Hello and Goodbye from north-central Laos!

[Tim]

We flew up to Hanoi on Tet Holiday, which turned out to not be such a bad idea.  After 36 hours or so, though, we'd had enough and got on another plane for a ride of similar length.  Only this time, we flew west into landlocked Laos.

There are stories to tell.  Janet wanted to book rooms ahead.  Tim was just sure that there would be plenty of rooms available.  Tim prevailed.  There were no rooms.  Tim's desire for spontaneous lodging options doesn't get to prevail anymore, for the rest of the trip.  We did get a good room for the second and third days in Laos, but that first night was a doozy.

Luang Prabang is beautiful and bulging at the seams with tourists.  Of which, we are 7.  My dad flew ahead to Chiangmai today, so now it's a traveling party of 5 Chases, my mom (who is also a Chase, so I guess that makes us 6 Chases), and Amanda.  Amanda came to visit us and is now going home to Thailand with us, in our next leg of the journey.  Overland in Lao.

I'm giddy with the excitement of it.  Tomorrow at 8am we will go down to meet our boat.  It would have cost the 7 of us around $450 to buy seats on a boat that holds 40.  But instead, we have CHARTERED  a boat for around the same price.  So exciting!!

Tomorrow morning I am boarding a boat on the Mekong River and traversing north-central Laos over to Thailand on a 3-day trip.  Yes, I just wrote that again because it is so exciting.  This hasn't been on my bucket list for my whole life, but I've been really, really looking forward to it ever since I realized it could be a possibility.

See you when I get to Thailand!

~Tim

The boat on the left is the type that we've chartered:

Happy New Year Again!

[Janet --from several days ago]

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!

Student Connect

[Tim]

Most of my Saturday last weekend centered around a "Student Connect" event that we helped to create for the expat youth of Da Nang.  The foreigners here gather for church on Sunday mornings (it creates trouble when Vietnamese Christians are worshiping God alongside their expat brothers, so we have Danang International Fellowship only open to holders of foreign passports), and a year ago the church created a monthly youth event called Student Connect.

It's comprised of some kids who attend D.I.F. and some kids who don't, and being a Christian isn't a pre-requisite to joining us for a day of swimming or a scavenger hunt in the old city of Hoi An.  Next month we'll do something Easter-themed, and last Saturday we went up into the hills to a pool area advertising mud baths.

There are two adults in their 20s who are the primary youth leaders, but Tim and Janet (into their 40s now) are the older, administrative parents who are there to make sure the restaurant provides timely food, coordinate with the van drivers, and juggle receipts and such.  It's kind of fun, actually, to get to be around all the energy of the youth but not need to be the ones channeling it into positive outlets.

We got to the pool and used Google Translate to ask "Where is the mud?"

The mud turned out to be less of an attraction than the heated pool.  They pump heated mud into hot-tubs, let you sit in it for a bit, then drain and clean the tubs.  Not all that exciting, and definitely not as fun as the mosh-pit of mud we were sort of hoping for.  :)

At the dinner I stood and shared something God has been teaching me about being offended.  I read in the Bible that Jesus said we should do things like "turn the other cheek" and "go the extra mile" and I've been reading those things all my life as if they are ways to be more godly or a better person.  Lately, though, I think that they are Jesus' methods for how to not be offended.

If a Roman soldier exercises his rights, he could give any Jew his equipment/baggage and require one mile.  Jesus said that we should go the one required mile and then go a second mile for the Roman oppressor.  Why?  To convert him?  I think at one time I believed that might be part of it.  After all, Jesus also said that we should let our light shine before others so that they will see our good works and give glory to God.  So I thought the turning of the other cheek, the giving of the coat, the going the extra mile were for that purpose--for the benefit of the other person.

But now I think Jesus was telling us the secret of having an untroubled heart.  If an evil person is taking my shirt, I should give him my coat also.  If I'm unfairly required to carry a load one mile, I should finish my obligation and then do more, of my own free will.  It's for my good that I do this, so that my heart can release the resentment that naturally builds up with requirement/obligations.

Pastors should be careful what they preach. 

Ever since I stood and gave that 8-10 minute talk at the Student Connect event last Saturday, I've had NUMEROUS times when I felt cheated or badly-used.  Many more times than would ever normally happen to me!  Each time, I look for a way to go the extra mile for my own heart's sake.  It's a mundane example, but one taxi driver went the long way around and ran the meter up to 43,000 ... so I paid 50,000 for a ride that should have been 30,000 (in a country where tipping is rare).  Little things like that, over and over again--I feel like my offense-forgiver is getting a workout.

Indignant.

There is SO much to that word, and it seems like I've been "righteously indignant" several times this week.  To be indignant I have to have rights that have been violated.  Words related to "being indignant": arrogance, rights, huffy, impatient, forgiveness, etc.  And now I realize I may be writing too much to a blog that may not care about offenses and forgiveness.  I'd like to discuss it one-on-one with you, if you have time:  <thechaseplace@gmail.com>.  

Stay tuned.  In the next week we'll head to Lao and then into Thailand because my students are all having their lunar new year holidays.  :)