoe designs with the owner

My sandals!

The next day in Hoi An, we toured the many ancient homes, temples, and pagodas in Hoi An.  I hope you enjoy some pictures below!

Street in the Hoi An Old Town

Inside one of the ancient homes of Hoi An

Some kids playing in the streets after dark in Hoi An

A lantern shop at night

Sign above shop

Doors of a temple in the Old Town

Scarves in one of the shops in the Old Town