May God-our-Father release blessing for you in this new year-of-the-horse. May he go before you and watch behind you, bringing you close to his heart. May your eyes be brightened and enlightened, that you can appreciate Joy like never before, even in places you didn't expect to find it.

Chúc mừng năm mới! We love you!

~Tim and Janet

Today is the day after Tet Holiday, or the second day of Tết. (By the way, I’ve begun to learn to type with Vietnamese diacritical markers, so if I toggle to my Vietnamese keyboard—Win+Spacebar—I can type “T e t e s” and it puts the hat on the e and adds an upward stroke. And I feel very cool about it.)

In this email I just want to unpack the screenshot above a bit.

This is a message sent to the woman who worked for the professional service they hired to clean the house we’re living in prior to our move-in. She’s named Nhung, and she agreed to come once or twice a month to help the house get a periodic deep clean—we’re so grateful!

The message is sent in an app called Zalo. It’s created by the Vietnamese government, for the use of the Vietnamese people, and if you’re a privacy advocate you can read into that statement anything you want to. It’s an easy guess that if the “winds” ever shift here, like they have in China, all the other messaging platforms could lose access and the people would need to use Zalo to communicate. In China the 微信 app is also the one they use for banking and paying each other, so it makes for lots of … transparency. We enjoy using Zalo with local friends and consider all of our comms, regardless of encryption, fully transparent.

I sent the blessing message to her on the evening of the first day of the Lunar New Year. February 17 is the basically the latest date for Tet that we’ll ever see.

Next 9 Years (2026–2035)

• 2026: February 17 — Year of the Horse (Ngọ)

• 2027: February 6 — Year of the Goat (Mùi)

• 2028: January 26 — Year of the Monkey (Thân)

• 2029: February 13 — Year of the Rooster (Dậu)

• 2030: February 3 — Year of the Dog (Tuất)

• 2031: January 23 — Year of the Pig (Hợi)

• 2032: February 11 — Year of the Rat (Tý)

• 2033: January 31 — Year of the Buffalo (Sửu)

• 2034: February 19 — Year of the Tiger (Dần)

Nhung gave a heart to my message and replied with a blessing of her own. She’s home with teenage sons and extended family this week, and we’ll see her again next week.

When we saw her for the last time before Tết holiday, we handed her an envelope with “lucky money” inside. I have more to learn about lucky money, but what I know so far is that any time someone enters my home for the next two days, I should have a red envelope with clean/crisp money inside. The luck that I’m extending isn’t based on the amount of value, and the luck is luck for them as well as for me. But if you’re a kid in 2026 you definitely track which of your uncles gives a better payout when your family visits their house.

I have a friend here in Đà Nẵng, an American war vet, who gives out Lucky Money envelopes all year long. I try to get coffee with him (and/or a bowl of phở) every week, so I see him giving red envelopes A LOT. Someone selling hair bands or cigarette lighters or lotto tickets will walk through the cafe we’re in, and he gestures them over and hands them an envelope with cash inside, and wishes them a simple blessing from God. He gets his red envelopes printed with a tièng Việt Bible verse on them, and he buys them 5000 at a time. It could be wrong, and I know about lots of the inherent dangers of coupling spiritual things with financial charity, but I’ve been with this guy enough and seen the interactions enough to validate that what he’s doing is deeply right on so many levels.

Tết Bánh chưng

Dear Mom,

For the past week we've been seeing wood-fired simmering pots in unused lots and on sidewalks, and today we finally got an inside peek at what's been cooking. It's a holiday food called bánh chưng, and people love the nostalgia of making it together. It's an all-day, all-night affair. The rice is soaked in water all night, then the ingredients are packed into banana leaves and tied tightly. They boil in water over an open fire which has to be tended for 10-12 hours! This results in a sticky-rice-pork packet that doesn't need to be refrigerated for up to 10 days. You can see how this would have developed in times pre-dating stovetops and refrigerators, when markets closed for two weeks and everyone rested from work and ate bánh chưng and hung out with family and friends. Young people have mixed feelings about actually eating it now, but they still speak with excitement about the tradition of making it. 

