Hoai's Wedding

Each Vietnamese wedding I've been to has been slightly different. Hoai's wedding was by far the most interesting and fun one I've experienced yet. Let me break down the day for you.

6:30 AM: Went to the hotel's all-you-can-eat buffet with Huyen's family.

8:00 AM: Tan, Hoai's fiance, and his family showed up at the hotel to collect Hoai, her family and me.

(PICTURE: The groom collects the bride.)

8:01 AM: I started to profusely sweat under my suit.

8:30 AM: Took a motorcade to Tan's family's house. The alley his family lives down was quite muddy because it's rainy season. Tan had placed concrete blocks in the alley the day before that we could step on.

(PICTURE: Luckily the bride didn't have to wear her train till later.)

8:50 AM: The official wedding ceremony started. Speeches were given by family members, poems were read, incense was burned to honor ancestors, envelopes were handed out and gold jewelry was given to the bride.

(PICTURE: The parents of the groom and bride pay their respects to the groom's ancestors.)

8:52 AM: My shirt officially reached the soaked level from sweating in a room with thirty people that had no AC.

9:30 AM: The two families celebrate the nuptuals by eating lunch together.
(PICTURE: The two family's eat together. This was one of three tables set up in the living room. I was at the table with all the male elders.)

9:32 AM: I realzed that every member of Tan's family wanted to chug a glass of beer with the foreigner at the wedding. Oh, and they wanted to do this individually.

11:30 AM: Went back to the hotel to take a nap.

12:00 PM: Took a nap in a room with Huyen's grandpa, father, brother and brother-in-law. I was the only one who had his own bed...and yup, we were all in our boxers.

2:00 PM: Was woken up by Huyen's nephew.

(PICTURE: Wedding Parking.)

4:00 PM: Wedding guests start to show up at the hotel on their motorbikes. There were 400 wedding guests.
(PICTURE: Guests place checks in the heart shaped box as they walk in.)

4:30 PM: Wedding festivities start. People sing songs, fireworks are lit, and another wedding ceremony takes place on stage. Oh, and people come trickling in to the catering hall. So many people that Huyen's family and I don't have a place to sit together.

5:15 PM: Huyen and I finally get a seat at a table with her grandpa and uncle. We proceed to eat, drink and be merry.

5:45 PM: Friends of the bride and groom start to sing songs for everyone. There is no band so the friends and family are the entertainment...until...

6:00 PM: A magician comes out and dazzles everyone with tricks.

The end of this video has all the magic you could ever ask for at a wedding...

Wedding Dresses

(PICTURE: Wedding dresses on the right, party dresses on the left.)

In America, a bride's wedding dress is a pretty big deal. Okay, yeah, that's a gigantic understatement. It's a huge -- and hugely expensive -- deal.

In Vietnam, brides want to look just as beautiful as American brides want to look. However they don't freak out about their dress nearly as much. This is what I learned when with less than 24 hours to go before the wedding, Huyen asked me if I wanted to go pick out a wedding dress with her and Hoai. Let me repeat that again: With less than 24 hours to go before the wedding we went to pick out a wedding dress!!!

I went to the shop with Huyen and Hoai and helped to choose the dresses she would wear the next day. She needed three different dresses. First she needed a traditional red Ao Dai for the morning ceremony.
(PICTURE: Hoai trying on the Ao Dai.)

Next Hoai needed her white wedding dress.

Finally, Hoai need a ballroom dress for the rest of the party after tying the knot. For this one she asked my opinion...and then thankfully went with the one she liked.

(PICTURE: Hoai in her party dress at the wedding.)

We spent about thirty minutes in the shop. Yup, ten minutes per dress.

Now if you aren't shocked already at the process of getting a wedding dress, let me blow your mind with this stat: the total cost of renting three wedding dresses, having hair and make-up done on the wedding day, AND all the pictures/album/videos costs....

...get a figure in your head...

...divide it by a lot...

...and then some more...

It costs (at least in Hue): $168.26.

It's Better Than On TV

(PICTURE: The Nguyens at Lan Co Beach.)

A couple days before we left for the wedding, Huyen mentioned to me that we could take a day trip to the "nicest beach in the world." Apparently someone wrote in a Vietnamese publication that Lan Co Beach was the best beach on Earth and well, clearly people believe it.

Huyen and I were going to take a motorbike to the beach but at the last minute, her mother, aunt, grandfather, sisters and nephew decided to join us. We called up a car and had a driver bring us about 50 kilometers to a resort on the beach.

When we got to the beach, I saw something that I will never ever forget. When the first wave came, Huyen's mother and aunt FREAKED OUT. They both sort of yelped and ran away from the water and up a few feet towards the resort. I figured they didn't know how to swim but couldn't imagine they'd be so scared of drowning my just having water rush over their feet. Well, it turns out this was their FIRST TIME SEEING THE OCEAN!

I couldn't believe it when Huyen told me this information. I guess I just take it for granted that anyone who is over ____ (pick an arbitrarily low number) has seen the beach at some point in their life. When I asked Huyen why it took her mom to the last moment to join our trip she said, "My mother said she had seen the ocean on TV and didn't need to go." After playing around on the sand for about an hour her mother, aunt and grandfather all agreed that the real thing was a lot better than the beach. If Lan Co Beach is really the best beach in the world, it's not a bad one to see for your first time.

Hoai's Wedding Part I

(PICTURE: The two families meet before the wedding.)

On 9/9/09, Huyen's sister Hoai got married in Hue. I have so many stories to tell from the four days we went away but I'll try and condense them to just a few blogs.

