Claiming Grief

Note: I'm writing this essay here because I don't have another platform from which to write it. It seems out of place to write something so heavy on what was once a travel blog, but I had to put these words down somewhere.

For the past ten years, I’ve been answering the question, “I’m sorry, where did you say you went to college?” to confused friends and colleagues who could have been forgiven for not having ever heard of my small alma mater, comprised of only 4,000 students in that far-flung, distant city of Seattle. I hadn’t heard of Seattle Pacific University, either, prior to my somewhat impulsive decision to apply as a high school junior living in the suburbs of Chicago. How disturbing, then, to suddenly catch glimpses of my college, my onetime home, awash in tragedy on the homepages of BBC and the New York Times. To begin to field new questions: “That was your college? The one with that shooting?” A school suddenly famous for reasons so unwelcome.

After college, I moved to the other Washington, the other Capitol Hill, and have made Washington, DC my home for the past 5 years. In this city, the shootings of poor people and of non-whites usually do not make the front page. In this city, an organization like Homicide Watch exists to remember murder victims in Washington, DC and track their cases, because the news does not do a sufficient job (http://homicidewatch.org).

For the past few days, I have clung fiercely to a sharply local sense of grief: this was my school, my community. A sense of violation and vulnerability sits heavily in my belly. A sour feeling of anguish has taken root deeply in my skin. I take stock of everything lost: Paul Lee, killed at 19. Jon Meis, saddled with the mantle of “hero,” who starts his married life under this terrible shadow of trauma. I imagine the awful, tedious aftermath as the shock starts to fade and conversations circle around and around the same topics: “were you there?” The uneasy feeling of exclusion for those who weren’t. The complicated feelings for those of us now distant from the university, or for those who never much liked SPU. The alienation for those who do not or cannot or will not process this murder through the framework of Christian teachings; the difficulty of navigating your own path through grief in the midst of collective commemoration.

I have clung fiercely to a sharply local sense of grief, but I launch wild accusations at myself all the while. Who am I to claim the grief of this community as my own—me, who graduated SPU six years ago and have no direct ties to any of the students involved in the attack? More cuttingly: who I am to hold this grief so dear to my heart, this killing of one, when 11,419 people in the United States were killed by guns last year? When 84 people were shot and killed in my own city of Washington, DC  last year? (http://guns.periscopic.com/?year=2013 http://homicidewatch.org/2013/12/27/homicide-in-2013-by-the-numbers/)

After the Sandy Hook massacre in January, 2013, my father wrote an essay about the shooting. My father was once a pastor and is now the President of the Evangelical Covenant Church—a protestant denomination headquartered in Chicago, with churches throughout the United States and Canada, and with a presence in other parts of the world. In his essay, which I’ve included below, he reminds me that grief is always local: it runs through the veins of the human connections we have forged to the specific places and people we have known. We grieve because we have first known and loved, and now lost. The grief is ours. We claim it as our own. This was my school; I can cry for its loss.

But what I had failed to grasp was that all grief is local. The paradox is that this intensely local feeling connects us to so many more who are far removed from our individual occasion of mourning. All 11,419 gun deaths in the United States last year were experienced intensely, intimately, horribly, by those who were connected to those victims. This is trite to say, of course, but it is the peaceful resting place my wild mind can come to when I lose myself rehearsing the sorrows of this week. All grief is personal. All grief is shared. In our own individual experiences of sadness, I claim a new privilege: compassion. Compassion, which means “to suffer with.” We unwillingly join the multitudinous ranks of those who have been torn through with senseless loss from gun violence. We join them unwillingly, furious, doubled-over in anguish. But we join them with a new, wide-eyed knowledge and compassion: now we know, too. I’m sorry for your loss. I’m sorry for mine. Let’s walk this road together.

“Rachel’s Weeping”

By Gary Walter

Covenant Companion (February 2013)

I find myself still sighing deeply over the massacre of innocents at Sandy Hook School, Newtown, Connecticut.

Societally, we’ve gone through a collective emotional concussion, disorienting and nauseating, which are the two symptoms I remember from my concussion as a kid getting beaned on the cheek by a Little League fastball.

 I actually hope we don’t recover quickly.  I hope we remain disoriented and nauseated for a good while longer, because regaining equilibrium too quickly will only serve the status quo. The pattern is familiar. The public clamors for well-meaning discussions around gun violence, but as the horror fades, life and other issues inevitably crowd in.  We may not mean to, but we move on.  The discussion is then ceded to those holding unyielding abstractions, talking past each other citing competing studies and shibboleths. 

Intractability sets in. Nothing changes.  And the litany of our young dying too young in mass shootings builds: Columbine, Virginia Tech, Northern Illinois University, Sandy Hook.

After the birth of Jesus, Herod ordered the slaughter of all boys under the age of two in the region of Bethlehem in a flailing attempt to eliminate this newborn threat for the title King of the Jews.  Jesus was the intended target of a massacre of children. Matthew 2:17 quotes the prophet Jeremiah to capture the region’s grief:

“A voice is heard in Ramah, weeping and great mourning, Rachel weeping for her children and refusing to be comforted, because they are no more.”

In my own concussive cobwebs I hear Rachel’s mourning from two directions within our Covenant family.

First there is mourning from Newtown and every place like Newtown. While we have no Covenant churches precisely there, the state of Connecticut is small with plenty of Covenant connections to the community. It is where Pastor Doug Bixby grew up. He wrote me, ”It is simply one of the darkest days in the history of this town”.  Six year old victim Ana Marquez-Greene is the daughter of a high school friend to another Covenant pastor, Matt Lundgren. Covenanters Jack and Becca Dowling were on site as rapid response chaplains, counseling families and first-responders. Similar stories multiply. 

