Meet my kids, Fat Meat and Barbecue

Hello from Hoi An, Vietnam- land of lanterns and delight. We have been here for a while now and it’s been dreamy to not change hotels or catch a flight every other day as we had been. Yay. I feel pretty relaxed and I can tell, as I’ve only eaten one earplug in the last week- score.

Hoi An is in central Vietnam and it’s a gorgeous little town of 100,000 people. Many artisans live here so there is a very relaxed and lovely vibe. Handicraft shops, tailors & leather shops fill each tiny street. Temples and coffee stands selling coconut coffee, egg coffee and salt coffee are on every corner. Kids ride their bikes in the streets and the light from colored silk lanterns creates a luminous nighttime sky as they are strung across every lane and alley. The river boats, teeming with lanterns remind me of the electric light parade at Disneyland.

Josh and David returned from their adventures in Malaysia and Cambodia and had fun at temples and big cities. While they were gone, Luna and I signed up for several artisan workshops and learned some new skills while relaxing into handiwork. Luna has taken to bookbinding so much that she’s been back for a 2nd class and has perused leather shops here for supplies.

To make ends meet, many artisans have transformed the front porch and rooms of their homes into stores or cafés and sleep in the back area. This makes for a very creative town, but maybe not the most sanitized food or working conditions. Yesterday we were at a restaurant and walked past someone’s bedroom on the way to the loo- that was strange.

Earlier in the week we went on a food tour through local’s homes, village back roads, rice fields and then into small eateries through town. We walked through a noodle factory- that term is used loosely here, as it was once again someone’s home where they’ve made noodles under a tin roof by hand for 50+ years- there were no electric machines, no clean areas and buckets of standing water where rice sludge sat fermenting waiting to become noodles. Later on our tour, we met a woman who grows sprouts from mung beans (bean sprouts) and then sells them at the local market. She grows up to 100 kilos of sprouts per day in sand brought down from the mountain, so they were bursting with nutrients. She works 7 days a week, from 3AM to 8PM. What we’ve discovered again and again is that the Vietnamese people are hardest working people we’ve ever met. Everyone we encountered on the tour was working round the clock, only taking 1 day off per year (really) and we felt very lazy and grateful that rest is possible in our lives. The people we met were 60, yet looked 85 as that constant wear and tear on the body accumulates over time. The younger generation is becoming more and more educated, yearning for lives with more opportunity than their parents’ and grandparents’ generations.

To put this in perspective, from 1945 to 1995 there were extreme food shortages and constant rationing of everything in Vietnam. 50 years of not enough food or supplies seems insane until you consider that this country was in a constant state of military conflicts involving first the French in the 1940s and 50s and then the US from the mid- 1950s to the mid-1970s. Ration coupons didn’t even mean you would get what you were entitled to since the “store” was a constant scene of chaos with people jostling and fighting for their share of food, cooking oil, fabric and gasoline. Rationing did not end in Vietnam until almost 1990 and the trade embargoes which followed meant almost every commodity was still in short supply. Everyone over the age of 10 once had full time jobs and spent their “down time” trying to grow food to make up for the shortages. The final embargoes did not end until 1995 and life in Vietnam has been improving ever since.  Politics aside, for the average Vietnamese citizen over the age of 20 life has been hard here. The older generation still work like they’re all going to starve if they take a day off – and it’s hard to argue with recent memory.

When the rationing ended in 1995, positive changes brought in both electricity and running water. There are still wells all over the place which some of the older folks use to this day. Refrigeration is something still not prioritized here and in the open-air wet markets, slabs of meat and parts lay strewn about in the midday heat. Josh got nauseous when seeing this up close and we were terrified to eat any animal products that had been purchased there.

On a lighter note, one of our last stops on the food tour was in a local home where we got to try freshly made cakes- ube (purple yam), green bean and lotus nut paste inside of rice paper. These sound better than they tasted to us. As we were standing there, two young children kept running out from the living quarters to see us, the tourists. Our guide explained that Vietnamese families often give their children western nicknames because they are easier to understand and say than their given Vietnamese names. She introduced us, very seriously, to the two sweet children, named Fat Meat and Barbecue. Not kidding. We were like what??? It didn’t help that Fat Meat was quite a rotund little girl. Later on we learned that food names are apparently a common practice in much of Asia, and one of our new friends on the tour had cousins named Oil and Mint back home in Thailand.

Hoi An is also known as a tailor-made clothing paradise, as labor is inexpensive here- so we’ve gotten some custom made clothing- a first for me. You can see some of the photos of our fashion taste in the photos below. It’s been really interesting to go through the process and experience the uncertainty at the beginning and the delight at the end.

This chapter of travel has been such a calm respite from the frenzy of earlier weeks and we’re so grateful. It’s been so nice to spend time with a friend from home and laugh together, converse and reconnect. Back to eating coconuts! Sending love from our family to yours. Next stop, Japan!

xo,

Carly