Soc Trang weddings

...and the bride wore hot pink....

Tet is fast approaching! Time to break out the red lanterns, gold decorations and get married!

Tet is an important holiday and festival in Vietnam, marking the start of a new lunar year. Currently, we are in the year of the buffalo; after Tet it will be the year of the tiger. Apparently it is not so lucky to be married in a year of the tiger so a lot of young Soc Trang-ians are squeezing in their weddings before Tet.
Weddings are incredibly important here, and the receptions afterwards are massive!

The weekend before last we went to a wedding reception for the son of one of Dan’s tennis friends. Last weekend we went to a wedding of the son of one of the drivers at work. The receptions were huge! And incredibly noisy! The first reception (mercifully) didn’t have singers performing Vietnamese love songs at an ear-shattering level; instead entertainment was provided by a bunch of young hip-hop dancers (with a little bit of singing thrown in). Not that we were spared the singing anyway, both the reception venues were hosting not one but two wedding parties each! What went on in one party (singing, speeches, music, dancing) was clearly heard by the other party! The second reception did feature live singing and dancing (of sorts), nearly drowned out by the noise of the other reception party happening in the same room (cunningly separated by archways and tinsel). Never fear, just turn the volume up a bit! They did the same? Turn it up a bit more! It took a few hours after the reception for my hearing to return to normal.

It was all good fun though. The food was amazing (4 courses, including battered crab, mushrooms, fried chicken and topped off with seafood soup) and the beer was...copious... Luckily, being female, I can get away with not drinking beer and am free to join in all the toasts with my cup of Pepsi. Dan, however, is not so lucky. He got dragged into an awful lot of nam muoi/nam muoi (50% scull) and tram by tram (100% scull)...as well as starting a few himself of course.

Another strange aspect of weddings here that I haven’t quite figured out the meaning of… halfway through the reception the bride will go and change into another dress – similar in design to a wedding dress – but in a neon-bright colour. At the first wedding the bride wore hot pink. At the second wedding the bride wore mermaid blue. I’ve seen so many stores around the Mekong Delta selling these rainbow-coloured wedding dresses and couldn’t figure out what they were for. I still don’t really know what it is all about, but I have seen some rather fetching sea-green and pumpkin-orange gowns for sale, maybe I should get one just in case I ever get married…. (that was a joke everyone! Please no more comments about how I’m going to come back from Vietnam either engaged, pregnant or with an adopted Vietnamese baby!)

Over and out for now, but next time I must tell you about our motorbike ride around the countryside and impromptu invitation to a birthday party…

Photos!

I've been promising to post some photos for a while now and I have finally got the time to do it.
So without any further ado, I present to you photos from the Mekong Delta...

Floating markets at Can Tho.

Dan and I at the floating markets

Cruising the canals of Can Tho

Dried seafood for sale at Bac Lieu markets

Tropical Vietnam?

It is very grey today, grey, cold, miserable and rainy. Not at all what I expected of the dry season in Vietnam! My only way of getting around Soc Trang is by walking or riding on the back of Dan's motorbike - neither of those options are very appealing when it is cold and wet outside. Also unappealing is the prospect of a cold shower this evening, how I miss having hot water!

Hopefully the weather will improve shortly and I can go back to only being cold at night time. (Yes I do get cold here at night time. I seem to have acclimatised to Vietnam's weather far too quickly, if this keeps up I will have to leave Vietnam and go find another, warmer country to live in.)

So, enough whinging about the weather (though it is what I do best), and onto more exciting news. I have now officially started working as a volunteer Technical Officer, Communications and Awareness Raising, with the GTZ project ‘Management of Natural Resources in the Coastal Zone of Soc Trang Province'. If you are really keen, you can find out about the project at http://czm-soctrang.org.vn/en/Home.aspx. So far this has just involved a lot of reading, though I plan on editing the website later this week. More about my role later, once I find out exactly what I'll be doing...

I am also going to start Vietnamese language lessons this week. Stay tuned to hear about my Vietnamese language proficiency!