The grief is palpable to many others because we have churches in many other communities like Newtown. The faces, names and personal stories of the children and staff could be transposed directly to the neighborhood school of a goodly number of Covenanters in any number of states and provinces.  The victims are recognizable, even though not known. Newtown becomes Mytown.   With this commonality, the sentiment “It could never happen here,” sorrowfully concedes, “Well, maybe it could.” 

But interestingly, that very grieving is helping more and more people hear the mournful strains of Rachel coming from a second direction. The loss of children and youth to gun violence is an ever-present pain for many urban Covenant churches and ethnic communities, from crowded New York City to sparsely populated Alaskan villages on the Bering Sea.  Pain shared is life shared.  The pain of Sandy Hook is awakening people to the truth that many in our urban communities and ethnic populations live with this anguish continually.

In the aftermath of Newtown, I sent an email to a sampling of churches who are determined to bring the hope of Christ to high-risk areas. I asked if any children and youth from the congregation had ever been wounded or killed in gun violence. Here is just a fraction of the responses.  These are not statistics. These are Covenanters. These are your children and youth.

·       Gregory, pastor’s great grandson, age 14, killed by a stray bullet on way home from a basketball game.

·       Bolivia, age 20, murdered in front of 11 adolescents on sidewalk of the church. 
Tamika, age four, shot in the head by gang crossfire. Survived but will be mentally disabled for life.

·       T.J., killed randomly while riding home on a bus.

·       John, 17, murdered just before a scheduled meeting with the pastor to turn his life around.

·       Marvin, pastor’s son, killed on the sidewalk.

I can’t tell you how proud I am of congregations like these that run to the need, not from it.  These sisters and brothers are uncommonly courageous, wise, caring, persistent, and prophetic.

The pain of Rachel knows no geographic, socio-economic or ethnic boundaries. There is common ground at the cross….and there is common ground at the grave of our children.  This one time can common ground lead to common sense in balancing rights with responsibilities? Indeed, don’t all rights come with responsibilities? We all learned the right to free speech ends at yelling “fire” in a crowded theater. My church’s right to the free exercise of religion still came with a $250,000 price tag for mandated fire sprinklers and other building code requirements.   Now is the time to find common sense approaches for the common good in curbing gun violence, if only for our children. And the Rachels who mourn.

(Almost) our last notes from abroad!

Dear loved ones,

I refuse to believe this, but the calendar tells me that today is already June 8th, meaning that we will be arriving back in Washington DC in less than one week. Try as we might to stay firmly in the present, those mixed feelings of transitions and farewells keep bubbling up in quiet moments. I cannot begin to express how grateful I am to have had the privilege to spend the last six months abroad, and with my husband and partner at my side. Though we always keep our fingers crossed that such unexpected opportunities may arise again, I have been so overjoyed to have this period of reflection, growth, and adventure that I will be content if I never have a life sabbatical such as this again in my life. Then again, for Nod and I, travel may just be in our blood.

Though the last two months of backpacking around have been incredible--eye opening and fun and challenging all at once--our very favorite part of our entire time abroad may very well be the new friendships we made while living in Australia. There's something about staying put and putting down our roots in a new community that we love more than site seeing, and in this case, it was our adopted Australian "soul family" who we lived with and Nod's co-workers who made an especially lasting impression on our hearts. 

At the same time, being away from home reminded us daily how precious our friends and families are to us, and how much we miss out on when we're away. As sad and reluctant as we are to bring this spectacular season of life to a close, I'm also impatiently excited to touch down on home soil and hold tight all those we've missed for these many months. But we're also mourning those we won't be able to hold again: this week Nod's grandpa passed away after many years of poor health. We'll be heading back to Seattle shortly after we return to the U.S. so that we can say our goodbyes to a man who was such a special and central part of Nod's family, and a legend in his own right. The sadness we've felt this week is complicated by the fact that we're so far away, so it's been adding to some of our readiness to return.

A picture of Nod's grandpa from his younger days that Nod's sister Mikel recently shared with us

But we still do have ten days left, which we plan to live to the fullest. For most of this week we've been in the sleepy little islands in Malaysia where Nod and I are lolling about like sunburned porpoises and snorkeling with sea turtles. 

On our own deserted beach

After catching up with some friends in Kuala Lumpur yesterday, we leave today for the final stop on our journey: Japan. Nod's mother is Japanese, but Nod never had the chance to travel to Japan before, so this final stop is extra special to us. I plan to spend the last five days of our travels picking up fashion tips from Harajiko girls while Nod gobbles down as much sushi as his belly can hold. 

But now, for a recap of our latest adventures: crashing motorcycles, smashing doors, and nommming our way across Malaysia.

One:

You probably remember from my last blog that I am a nervous wreck when it comes to motorbikes. Motorbikes are king of the road in most of southeast Asia (Malaysia is the only country so far where four wheels are the norm), yet I managed to drag my feet for six weeks in hope of prolonging the inevitable. When our feet were tired and we were desperate for a taxi, I would let every moto taxi pass me and drag myself along for another mile until I found a car that would take me home. I pleaded and cried not to rent one in Chiang Mai when we took a day trip to a nearby temple, even though it cost us ten times more to hire a taxi instead. When I finally gave in and went along for a motorbike tour in southern Vietnam, I almost kissed the ground in relief when it was over. 

