Tet Viet Nam

After six years, Nancy and I finally managed to be in Vietnam together for Tet Viet Nam (Vietnamese New Year). In the past, we'd only been around for the last few days of this four-day holiday and I was here for New Year's Eve in 2007 when Nancy was in the US for a few weeks, so I was excited to share it with her this year.

Around 11 PM we locked up the house and walked down to Ngoc Khanh lake, one of the fireworks sites the city had set up. Everyone was in a good mood, ready to welcome the year of the buffalo (for the Chinese, it's the year of the ox).

Precisely at midnight, the fireworks erupted. It was an impressive show and we got a pretty good view through the trees near the edge of the lake. We walked home, shoulder to shoulder with a few thousand other people. Along the way, the sugar cane sellers were doing a brisk business. It's good luck to have a live plant or branch on your ancestral altar at Tet and a lot of young people climb trees to break off a branch. To discourage that habit, the government has encouraged the use of sugar canes. It's one of the few times you can buy them whole in the city, from root to leaves.

Nancy posted more photos at her Picasa site.

For the last few days we've been packing up between visits and lunch dates with friends. On Friday night we head for the US. We've known this was coming since last Thursday, but being back in Hanoi makes it feel worse. When we drove past the school this morning and I looked out at the pond that I've seen so many times from the teacher's room, it was all I could do to keep from crying. Funny how all the problems with the city (noise, pollution, cost of living...) fade away when you have to say goodbye to it all.