Eating, drinking and typing in Soc Trang

Apologies for the multiple publishing of the same post, I'm having all kinds of issues with the internet connection! To put it nicely, the internet connection here is a bit haphazard.
Some not-very-exciting news... this morning I had my first noodle soup for breakfast! We went to a vegetarian cafe for breakfast, one that Dan has been to a couple of times, and ordered the noodle soup because it is the only thing on the menu that Dan recognises. One day we will be adventurous and order something we don't recognise! Anyway, noodle soup for breakfast was quite an experience, I don't think I'll be hungry for the rest of the day now. Even more interesting though were the packets of vegan food for sale in the cafe; vegan chicken, vegan fish balls, vegan shrimp and vegan snails. I think they are all made of tofu but they looked a bit odd, especially the vegan snails!
To continue with the food theme, last night we went to Cafe 36 for dinner. It was a welcome dinner for me and some of the people from Kiem Lam (Forest Protection Sub-Department - where Dan works) were there. The custom in Vietnam is, if you invite someone to dinner or drinks, you pay for everything. So we ordered stir-fried water spinach, fish balls in lettuce, mango salad and some kind of fish that you wrapped up with noodles and salad to make a fresh spring roll. Plus there was a lot of beer drunk! The waitresses at Cafe 36 will come to your table and pour themselves a glass of your beer; however much they scull (usually 50% or 100%), you then have to scull the same amount. The trick is to have a lot of ice in your glass so you don't have to drink too much beer! (Most places here serve warm bottled beer in a glass with a big piece of ice in it.) The food was lovely and the drinking games, well, I left that to the Kiem Lam men. All up it cost just over 500,000 dong - just over $35! I am still amazed by how cheap food is here, and Cafe 36 is one of the more expensive places in town!
I am really going to test my blogging skills and the internet connection here now and try and post a photo of the street in Soc Trang that I live on. Apologies again if I mess it up!

Arrival!

Well it has been a hectic few days here in Vietnam! I arrived in HCMC late Saturday night, Dan met me at the airport where he had been waiting for about an hour - he thought there would be a waiting area at the international airport where he could sit in air-conditioned comfort...wrong! The waiting area is outside the airport, everyone has to stand outside, in the heat and exhaust from passing traffic, while being closely watched by some very serious looking security guards. Luckily it didn't take me too long to pick up my visa and luggage!
Anyway, the next day was spent being a tourist in HCMC. We had a luxurious Western style breakfast then went to see the War Remnants Museum. The museum had old US arm vehicles and artillery pieces, a guillotine used by the French on Vietnamese dissidents and a model 'tiger cage' used for Viet Cong prisoners. Inside the museum there were photos taken during the war and photos taken after the war of children born with significant birth defects due to their parents' exposure to US chemical warfare. If you ever find yourself in HCMC a visit to the museum is a definite must, the experience is brutal and completely shocking, but it shows you just how much the Vietnamese were prepared to endure in order to gain their independence.
We did a few other touristy things, including going to see Ben Thanh Market (lots of souvenirs!)and the famous Rex Hotel and the People's Committee Building. Things are definitely changing quickly in HCMC; I was here 3 years ago and was surprised to see a lot more private cars on the road, especially in richer areas such as near the Rex (where there are even designer shops!). And the private cars are not just any old cars, they are all black or silver Mercedes or massive, gleaming Landcruisers. While the cars indicate the growing wealth of this country, they are definitely not helping the traffic congestion! Pedestrians, bicycles, cyclos, scooters, motorbikes, taxis, cars and buses all jostle along, beeping at one another, trying to move forward on roads ungoverned by any real road rules. However, I was surprised to see that people on bikes now all wear helmets (though there may still be a family of 3-4 on a single bike) and the traffic mostly stop at red lights.
The day was capped off with a terrific seafood dinner at a restaurant whose name I forget and which isn't listed in the Lonely Planet. Marinated mussels, barbecued prawns, stir-fried water hyacinth and salt and pepper trout and snapper, yum! A superb send-off from this crazy city!
That was day one in Vietnam, day two was spent on a 6 hour bus ride to Soc Trang. Nothing too exciting to report on that, it was long, it was cramped, but we did stop for a good lunch (seafood noodle soup and beef noodle soup) and the ferry to Can Tho was a welcome break to stretch the legs.
So I have now arrived in Soc Trang, it is bigger than I expected. I haven't seen much of it yet so will write more once I have had more of a chance to explore. I will also try and post some photos. Right now though I have to go and unpack my bags - which seems terribly cruel considering how long it took me to pack, weigh, repack, weigh, weigh, adjust, unpack, weigh and repack them!

Pre-departure

Tomorrow I leave Australia for Ho Chi Minh City, Vietnam. From Ho Chi Minh City I'll be taking a 6 hour bus ride to Soc Trang City in the Mekong Delta. I'll be living in Soc Trang with Dan for the next 12 months. Dan will be busy doing volunteer environmental co-management work on the local coastal mangrove areas and shrimp farms. Meanwhile I will be busy doing.... Well, I haven't quite worked that out yet. But I have grand ideas of doing some kind of volunteer work, lying on a hammock in the tropical heat and reading all the books I made poor Dan take over for me and sampling all of the local delicacies (though I'm still a bit unsure about eating beef noodle soup for breakfast and I have no intention of drinking snake wine).

Anyway, I'm hoping the next 12 months will be exciting, I'm hoping to do something useful while I am over there and I'm hoping to learn a lot more about Vietnam, the people, the culture and the history and maybe even a bit more about myself.

Before that though I have to go finish packing. Argh!