One week after our motorbike tour in Da Lat, we were in the misty mountains of Sapa in northern Vietnam. Sapa is a tiny speck of a town that exists as a central market for nearby villages and as a jumping off point for travelers wanting to take in the beautiful countryside. The highlands villages dot the border with China, which was less than fifteen miles away. Ethnic minorities like the H'mong and the Dzao farm corn and terraced rice paddies in the green mountains. The mountains were so cool that we had to wear jeans and jackets--a welcome novelty after so many months in the sticky hot tropics. (Nod took some beautiful photos!)

In Sapa, we came to do one thing, and one thing only: rent motorbikes to drive through the hilly fields and villages. Given that the last time I had ridden a motorbike we nearly had to enter marriage counseling, it was surprising how calm I felt about getting on the second time. Perhaps it was the confidence I gained from surviving our previous trip. Maybe it was because I had threatened Nod with the prospect of not shaving my legs for two months if he drove recklessly--a threat he took to heart. It's hard to say, exactly, where this calmness came from. But as I slowly straddled the back of the bike and we roared the engine to life, I felt sure deep down that today was going to be a good day.

Yay motorbikes!

It's ironic, really, how I had been so panicked on our first ride--which had gone so smoothly--and felt completely serene as our motorbike slipped out beneath us and we came crashing to the concrete later on that day. The day had been glorious--one of our very best in Vietnam. We spent hours admiring the beauty and sheer accomplishment of the village terraces. Nod pulled over frequently so he could chat with villagers and take pictures. We stopped and walked through one community and lingered as long as we could before we had to turn back. The roads in and around the villages themselves had been treacherous: steep dirt tracks with big, loose rocks. Though they were certainly a test of Nod's driving skills, we had managed all of them successfully, with me uncharacteristically cool and collected all the while. 

It was just when we were heading back that our troubles begin. Perhaps it was that we were feeling a bit cocky on the pavement, having just mastered such difficult terrain on the dirt roads. Maybe it was the elation we felt in such a beautiful place after such a pleasant day. Maybe we're just complete rookies at driving motorbikes and had no idea what we were doing. The problem came just as we turned a corner and saw that a small stream had breached the road and covered the asphalt with an inch or two of water. That alone might have been okay, but a large 12-passenger van came around the bend heading towards us, pushing us to the side and catching us a bit off guard. The water had made the road slippery, and as we were moving over for the van, the bike went out from under us and we were on the ground before we even knew what was happening. Luckily, we made it without hardly a scratch on us: Nod was completely unscathed, while I just had some small cuts on my feet, though I have some deep bruises on my legs to show for it, too. 

This is after we picked the bike--and ourselves--up off the wet street

The van driver looked horrified and made sure we were ok. An old woman passing by just laughed at us, the foreign amateur drivers. Later that night, we treated ourselves to ice cream sundaes and felt grateful to be well and safe. The next time I'm on the back of a motorbike, though, you'll understand when my palms get a little sweaty.

Two:

After Sapa, our next stop was Malaysia. Malaysia is known for many things: cosmopolitan Kuala Lumpur, gorgeous rain forests, a diverse heritage of Indian, Chinese, and Malay influences. Mostly, though, we were going there to eat. The large island of Penang is especially famous for its food. Alina, my old roommate, is from Penang, and I have never met someone so dedicated to the act of eating. Take a weekend trip out of town, and the first question she'll ask is: "What did you eat?" Try to show her pictures of the sites you saw, and she'll skip through them until she finds the pictures of your food. We once took a roommate trip to New York, and she scheduled our entire itinerary around the restaurants she had carefully researched for weeks ahead of time. During our first night there, she ate two full dinners in different restaurants. People from Penang are serious about their food.

Since I spent years of my life subsisting on nothing more than cereal, scrambled eggs, and diet coke, and since I still consider Hot Pockets to be a pretty decent meal, I have no right to speak at all about the subtleties of a celebrated cuisine. After all the famous dishes we ordered in Penang, I was still the most excited to discover that they had real A&W root beer there (trust me, it's impossible to find outside of America!) 

So I had the reins over to Nod, who took diligent notes on each and every meal we ate. Foodies, read on (This is for you, Alina!). Non-foodies, continue reading at number three. 

----

Having been told time and time again that Malaysia, and Penang especially, is the food capital of SE Asia (and by in large the entire world, I mean c'mon, this is some of the best food in the world, right? Sushi, excluded, of course!) the Wazis decided to unbuckle our belts for a day and try to fit it all in. 

Arriving in KL after a monstrous travel day including a 1 hour bus ride through the mountains of NW Vietnam (only a mere 1 kilometer from the Chinese border), a 10 hour train ride to the capital, a 5 hour wait at the airport, a 3 hour flight to Malaysia and a 2 hour layover disaster in KL, and surviving on stale coconut bread, I was in dire need of food! I get the Nasi Lemak (rice with peanuts, cucumber, fish, shallots and samba sauce wrapped in a banana leaf) and am already in foodie heaven! And, this is at the airport. Good things are to come…

We arrive in Penang just in time for dinner, or at least what we thought would be dinner time at 6pm. Food stalls are just starting to open up and we wander out of the old city, unable to find the hawker food. We settle in at a coffee shop and bleary eyed from hunger, I decide to stick to my guns and order the Nasi Lemak again. Alissa orders a BBQ chicken dish and some wonton soup. The portion size is monstrous and the bill is less than $5 USD. It's 8pm and the smell of Malaysian and Indian food start wafting through the air. Overly full, we hesitantly follow our noses.

