Happy New Year!
Vietnam is in the midst of celebrating its most important holiday: Tet. (Finally, a word that's easy to pronounce!) It's the lunar new year, and although there's a bit of partying when January 1st rolls around, no one here really thinks of that as the new year. Tet is the real New Year celebration. Today is the second day of Tet, a day for visiting friends and neighbors. We are in the airport in Hanoi right now, taking advantage of our long break from school to do some traveling. It was a lot of fun, though, seeing all the preparations that led up to Tet.
The city decorated far more than we expected for Christmas, but those decorations all looked a bit out of place. Pine trees with snow on them? Ice caves? What? But for Tet the city gets decorated all over with flowers and orange trees. Parts of town that are normally wide open lots became flower markets. Just like Christmas tree lots for us, people set up temporary stalls selling kumquat trees and various potted plants. They sleep there at night to keep their stock safe, and there's a festive, "campy" feeling in the air. People with gardens take special care to get their flowers to bloom at the right time. There's one kind of flowering tree that they make sure to defoliate exactly 45 days before Tet so that it will blossom on Tet. Those trees have a yellow flower, but up here in Hanoi the special tree is one that blooms pink. People will buy either a large flowering tree or an orange/kumquat tree to put in the entrance to their homes. They might add some red bows or red lucky money envelopes to them, but mostly the flowers or the fruit serve as the decorations. It was such fun to see that tradition and compare it to our Christmas tree tradition.
On Tet Eve Daniel and I were the only ones in our household to stay up to see the midnight fireworks. We joined another couple in walking our neighborhood out to the place where we thought the fireworks would be displayed. As it turned out, we and quite a few other people had wrong information: at midnight fireworks started exploding a good distance south of us, and many people jumped up and got on their motorbikes and zoomed off to be closer to the action. We decided that it would actually be more interesting to see what was happening outside people's homes, so we wandered back through the neighborhood. At nearly every house, one or two people were outside burning the papers they send to their ancestors in the afterlife. Some of the papers were fake money, but we weren't able to tell what the rest were. Everyone wished us a happy new year in English and Vietnamese, and we wondered if it was auspicious to greet a foreigner early in the New Year. Doing what brings luck for the coming year is on everyone's mind, and I've heard that everyone is super nice to each other on the first day of Tet, putting old family quarrels to rest--at least for one day.
It's been lovely to motorbike or walk on the small streets of the city in the days leading up to Tet because many of them are lit up by canopies of colored lights and lanterns. We may put Christmas lights on our houses and shrubs and such, but because the streets are so narrow, the Vietnamese can string lights all the way across the street. It feels magical to walk under them, and I'm sorry they aren't like that always!
Another Tet tradition is to put on your best clothes and take photos at the flower displays set up for that purpose. In Da Nang we were having our coldest weather yet, with gusty winds, so not many people were venturing out to the parks on those days. In Hanoi, though, the weather was just beautiful, sunny and about 70 degrees, and the lake area was full of families in traditional clothes posing in the gardens. It reminded me of an Easter Sunday--everyone dressed up and posing in flower beds and in front of budding trees.
We're leaving Tet behind now and heading into Laos and Thailand. More stories to come!
No comments:
Post a Comment