We didn't stay for the long cooking process of the ones we helped to pack, but other friends brought us some they had purchased from a famous place, and we shared it tonight with a Vietnamese friend who wasn't with her family. It was actually pretty tasty!

Enjoy the photo journal below from our day making it with friends.

It's the day before Tet (Lunar New Year) and we've been invited to a family festivity in which we'll learn to make bánh chưng.

These are the "small" banana leaves.  

She's teaching the process of folding the leaves.

Fold and cut to make a leafy box.

Rice and mung beans and pork.

The rice is carefully packed so it's on the outside of the other fillings: bottom, sides, and top.  Then the package is folded up.

On another corner, same day:

Conflict Resolution

Dear Mom,

I'm hosting tonight and next Friday night at Vision English Club.  I get to choose the discussion topics, and I've got "Conflict Resolution" in the hopper for both Fridays.

https://www.facebook.com/groups/VisionEnglishclub/

Tonight at 7:15 I'll help language learners, usually about 16-20 people, know to introduce themselves and get a feel for who's at their tables.  If the tables aren't balanced, I'll do a little shuffling to make sure there isn't any table that just has 4 beginner-speakers and nobody with good speaking ability.

Not every advanced English speaker has been invited to join a group called "Vision Volunteers" but about 10 of them are recognized for their faithfulness to the English Club and their ability to use English to help their peers get practice speaking English.  In the photo above we got six local Volunteers and two from Holland together for a game night.  It was fun, but more than that it helped the group create a friendship bond.  We're looking for ways to enlarge the group and deepen the trust/friendship they feel toward each other.

Then at 7:30 tonight I'll introduce the topic and help each table create a vocabulary list for themselves.  "If I knew that the conversation topic tonight were going to be on Conflicts and Conflict Resolution, what vocabulary words would I want to have access to?"  I'll give them a chance to brainstorm first, then I'll hand out a crib sheet of vocab that AI helped me generate on the topic.

https://chatgpt.com/share/6985450d-a2f0-800b-9691-ae0bd038efc9

I'll probably also give AI a chance to create an English/Vietnamese lexicon for the topic, but I haven't done that yet.

Oh, that's too funny.  I just now went to the Facebook page for Vision Cafe and expanded the post about tonight.  Please read it, and as you do keep in mind that I only told them I was going to open up and explore the topic of Conflict Resolution.  No spilling tea or "throwing hands."  Wow.

https://www.facebook.com/share/p/1GtQzA9TQH/

But it's a good topic.  They'll talk in table groups of 4-5 with various discussion prompts, then toward the end we'll have several people stand and share out to the whole group.  

I find myself looking forward to tonight!

Love,

Tim/Janet

How did the tourist cross the road?

Dear Mom,

When visitors come to Vietnam there's really only one scary time, and it's REALLY scary: it's the first time we cross the road.

The newbies often trail cautiously behind, creating an effect like a line of ducklings, with me at the lead like Mama Duck.  It's the worst possible line to present to the oncoming traffic.  Ducklings NO!

And then when we get them midway across the traffic, they look to their right (correct) and see a gap of traffic (okay) and then make a break for it, bolting across to the other side (NO!  This is so scary for Mama Duck!).  

We're going to keep moving, slowly and consistently.  We're going to present a narrow target to the oncoming traffic.  I'll be upstream, uptraffic, and all the newbies can be downstream, safe in my "traffic shadow."  It might be that we combine with another group because there is power in numbers (a driver is more cautious about a group than about a solo crosser).

White lines don't have meaning.  You can cross anywhere, and traffic behaves the same whether there are lines or not.

My nephew visited recently and then posted about traffic and crossing traffic and did a terrific job of it @ https://saintwerewolf.com/vietnam/#walking, including this gif that caught my attention.  Funny because it's so true.