The next stop was the famous Char Kaeo Taeo cooked by the same man since 1954. This fried noodle dish with prawns and cockles would put any Pad Thai to shame. At $1, not a bad deal! 

On the way back home, now delirious from food, we happen to run into a cake vendor. I start snapping photos and the locals corner Alissa and tell her which cakes are best. We end up with 1 kilo of cakes and finish the bag by the time we get to our hostel, 3 blocks away… :/ A deep sleep ensues…

Our one and only full day in Penang starts at a leisurely 9am, in torrential downpour. This is what happened:

9am: Indian Roti with egg and onion with potato stew, Tosai (long flat bread) with onion, dhal and chickpeas. Followed by orange juice and chai tea…

10am: Fresh coconut juice

11am: Mee Goreng (fried vegan noodles with dark soy sauce and veggies), chai tea and a cup of hot water due to a translation faux paux

1pm: Rojak (diced durian, mango, apple, pear, papaya and veggie fritter with a shrimp/squid and tamarind sauce). We walked for 90 minutes trying to find this place in a downpour! This stand is famous around the world for THE BEST Rojak and though it didn't disappoint, the flavors were a bit bold for the Wazis. Alissa followed this by some A&W root beer.

2pm: We picked up some pretty gross onion dessert balls. I thought they were pastries filled with yummy red bean paste. Nope-curry powder! Foiled!!!

4pm: Laksa (Malaysian soup with noodles, veggies, fish and this wonderful broth that was spicy, sweet, sour and salty) and Indian tofu with a sweet tomato sauce. Followed by kiwi juice and Lime assam juice.

4:30pm: Popiah (Spring rolls with stir fried noodles and tofu)

5pm: Cendul (a dessert made with shaved ice, coconut milk, red beans and this green gelatinous thing). SO GOOD!

5:30pm: Tee Nya Kuih (a dessert made with molasses and gelatinous rice flour)

6pm: An eclair. We went to a local coffee shop called Starbucks and played cards. We felt bad and ordered an eclair.

7pm: Char Mee Hoon (stir fried vegetarian noodles chinese style with mee curry). 

8pm: Cendul AGAIN! So goooood!

9pm: Rice cakes and a sesame fritter…

This leads me to this moment right now. I can slowly begin to understand Malaysian's obsession with food. Most hawkers on the street serve 1-3 dishes that they have perfected and many have been around for over 3 generations. At 11am, people were packed at the outdoor food courts eating heaping plates full of rice, fish heads, chicken, dhal, and a million types of sauces. What I don't understand is how nearly everyone we saw were thin, apparently healthy looking and eating plates of food 1/3rd their body weight! Luckily, the Wazis paced themselves properly and walked maybe 10 miles in search of the best of the best. Tired feet, full bellies and a smile on their faces… Now, off to the east coast islands of Malaysia for some snorkeling and 86F degree water! :) 

-Nod

----

Three: 

When we were in Penang, we decided to forego the usual budget backpacker hostels and their inexplicable dedication to reggae music and rent a bedroom from a local. We found a room that was located in an old-fashioned house in an historic quarter of Penang that's recognized as a UNESCO world heritage site. The woman who owns the house uses the downstairs as a cooking school for travelers, and rents out two rooms upstairs to people like us. We didn't see much of our host, however, since she wasn't scheduled to hold any cooking classes during the two days we were in Penang, and she doesn't live on the premises. 

Being an historic house, it had a few quirks to it. It was tall and made of heavy wood and--being a townhouse in an old crowded quarter--it didn't have any windows or doors along the sides or in the back of the house, since other townhouses shared these walls with us. The front doors were thick and wooden with an antiquated lock that wasn't really functional, so the owner used a thin metal gate--the kinds you might see on the front of a pawnshop at night--to secure her doorway, locking it with a padlock. 

Old houses in historic Penang, all with metal gates in front.

I explain all of this because when we came downstairs at 4:30am to meet our waiting taxi for an early morning flight and found that the padlock was jammed, we were literally trapped inside a wooden box with no other way to escape. No windows to shimmy through, no back door to try. If there had been a fire, we would have turned into little bits of charcoal. The padlock had always been difficult for us: sometimes the key didn't turn right, sometimes we couldn't get the lock to close. But with patience and enough jiggling, we had always gotten it to work. Now that we really needed to leave and catch a plane, the lock jammed irreparably--perhaps irritated by the abuse we had shouted at it every time it had been difficult to us in the previous days. Nod, me, and the taxi driver all took shifts turning the key left and right and yanking on the lock, but it was all in vain. Since it was 4:30 in the morning, there was no locksmith to call, no owner nearby to provide a plan B. After fifteen minutes, it was clear that we weren't going anywhere unless we changed tactics. The padlock was solid steel and wouldn't break without a power tool--something we had in short supply. But the metal security gate was made out of thin rungs that looked like they might give way. We looked around for something we could use to smash apart the door. Since this was a cooking school and not a house, we couldn't expect to find the usual assorted toolbox most people keep in their garages. Luckily, though, this meant that the owner kept an industrial sized mortar and pestle in her kitchen. The pestle was made of solid granite and weighed almost 20 pounds. Nod grabbed it and started bashing it against the metal rungs, and soon we had broken enough that we could squeeze through the bars. So it was that before 5 in the morning, we had already 1) showered 2) eaten breakfast and 3) broken down a door, which is more than I can usually say after a whole day. We felt a certain sense of accomplishment. Our taxi driver mostly looked at us like we were crazy, and possibly to be pitied for that. 

