Dear Mom,
It’s just before 5am and I am giving up on sleep. I did get enough good hours of solid that I should be all right today, but I have been awake since sometime at the early part of the fourth watch.
Day Zero was Saturday (we arrived in the middle of the night Friday night/Saturday morning) and I did indeed wander out and found a motorbike to rent down the street from our hotel. 150,000 VND is less than $10 per day, and he’s a snazzy orange feller.
Janet took this photo of me as I returned from the hunt. Our hotel courtyard is stunningly beautiful, and that’s where I’m writing in this pre-dawn morning.
Even though it was Day Zero and we were committed to limit social interaction and just keep moving and hydrating, we did in fact get coffee and lunch with old friends from 2015-16 Vision Cafe days. Daniel is the Korean man in the photo, and Helen is a Korean woman we’ve interacted with on some short visits since leaving in 2016.
There’s no Vision Cafe anymore, but they do have Vision English Club a couple of times a week, and there is a state-sanctioned Vision Church that holds services in Korean, English, and Vietnamese. We probably won’t be doing much with the church part of things, but we’ll weigh the possibilities of helping with the English Club (and in fact we’ll be meeting with the English Club people tomorrow).
After a bowl of phở with Korean friends, we went for a massage and haircut.
My haircut was 65000, and he did a GREAT job. In Google Translate I really gave it some thought about what to write in English so the correct thing would transmit. If you write “Just remove a little” there is every chance that the translation tool will get it upside down and he’ll understand “Cut the hair down to a stubble.” So I led with “I like long hair” and we went from there.
Massages cost upwards of a half a million dong each (you can always google “580K VND to USD” and this spa is one that has an untarnished reputation: https://queenspadanang.vn. Highly recommend. My foot is still gimpy but my right elbow seems to have been completely unkinked by the treatment. So grateful!
Let’s see, what else did we do on Zero Day? Nothing major.
I went into this cafe and sat and drank a carrot juice when it started to rain and my rental motorbike battery was being revived/charged at a little repair shop next door:
We couldn’t help ourselves, and we did invite friends over for dinner. We went out and got grilled pork and rice noodles and wrapped greens and meet in rice paper. So so good.
We were in bed between 8 and 9pm on Day Zero. Hydrated and with a sleeping pill. Success.
DAY ONE had a little less adventure, actually. We went to DIF since it was a Sunday morning. Saw lots of familiar faces there, met some new friends. They were dunking people, 5 adults and two teenagers, all from English-speaking countries like Australia or the USA. They are beginning a discussion series they’re calling Big Questions, and it’s using a video/discussion curriculum we’ve also used before. We like it because it’s curiosity-driven and an exploration of life’s persistent questions.
We went out for lunch (Asian-fusion tacos) and then bought a couch. True that we don’t have a house yet, but an expat listed his couch for sale on Facebook and we scooped it up for 5 million. It’s a good start on the furnishings that will be a place of hospitality. And we bought an automatic ice maker. And we bought a motorbike. Bun Cha Hanoi for dinner. In some ways it felt like a pretty easy day, but we were still drained at the end of it, and our bodies are still in the sway of time-clocks in Bend, Oregon.
And so we begin Day 2. I don’t intend to write daily, but it seems like right at the start there’s a big push to get things moving, and we’d love to know that you’re thinking about housing and friendships and all the rest on our behalf. Fingers Crossed!
Love,
Tim