Happy New Year!

On the 9th – 7th of February this year it was the lunar new year, called ‘Tet’ here. It is the biggest holiday of the year and a real family occasion. There are huge preparations beforehand, including cooking special food, spring-cleaning the house, and visiting relatives and friends. I’ve eaten loads of ‘trung cake’, a Tet speciality which consists of sticky rice filled with some type of bean and meat. I actually quite liked it until I read on my friend’s blog that it is stuck together with animal fat – nice!
I decided to go on holiday for Tet, mainly because I really needed a holiday, it’s freezing cold in Yen Bai (although my friend in Mongolia did remind that I didn’t know what cold is as she is living in -40 degrees conditions!) and everything closes down for about a week and I thought it could be a bit boring.
January had been quite a stressful month for me as I had a big provincial-level workshop to organise and the preparations didn’t exactly run smoothly! It all turned out well in the end and the teachers all enjoyed the workshop, but I was definitely ready to get out of Yen Bai for a while! I went down to the south coast of Vietnam, where the weather is perfect at the moment. Humidity is low, the temperatures are in the late-twenties and there is a lovely breeze. I went to a place called Mui Ne, which is just opening up to tourism. Germany and Russia seem to be ahead of the English in discovering this place as a really lovely little resort. It hasn’t been overdeveloped yet and there are still loads of little cheap Vietnamese places to eat and drink across the road from the beach. I sunbathed swam, ate, drank and really recharged my batteries. My idea of a perfect holiday!
Before travelling back to Hanoi, I decided to do a day-trip from Ho Chi Minh City. I went to a place called Tay Ninh, which is a province near the Cambodian border. It’s famous as that was where the girl was photographed running down the street naked after a napalm bomb attack by the Americans. The girl who was burned was a member of a religion unique to Vietnam called Cao Daism. It’s a new religion founded only in the 1920’s and incorporates aspects of all the world’s religions into it. Saints of this religion include Louis Pasteur, William Shakespeare, Joan of Arc, Winston Churchill, and Napoleon. The main temple is based in Tay Ninh and is a really magnificent site. It is extremely colourful and while I was there I was trying to think of a word which I thought best described it – the best I could come up with was sharky!
After watching the noon ceremony there, we went on to the Cu Chi Tunnels. These were built by the Vietnamese fighting against the Americans in the war. There are 250 km of tunnels which were all built by hand, and consist of meeting rooms, wells, kitchens and make-shift hospitals on four different levels. Some of them are only 80cm by 80 cm, and there was no lighting, so some of the soldiers who spent a lot of time down there suffered from temporary blindness when they came out into the light. I found it absolutely fascinating, and we even got to go down a short part of one of the tunnels. Shamefully, they have enlarged that part of the tunnel for all the ‘larger’ tourists who visit the site. It is still extremely small and very hard to imagine people living down there for any length of time.
But now it’s back to reality! I had a really lovely holiday, and I thought that I might dread going back to Yen Bai. However, when I arrived at the station, my friend was waiting for me and took me back to her house where she has prepared lunch for me, and I realised that I have a lot to come back to here in Yen Bai.