Next to motorbike crashes and bashed-in doors, our other misadventures seem trivial. Sure, the Kuala Lumpur airport is the most byzantine and archaic I have ever seen and caused us to actually miss our flight--and yes, we are ready to bid farewell to all of Asia's budget airlines and their nonexistent customer service. But what would travel be without a few hiccups and frustrations? Absurdity seems to be where Nod and I shine, both easy going enough to see the mishaps of our trips as good stories rather than spoilers. But with all that said, we'd just as well prefer that the rest of our short time abroad goes smoothly so that we end up home all in one piece. And so now we're off to live up a few last days of relaxation in Malaysian islands and prepare ourselves for a sushi onslaught in Japan.

Until then-!

Vietnam, in Vignettes

I'll admit it: it took us a little while to warm up to Vietnam. In Saigon, we felt hustled by taxi drivers and aggressive touts. When we left Saigon for the quiet mountain town of Da Lat, Nod came town with a bad stomach bug that forced us to lay low for two days. By "lay low," I mean that Nod spent some 36 hours heaving in the bathroom while I fed him ice chips and beat every single level of "Plants Versus Zombies" on my iPad. Not the Wazis at our finest. Da Lat is also the honeymoon capital of Vietnam, which meant that we were surrounded by inescapable adorableness even as we were feeling rotten. Here we were, slumped over in a swan-shaped paddle boat, or holding our stomachs on the scenic gondola ride overlooking the pristine rose gardens. In our sickness, we felt taunted by the ever-present cuteness.

Furthermore, Not many people speak English in the big cities (though we've been relieved to run into more English speakers in smaller towns). We know it's our responsibility to learn the languages of the countries we travel to, but Vietnamese is a tonal language with six different tones, so it's not a simple thing to pick up. It turns out that when we thought we were saying "Hello!" we were really asking, "Would you like rice soup?" So the potential has been high for both the joy of cultural immersion and the frustration of misunderstanding. For the first few days, we were feeling more of the latter.

In addition to all that, traveling from Cambodia to Vietnam meant traveling from former war zone to former war zone. In actuality, being in Cambodia was much emotionally heavier for us than it has been for us to be here in Vietnam, at least so far. I think what it really comes down to is that Nod and I can only emotionally process one thing at a time. We visited the Vietnam war museum in Saigon only two days after we visited the Killing Fields, and it made our heads spin to hold so much war in our minds at once. It has been difficult to allow ourselves to deeply reflect on the role our country played in Vietnam's recent past, and the violence that was brought about because of it. When given the chance to stay at a beach near the site of the My Lai massacre, I opted out. My heart is just still too heavy.

All the same, I still feel shy to let Vietnamese people know that I'm American, though they don't bat an eyelash. When we've asked people how they feel about American tourists, they just shrug and say "The war was a long time ago." I keep wondering what people really think, deep down, but people seem genuinely happy to see us. And I suppose that is the cycle of life: countries go to war, and later they become friends again. I suppose I should celebrate this as a good thing, but I still felt a bit strange getting a manicure in a country we recently napalmed. But then again, maybe time is a better healer than I thought. Could it be possible that in forty years Americans will have their honeymoon in Fallujah or Kabul as easily as we went to Vietnam? It seems so unimaginable, even scandalous.

But things in Vietnam have been looking up for us again as of late: we've tracked down some decent vegetarian food this week, along with some free bicycles. Now that we're feeling better, there has been much to enjoy and appreciate: the surprising public dance and aerobic classes in the park in Saigon, the flowering bonsai trees and songbirds in the country's many gardens, syrupy sweet iced coffee, stunning sunsets that turn rice paddies orange and pink, colorful lanterns floating romantically down the river in Hoi An. 

Wandering the streets of Saigon

Yay, Vietnam!

But enough of an introduction: here are the stories of our recent exploits, told in vignette form. Read below to discover why bicycles are best, how to change a flat tire, and why you should never, ever try the ginger sauce.

One: On the woes of being a vegetarian in Vietnam

When ordering food in Vietnam, especially as a vegetarian, there is one rule to remember: never assume anything. I myself am not an official vegetarian, though I trend that way, and Nod is nearly vegan in his eating habits. In any case, I'm often wary of eating meat in foreign countries: eating beef steak is well and good, but eating cow brain is not, and I want to have the language skills to know the difference. We started off our journey in Vietnam overly ambitious about our ability to order street food with zero language skills whatsoever. Nod ordered a vegetarian sandwich and got beef liver instead. At a bus stop, what we thought was tofu with tomato sauce turned out to be slices of pork covered in oxtail stew. That was enough to turn our stomachs for the remainder of the bus ride (though on the mountainous roads we've been traveling, that isn't hard to do: I was handing out Dramamine like candy to fellow passengers during our last trip from Da Lat).

But when things go wrong with Vietnamese food, they can go really wrong. I was made to sample something the other day that our host described as "spicy ginger sauce." Its secret ingredient? Pulverized rat. As if by way of clarification, the old woman selling it made little squeaky rat sounds and pantomimed how she barbecued and then bludgeoned the rat with her mortar and pestle. Fabulous.

Other foods in Vietnam that we have dodged more successfully: fried crickets, snake wine, cat, boiled eggs with baby chickens inside (this was billed as a great snack for a night of drinking), scorpions, dog, and monkey brain. 

Yum: Fried crickets with a side of chili sauce.

Happily, our hostel directed us to a vegetarian-only street food cart last night and we had the most delicious pho soup yet, so we're feeling more hopeful about the cuisine again.

Day #5: our first good vegetarian meal. Hallelujah!