To get to Hue we had a few transportation options. We could take a bus (16 hours), a train (14 hours) or fly down (45 minutes). If Huyen and I were going alone we would clearly have flown since I'm more than willing to pay the extra $3 to fly. Yes, it was just $3 more to fly compared to a sleeping compartment on a train. However, Huyen and I weren't traveling alone since her mother, aunt, grandpa, sister and nephew were all coming with us (her father and brother were taking a bus the night before the wedding). Huyen's mother gets extremely motion sick which ruled out taking a bus. She also is scared to fly which clearly ruled out taking a plane. Thus it was me and the Nguyen's taking the train.

Before the train took off Huyen told me that it is known that a day doesn't go by without a train hitting someone on the tracks. I thought this was an exaggeration until ten minutes into the ride our train hit TWO MOTORBIKES AND A CAR (or a car into two motorbike, or a motorbike into a car and another motorbike. It wasn't very clear). Thank goodness nobody died but it was a pretty scary incident to say the least. All of a sudden our train came to a screeching stop and right next to our window a huge crowd gathered outside. There must have been at least two or three hundred people within two minutes of the accident. On the left side of the train were people with flashlights looking at the motorbike that was caught between the train and the tracks. On the right side of the train was a car that had smashed into the front of someone's house. After ten minutes apparently everything was okay and our train took off again.

(PICTURE: Giving Viet Huong a shoulder ride on the train.)

It sucked that we weren't flying to Hue but at least we had a bed to sleep in...so I thought. Huyen's family decided to only buy three seats in a sleeper compartment and that the rest of the people could sit on the chairs and possibly swap with the people in the beds at some point. Well, of course the older people ended up getting the beds which meant the rest of us were gonna have a long ride ahead of us. After a few minutes of sitting in the seats, Huyen and her sister snuck us into a six bedroom compartment that had only one person in it. I rolled my eyes at this and felt pretty terribly for the tourist in the compartment when Huyen's nephew Viet Huong started to climb on the bunk beds and kick the bed of the tourist. Luckily for that guy a train worker threw us out of the compartment within fifteen minutes...

...ten minutes later, in pure Vietnamese style, we had our own private compartment after Huyen's mother slipped the train worker ten dollars for all of us.

The one advantage of the train is that there are amazing views outside the windows. However, the most amazing thing I saw was inside the train: when it was time to go to bed, Huyen's 70-something grandfather scaled the bunkbeds and climbed up to the highest bed (there were three beds per side). I watched with astonishment as this man flew up the beds like Spiderman. I really hope when I'm 70-something I can still climb like he did...although that's probably not gonna happen since I had a hard enough time getting into the second level bed.

(PICTURE: Huyen with her mom, nephew and sister. Her sister didn't get much sleep.)

The following morning we arrived in Hue and were greeted by Huyen's sister and her fiance Tan. We all freshened up at the hotel and then went to Tan's house to meet his family. While we ate fruit and drank tea, Hoai and Tan handed everyone their wedding invitation. This was just one of many many things that was different than an American wedding. Usually in America we mail out our wedding invites. In Vietnam, not so much. In fact, more often than not, there are no wedding invitations. Usually Huyen is called on the phone and invited to weddings a few days prior to the ceremony taking place....but of course, this could all just be something Huyen told me because I wasn't really invited to the wedding.

(PICTURE: My wedding invitation.)


On our second day in Hue, Huyen's family and I did some sightseeing to different king's tombs. Seeing the tombs was great because I missed all of these sites the first time I was in Hue and it was fun to see how enthusiastic Huyen's grandfather was about the history of his country. Even more amazing was the opportunity to take funny pictures with statues:

A Nice Letter

I make fun of myself all the time on here so once in a while I get to toot my own horn. I received this really nice email the other day from one of my former students. It made me feel pretty darn good:

Hi Ben! How are you??? I'm Dai TRang- your student in pre-intermedate class which your last class you had taught before you came back USA. I'm sorry for I haven't kept in touch with you for a long time. I'm so so so sorry. DO you remember what I wrote in my first literary composition i gave you? I wrote that my biggest dream was go to USA to study. I always think that it's just my dream and never becomes true. But you know, there was a marvellousness happended to me. i had got a schoolarship 100% to study in high schol in USA in 1 year. After that i wil get others schoolarship to study in university in USA too. I can believe that i could do it. It will be exciting. I wanted to study in USA because of the way you taught us. YOu see, in vietnam, the teachers are very serious,unfriendly and keep space with their students. Opposite them, you are so friendly,easy, understand your student,always change the menthod to teach. Your class was very fun and made me interested in studying English. So I think that, all teachers in USA are like you and study in USA will be my new trial. But I afraid of Americans cann't understand what i say and so do i,I can't understand what they say in English!!!!!!! So what do you think I should do to improve my English. I did a lot of ways and now my speaking skill is better and i can speak english more confident.

You always is my best English teacher so thank you for helping me and makes me could reach my dream!!!!!

Best wishes,

Trang

P/s: I know i have many mistakes in this mail, i'm sorry! =)) I'm looking foward to seeing you soon.

A Trip In Pictures

You know you're having fun when you can't stop taking pictures. On our trip I took over 500 pictures. Here's about half of them...

Mary Travers

This is a sad moment for me. I just found out that Mary Travers of Peter, Paul and Mary died. I grew up listening to Mary's sweet voice and still listen to her today. One of the first albums I gave to Huyen was Peter, Paul and Mary's Greatest Hits.

It's hard for me to think of the Civil Rights and anti-war movement without thinking of some of the songs Peter, Paul and Mary covered like "If I Had A Hammer", "Blowin' In The Wind", "Where Have All The Flowers Gone?" and "The Times They Are A-Changing."

Rest in peace Mary Travers.