I am a single parent with a teenager on the autism spectrum and travel is one of my passions. Travel is a wonderful, educational experience for typical children, and my hunch that Julia would learn and grow with travel experiences was rewarded last summer in Italy. So, I am on a mission to teach Julia about the world—one trip at a time!
Another photo dump from the museum of ethnology in Hanoi. We spent the afternoon, we could have gone back for more. The outside recreation of types of housing was wonderful. I wish we had a guide or an audioguide but we gained some knowledge and had a great time. Also, cafeteria/restaurant was good.
Surprises around every bend. And always good to be just a little prepared. Perhaps a little open and curious.
Case in point: this morning’s iced coffee—expresso with almond milk and fresh milk (no skim or 2% anywhere in sight) and I’m sure a little sugar—contains little coffee “jellies.” The first jelly slips up in the straw and surprises me. A worm? Okay, it is nothing like a worm but . . . and it is just one of many of these exquisite jellies. Julia’s chocolate soda drink has chocolate jellies.
Also, a find from a few days ago—tiny and perfect cream puffs. Oh, to die for! We are walking and sweating so much that a few cream puffs at the end of the day is of no consequence.
It is a balmy 80 degrees this morning and boy, it feels like autumn. Or early summer. Just something lovely. And a breeze!
We have been very lucky with the air conditioning in all of our lodgings. It is neither too hot or cold and adjustable. This has saved us over and over—mid-day naps when the sun is unbearable—and then, out again when the sun goes down. The sun goes down pretty early or rather, we are experiencing fall sun sets with summer temperatures.
Once again, I’m sitting again while Tra My and her mother cooks. I go to restaurants and people cook for me all the time, I visit friends and they cook for me, but I do not usually sit in my own kitchen as someone cooks for me. And I rarely sit and do absolutely nothing while someone cooks in my kitchen.
It is unnerving.
Tonight the dinner party is vegetarian—tofu and soft tomato. I have no idea what that is but there is lemon grass, cabbage, maybe some garlic. Everyday, well almost everyday is a culinary adventure.
But I want to start writing about our Sapa adventure. A week ago tonight, we took the night bus from Hanoi to Sapa. The ride to Sapa will be a separate post.
“It’s all in your head.”
I can hear my father saying it. My mother didn’t correct him even though she suffered the same ailment as I did. Often. I don’t remember him saying it to her but he said it to me. Often.
“It’s all in your head.” He said whenever I got car sick.
On a city bus from Bloomfield to Newark in New Jersey, sometime during the last years of big department stores clustered around Market and Halsey Streets, my mother and I set out to have a shopping day. I was accompanying my mother because I was the oldest girl in our family; however, I was not the best shopping companion. As a short, fat, rather plain child who leaned towards play pants, never dresses, I didn’t enjoy department stores. My younger sister would have been the better choice.
Still, Mom and I boarded the number 128 bus bound for Newark and chatted amiably as we passed Bloomfield Center and headed down Bloomfield Avenue. The 128 was not a local bus and did not stop at every corner, but there were still plenty of stops. The bus slowed down, pulled over to the right to the curb, stopped, then started again, pulled out into traffic and took on as much speed as city streets allowed. I was always queasy on buses but I was too young to take one alone and the family usually travelled by car.
I read my posts from the beginning of last month, days before we left for Tokyo, and I feel like they were written by a person from another time. Not another person. I am the same in many ways. Still mothering Julia with a lot of resistance, still looking for what she will do when we get home (You can email from anywhere although responses are no quicker from far away), still bickering with Julia which is doing neither of us much good, still trying to figure out how to deal with her body dysmorphic perseverations, still trying to inspire her to desire to do something, anything.
But there are other “stills.” No, perhaps, still is the wrong word, the wrong idea.
Three weeks into this journey and I acknowledge that I feel challenged on many fronts. In these wee hours of a night time becoming morning, I acknowledge that watching Julia fit into our Asian adventures brings a certain amount of pleasure. I have not technically brought her home, not yet anyway, but we are somewhere where she is much more related to the dominant culture than I am and that feels right. I’ve found a way to get her drawing and painting, at least somewhat. A few days every week we trade a very small notebook back and forth, taking turns drawing and painting. Not great masterpieces but some simple pleasure. It is also wonderful to have a traveling companion who likes to do so many part of travel that I love—long and sometimes multiple visits to museums, days when we are closer to just living here than sightseeing and being tourists, and reveling in the unexpected which lies around almost every corner. It has meant that I have to give up control of everything but there is comfort in that too. Not that releasing my killer grip on travel plans has been without discomfort.
We spent a long morning, not as hot as many of the ones that came before but still sweaty hot, at the Temple of Literature, in Vietnamese, Van Mieu-Quoc Tu Giam. This was my favorite place 22 years ago when I came with my friend, Jennifer, to adopt her daughter. And it remains a favorite—now, with an excellent audio tour. It is a place of calm and peace in the middle of the chaos of Ha Noi.
Van Mieu-Quoc Tu Giam was founded in 1070 as a temple to worship Confucius. A short 6 years later the next Emperor established the Imperial Academy on the Temple grounds as a royal school for nobles, and bureaucrats. Other students were accepted based on competitive exams as a way of filling the civil service. It seems it didn’t take long for the prestigious academy to diversify their student body. I wonder if those nobles and bureaucrats didn’t get bored of their own company. Maybe they just needed some smart guys. The last exam took place around 1919. Of course, candidates were only considered if they were male and sons of landowners, sons of singers, performers and criminals were not allowed into the exam. The school was strict and too many violations of the behavior code could result in expulsion or loss of a head.
For all its restrictions, Van Mieu-Quoc Tu Giam is a magical place of learning, a place that has valued education and right living for more than a thousand years and for that I love it.
Always we see times colliding and melting together. The woman on her bike in the early morning. The back of the bike is loaded with produce that she will sell today. As she walks down the street, the motor bikes whizz past her, all busy, all rushing. They are the predominant inhabitants of these streets. There are far fewer bicycles than there were 20 years ago. They no longer command the speed of the streets and take very few parking places.
The cars, of which this picture has only one of a quite moderate size invade and take up so much room. There are big ones–SUVs of the biggest variety that honk and push through. Everything else, motorbikes, bikes and pedestrians slow those huge monsters down, but they persist. They don’t feel like the trucks delivering or the buses picking up and letting off or touring. The SUVs feel like money being shown off. Rarely is there more than one person in those SUVs and that person is occupying valuable real estate. And currently, as a walker or sometimes motorbike rider, those SUVs are what puts the fear of god in me.
There were lion dancers! They were wonderful. I noted how much more intricate the dancing was, how there was choreography, and then realized that I had never seen lion dancers in any place in Asia. I was comparing them to Chinatowns and Madison’s International Festival. Was it just that this performance was so much closer to the source?
Trấn Quốc Pagoda is the oldest Buddhist temple in Ha Noi. It was originally built from 544 to 548; however, it has been refurbished and rebuilt a number of times since—websites disagree on the last renovation which may have occurred just before the turn of this century. The pagoda is located on a small island near the southeastern shore of Ha Noi’s West Lake which is a lovely location. We visited it on my last trip here in 2001 and I may have taken the same pictures that I did this time.
On the grounds of Trấn Quốc is a Bodhi tree taken as cutting of the original tree in Bodh Gaya, India under which the Buddha sat and achieved enlightenment. The gift was made in 1959, marking the visit of the Indian president Rajendra Prasad. The tree is not marked, or at least not marked in English. I should have looked up what it looked like before visiting.
Chasing Joy 