Two: Not what we bargained for

Seasoned travelers though we may be, bargaining is its own art form that requires good humor, quick math skills and--above all--knowing how much something is actually worth. Nod and I honed our skills in countries we actually lived in, where we knew the language and the prices. Then haggling turns less into a contest of wills and becomes a form of market entertainment. I once spent two hours bargaining in Arabic for a rooster statue in Egypt (meant to be the crown jewel in my dad's extensive rooster collection) and when we finally came to a deal, the shopkeeper shook my hand and invited me to stay for lunch. It was my greatest achievement with that difficult language.

Arriving in a new country, especially when you don't know the language or the currency, feels like you're flying blind. And so it was on our first day in Saigon, when we tried to find a taxi that would take us to a network of old Viet Cong tunnels a few miles outside the city. We were still at the point where we needed to pull each bill out of our wallet to remember how much it was worth, and kept forgetting the exchange rate. We were hardly in our best form, but we never expected the human drama that would unfold over a simple afternoon of site seeing.

The first taxi driver we approached might have been certifiably insane. He was pacing the sidewalk outside of the Vietnam war museum, angrily biting off a chocolate Popsicle and barking to his friends sitting in the shade nearby. His face was red and his eyes were opened wide as flecks of ice cream flew out of his mouth as he spoke. He was not the kind of driver we would ordinarily approach, but his eyes locked on us as soon as we came into view, and his ferocious gaze shrank our willpower to walk away. We were cornered. As he approached, he tore the Popsicle wrapper off its stick and threw it on the ground separating us from him. The gauntlet was thrown. We gulped. As he slid the last bit of ice cream over his tongue, we tentatively asked, "Cu Chi tunnels?" He grunted. We named our price. After turning his head to bark something unintelligible to his friends, he agreed and started to herd us into his car. Stunned that he agreed to our price so quickly and a bit turned around by the rapid turn of events, we sat wide eyed in his stifling taxi, wondering how we had just agreed to spend our afternoon with the angry ice cream man. Luckily, he gave us an out soon enough: we had scarcely pulled away from the curb when he locked all of our doors and demanded a 10% increase in the price. Not eager to be extorted all afternoon, we forced open the doors and fled onto the sidewalk.

The next two taxi drivers we spoke to were blessedly calm and sincere young men, but the language barrier was formidable. Which is to say that the only word in English they knew was "okay," and the only word we knew was, "pho soup," entirely irrelevant to the negotiations at hand. More than once during our feeble attempts at sign language, the drivers would pull out their phones and start dialing someone. We assumed they might be calling a friend or colleague who spoke English and who might translate, so when they held out their phones to us to speak, we answered with an English "Hello?" But on the other end, there was only ever silence, or sometimes a man speaking Vietnamese. We never fully understood what that was about. But after pulling out maps, calculators, and cellphones, we finally found a nice, professional young guy who seemed to understand where we wanted to go for a price we were willing to pay. We relaxed into the seat of his taxi, grateful for the cool air conditioning and looking forward to seeing these remarkable tunnels used during the war. True, some miscommunication still happened and we ended up driving some 20km the wrong way for a while, but we eventually arrived and, with lots of sign language, tried to communicate to the driver that we would meet him again in two hours.

The tunnels were impressive: built by local villagers over 20 years of war--first with the French, later with the Americans--they added up to a system 200 km long and so deep in parts that outsiders visiting them have died for lack of oxygen.

Crawling through the relatively spacious first tier of the tunnels

Used both to permit village life to continue under heavy shelling and also to aid their fighters, they built underground schools, hospitals, kitchens, meeting rooms, and bomb shelters. Hidden tunnel entrances dotted the jungle, giving fighters the chance to snipe at enemy soldiers unseen. It was a bit unsettling: a 1967 propaganda movie showing at the visitor center praised a girl from Cu Chi for being a "#1 American Killer," and our guide showed us all the booby traps these guerrillas used against the Americans, usually made out of nails, sharpened bamboo, or unexploded American bombs. I could appreciate the hell it must have been for these drafted American soldiers to be sniped at in the jungle by an enemy they couldn't see--though it certainly wasn't the same hell the Vietnamese faced when their country was invaded and bombed (with more bombs than were dropped in all of WWII, I learned), with two million killed just during the American phase of their longer war for independence.

So we spent two hours crawling through tiny tunnels and learning about life during the war, and then happily found our taxi driver waiting for us as promised. We began to relax--ha ha, we thought, how absurd our first ice cream eating taxi driver had been, how easily everything had worked out in the end. Our trip home came during rush hour, when even the back streets we took through village markets were filling up with motorbikes and drivers jockeying for some space in the crushing flow of traffic. It was right about then when we felt a thud, and our driver's eyes widened in alarm. He forced his way through the traffic over to the side of the road, where he parked, and then flung himself running into the oncoming cars. Left alone without explanation, we slowly made our way out of the car to assess the damage: a flat tire. In the distance, we saw our driver running back toward us just as maniacally, waving a hub cap in his hand victoriously. How he managed to find it and pluck it off the road without being run over, we will never know. Nod and our friend David set to work assisting our driver--whose sharp looking uniform was now covered in grease--with the car jack and the spare, while our friend Erin and I were left trying to divert traffic safely around the three guys. 

Nod also thrust his camera in my hand to document this unfolding scene of craziness, which had me wading through puddles of rain water and motor oil to stand among the swerving cars to get a good angle. I have never felt more like an intrepid photojournalist. It was right when I was putting back on the lens cap when I noticed a large bus barreling towards us. Nod and David looked up just in time to dash out of the way. By now the bus driver realized he hadn't given us quite enough clearance as he tried to inch past the car without scraping it. He ended up clearing it by less than an inch.