Love,

Tim/Janet

Markets

Dear Mom,

I lost my riding-at-night glasses and would like another pair from Harbor Freight.  If you're living in Bend and can help me get those and something from Walmart THIS WEEKEND, I'd be grateful.  The next people coming to Vietnam from Bend are leaving on Monday, so I don't have time to order what I need online and have it arrive to them on time.  Email me if you're up for a small shopping trip on my behalf.

The Christmas season officially ends for us today, with three more family members (one son and two nephews) flying homeward.  

In this picture I'm drinking a soursop shake and my dad and my son are sampling durian smoothies at the biggest municipal market.  Durian is ... durian a whole topic unto itself, but I realize I've never talked about markets.

The most common market is a tạp hóa ("top hwaah" with a sharply rising tone as you finish hóa)

These tạp hóa storefronts are generally in someone's house, taking up what we would consider the front living room.  The hanging packets across the top are single-use soaps and shampoos.  You can also buy TP, snacks, water, drinks, some cooking essentials like oil or fish sauce.  If it starts to rain and you're unprepared, you can buy a single-use poncho made of the thinnest plastic you can imagine.

No negotiating prices.  Sometimes items are marked, usually not.  Sometimes I'm charged a "foreigner tax" and get to pay a higher price, but I don't get mad.  There's no point in trying to tell them that I just saw someone else get the same thing for 10K cheaper, or that it's got a standard price and they're gouging.  Just note which stalls seem trustworthy and use them in preference to the others.

Next up are the Mini-Marts:

These are chain brands, convenience stores with things you'd expect in an Asian Circle K, plus maybe vegetables/fruit.  I'll find one of these for every 5 of the tạp hóa corner stores.

And while there are some huge stores like Mega (a Thai company similar in some ways to a Costco) or Lotte (a Korean chain similar to Super-Target), the only other category of market is a Municipal Market.  They range in size, but you're going to find a similar array of things that happen in and around a local "Chợ" Market.  IMAGES

At the Municipal Chợ, you'll be able to buy MOST of what a person needs for daily life:

• veggies
• meat/fish
• ice
• fruit
• flowers
• bamboo plants
• clothing
• seamstress
• ancestor-honoring stuff
• food stalls with metal benches (that's where we are in the picture above, holding our durian-fruit shakes)
• dried fruits/nuts
• candles
• scissors
• plastic containers
• umbrellas
• all the stuff available at a tạp hóa

And then around each Chợ (pronounced "chuh-uh" with a rising tone) you're going to find the same sort of shops within a half-block:

• motorbike helmets
• gold shops (this is where you should exchange USD)
• optical shops
• food stalls that shift from breakfast to morning snack, then disappear for 2-3 hours, then reappear to sell early-dinner snack
• and obviously some coffee shops and motorbike repair shops, but that's a given since they're so ubiquitous

It takes some time to get the hang of knowing where to go when I need a certain item, and then once I've gone somewhere and had a positive experience, I always go back to the same person when I need something similar.  I'm good at making eye contact with the sellers and smiling, so that when I return I usually get a happy greeting.

Ah, when I wrote that last sentence I could hear someone reading and thinking "yeah, they're happy because they know they can cheat him again," but that's actually not true.  The ones who cheat me are universally unhappy to see me again.  I'm never harsh with them, and I try to avoid going back to them so this seldom happens, but they never gesture to me to buy something when I go past.   It's so different with the ones who give me the local prices from the start--they're happy to have me as a returning, eye-contact-smiling customer.

Which brings up one more point about the markets, and haggling.  There's really only one sort of place we haggle here, and it's the places that sell things to tourists.  Haggling/negotiating for prices is not done at a tạp hóa or most chợs (except for the one Chợ Han in town that is dedicated to tourist traffic).

I'd sign off by saying "okay, that's all, I'm off to the Chợ/Market now" but it's 1pm and nothing is open.  All the Chợ stalls are asleep and  the tạp hóa lady would wonder why I'm waking her up to buy a wheel of peanuts.  The only places to go shopping at 1pm around here are the minimarts, which usually don’t carry what I’m needing, or one of the big stores across town, and I'm too sleepy to want to make the journey.

Love,

Tim/Janet