When all was finally fixed, we passed around kleenexes as our driver futilely tried to wash the grease off his tie with a bottle of drinking water. When we climbed back in, our driver--who had earlier driven us in silence, turned on techno remixes of 1980s love songs and blasted them as loudly as he could. I guess we all have our different ways to unwind. 8 hours after we had first begun negotiating a taxi, we finally returned to our backpacker hostel--filthy from the tire change and from climbing through the muddy tunnels. It had hardly gone as we had planned, but then, I don't think we would have changed a thing.

Three: Vietnam on Two Wheels

Our best days abroad have been spent on two wheels--bicycles and, recently, motorbikes--that allow us to venture off into the countryside and do our own exploring. We rented bicycles when we were in Cambodia and relished the freedom and fun we got from our bikes. In Hoi An, we wobbled on our bikes over back country dirt roads to ride by vegetable gardens and rice fields in surrounding villages. One sunny day at high noon, our road dead-ended into a flooded coconut grove. Woven bamboo boats shaped like teacups hovered in the water, where farmers would paddle out to check on their crops. 

Round basket boats

We happened to run into an old woman who motioned that we could get in her boat with her, and so we spent an hour floating between the palm fronds in an area that once housed a secret base for the Viet Cong.

In Nha Trang, a German man offered to let us ride his gorgeous, never-ridden mountain bikes and take a class at his wife's yoga studio for free in exchange for Nod taking some promotional pictures of their businesses. We rode our bikes out over rickety wooden bridges and through village roads for three hours in search of a famous Buddha statue nearby.

It was the day of the full moon festival, so families and monks filed into the temple to bring their prayers and offerings. It was a lovely and peaceful day.

But in Vietnam, we've also upped the ante by a few cc's in the form of motorbikes.

I am the worrier of this relationship. I fret when the bicycles we rent don't come with helmets. I worry about unseen potholes, the carelessness of other drivers, the hazards of braking too quickly if we come across an unexpected water buffalo in the road (true story: we saw a Vietnamese family take a spill after running into one of these mighty creatures on the road at night. Everyone was alright, I think). 

Hazards of the road in Vietnam

Despite my efforts at yogic breathing and the calming mantras I repeated in my head, all of these anxieties were magnified when we agreed to go on an all-day countryside tour of Da Lat--on motorcycles. The tour came very recommended to us: our guide was born in a hill tribe village, where their customs and language differ radically from most Vietnamese. The area we were in is famous for coffee groves and market places, and our guide promised to show us life inside his hard-to-access home village. All of this would be done on motorbikes.

Now, Nod had been as very patient as he could. All through Thailand, I cited the risks of driving motorbikes when he petitioned for an afternoon ride. "The crazy traffic!" I said. "It's on the wrong side of the road!" We agreed to a truce on the motorbike question for the duration of Thailand, and in Cambodia, I was able to persuade him to join me on a bicycle instead. "It's better for the environment!" I protested. "You love the environment!" In Vietnam, Nod finally had the chance to jump on the back of a motorbike taxi to tour some temples in Saigon as I spent a morning working on our blog. He came back breathless and ready to drive his own--and shouldn't I try one, too? 

Nod and his motorbike driver in Saigon

In Da Lat, I finally relented, though my vision was still to ride on the back of someone else's bike--preferably driven by someone Vietnamese who had been riding a motorbike since the age when they could first stand. Nod decided to ride his own bike during our tour, and spent a half hour during breakfast practicing with the bike in an alley behind our hostel. "It's easy," he said. "Just like a bicycle--with a lot more power." I nodded grimly. That was precisely the problem.

When the moment came, I climbed on the back of our guide's bike, and Nod and three other guests followed along behind. I held on with sweaty palms, trying my best not to visualize flying off the back of the bike and ending up splattered on the roadside. It's a bad habit of mine. Nod, in the meantime, was loving life, secretly hoping to fall behind the group just ever so slightly so he would have an excuse to come roaring back, accelerating through the admittedly sparse traffic in the mountains.

After an hour on the bike, even I started to relax. We couldn't have been going very fast--maybe 35 mph at most--so it was soon very comfortable to just sit back and enjoy the scenery--though I still kept a sweaty grip on the guide's jacket. We made several stops: at a cricket farm where we declined to sample fried insect treats, to a family's silk worm workshop, and through a local market. 

The day seemed so carefree by now that I mentioned in a sort of swaggering way that I could probably ride on the back of Nod's bike, seeing how easy this whole motorbike thing was. I secretly hoped that I could still claim dibs on my old spot on the guide's bike, but another girl in our group quickly took my place. So here we were: the Wazis on two wheels, though not in our usual pushbike fashion.

I believe this was taken early on in the day, before I had reached near panic attack levels

To my credit, I'd like to say that I did very well for, oh, the first hour. Sure, I tensed up whenever we accelerated, and I found myself whispering in his ear more than once to slow down, please, if he wouldn't mind, thank you. But the scenery was so gorgeous that it took my mind off things: we were ducking in between green, forested mountains with the sun sometimes jacketed by whispy clouds that kept us cool. Coffee trees lined the roads, and families hauled out their private supply of fresh rice kernels to dry in the sun by the side of the road. We stopped to admire a cascading waterfall.

But after some time of riding on these gently curving, broadly paved roads, we took a turn onto a narrow dirt track. Rain and motorwheels had gauged out stretches of the path, leaving us to totter across narrow strips of passable road with our feet down on either side. Tractors and supply trucks competed for space between stretches of farmland, leaving little room for us to work around. Each pothole we hit wound me tighter, until I had to start wiping the sweat of my palms onto Nod's shirt before resuming my death grip. My supplications to slow down became more insistent in his ear. I knew I had to be stressing him out, which doesn't help him drive any better, but I had lost that cool confidence I boasted of earlier in the day and was now simply focused on my survival.

Decidedly less enthused as the day wore on

My panic was given an afternoon respite when we arrived at our guide's village and got to spend a few hours on our feet, rather than the bike. We met his family, ate some delicious vegetarian noodles (prepared by his sister, who is a Buddhist nun and therefore vegetarian as well). But the best part of the day was when he decided to have us drop in on some neighbors to see if we could find some villagers who would be willing to entertain a couple of foreigners for the afternoon. So we literally started going door to door, calling to see if anyone was home.

The house we ended up staying in was originally just a one-room wooden house, though the government had paid to have some concrete additions put on to help better house the 13-member family. Since it was the middle of the day, the men were all working in their farms, leaving behind a group of mothers and sisters-in-law who ranged from ages 84 to 36. It was here that I was made to eat rat paste (best paired with fermented rice left in a gourd for four days, which the 84 year old woman gulped down with apparent glee). But we also had a chance to ask them questions through translation, where we learned that this village was a matriarchal society: women purchased their husbands, kept the family property, and passed on their names to their children. (When asked which of the men in our group would make the best husband material, one of the middle-aged unmarried daughters stood up, stared each man in the face only inches from them, and eventually concluded that on account of Nod's facial hair and high energy, he would probably do). When at the ripe age of 13 or 14 they gave birth to their first child, they would deliver their children in their home or in the fields where no one was allowed to touch the new mother and child for an entire week. It was no surprise, then, when these women lit up a cigarette midway through our conversation--I might need to take the edge off, too, after giving birth all alone.

I should mention here that our guide's translation services were not always keep true to the original meaning. He took endless pleasure in telling the older women to repeat after him, and then slowly having them say "I love you" or "Gangnam style," and then watching as they would turn to beat him after discovering what they had said. 

Now, there are a number of poisonous snakes in the highlands of Vietnam, and the most deadly is a small green snake that likes to live in coffee trees. We had already learned that our guide kept a small rubber snake in the pocket of his track pants after he flung it at Nod in a coffee grove and caused us all to fall over in panic. These village women were not to be messed with, however. When our guide repeated his antic and threw the rubber snake at their feet, one woman was already pulling off her shoe as the snake was mid-flight, and then proceeded to beat it until she was sure it was dead. I have no doubt that she would have been able to tear a lion apart with her bare hands if it had come to it. In the end, I'll place my bets every time on the women who deliver their own babies in a field.

Four: Summer nights

Three days ago, Nod and I flew to the seaside town of Hoi An. This was definitely the softcore way to travel: we could take a 16 hour bus ride through the mountains, or we could pay $100 for a 55 minute flight. I thought over this decision for, oh, 0.3 seconds. (Had we taken a bus, though, as we did from Saigon to Da Lat, we could have enjoyed the most beautiful sleeper buses in the world. My queasy stomach just thought otherwise).

Bunk beds on the bus!

So we arrived, and soon after we hopped on a few free bicycles provided by our hotel and aimed for the nearest beach. As soon as we got there, we knew we had been wasting our time the previous 2 days when we had twiddled our thumbs at a resort beach overrun by Russian tourists. The beach in Hoi An was quiet, ringed by mountainous islands, with warm water lapping up on a stretch of sand populated overwhelmingly by local families. We sank into the waves and enjoyed a peaceful afternoon of swimming and dodging little sand crabs.

Around 5pm, Nod tapped me on the shoulder. "Did you notice how crowded it's gotten?" In my relaxed stupor, I hadn't seen the steady stream of Vietnamese families filing onto the beachfront, carrying coolers and ordering bowls of rice soup from vendors that had popped up out of no where. Teenagers off of work ran into the water with their uniforms still on, girls played with each others' hair, fathers carried naked babies over the shoulder and into the shallow waves. Soon the beach was packed with family picnics, so Nod and I settled in at one of the impromptu restaurants, ordering coconuts and lemon juice as we sat and watched in little plastic chairs that sunk lopsided into the sand. Above the din of conversation, we heard someone play recordings of Debussy and Rachmaninov.

And then the full moon rose. I didn't see it at first, as transfixed as I was on all the family scenes around me and on the pink swirling clouds of sunset to the west. It was as the sun had just dipped below the horizon that I turned the other way and thought, for a moment, that the sun had somehow flown across the sky to rise again in the east. The moon was brilliant orange and huge, so much larger than the sun could ever be. It hovered low against the horizon and slowly changed from a vibrant red to a vermillion, shrinking again as it climbed higher. I have never seen anything like it before. At first I thought that all these families had come because of the moon--many of the places we've traveled to have special full moon festivals. But no, as I later learned: like us, they had come because the summer nights are hot and the seafood is cheap. So we all sat together, enjoying a summer evening.

And now we've finished our first week in Vietnam, and we still have much to see. Later today we'll fly to Hanoi, and then admire the famous beauty of Halong Bay and the terraced rice fields of Sapa. And though some of you at home may have realized that, technically, our time abroad will soon be coming to a close, Nod and I still prefer to keep our eyes firmly glued to the present. No need to start counting down the days when we still have yet to see Malaysia and Japan! Many more adventures still await us in our final weeks. And once our travels are over, we will die of happiness to see you all back home once again.

Until then-!