Đàn Bầu Express

The longer I am not in America the more I appreciate the American postal system. I don't know, guess I've never tried to send big bulky heavy things halfway around the world from America before though either. Anyway, so my dan bau is on its way home. First, via express airmail is the instrument itself. It is not such a big thing, smaller really than my pipa, but it is exactly 1.1 meters, long. The postal regulations (and they did show me the list of regulations) say that it is impossible to send anything bigger than 1.05 meters from Vietnam to America. Hmm. So I scratched my head for awhile, made a couple phone calls, and walked down the street to the FedEx office where it would have cost me 221 dollars to send my dan bau to America. But, it could have gotten there yesterday, I suppose! Didn't do that. The FedEx people kindly told me something that the post office people didn't mention, that if I send something 'express' via the post office, size doesn't matter. So the Vietnam post office airplane is bigger than the Vietnam post office boat... hmm. So I sent it 'express'. No, I don't know exactly how express it will be, I didn't really care at that point. The rickety little stand I have for this instrument, and the speaker and books, were all under the magical meter mark, so I sent them by the boat which will take two months, or three months, or I don't know. Nobody knows.

Anyway, on to other exciting news. Summer is here. I have no more schoolwork. I am getting up WAY early tomorrow and onto a plane and south to Nha Trang and will shortly find myself on the BEACH doing NOTHING. :) My finals week went pretty well, really. Monday a bunch of classmates did class presentations which were really interesting. Tuesday, I studied all day for the history exam which I decided to take in lieu of writing another paper, since I hadn't written the first one yet. Wednesday morning I took the history final - I can now recite the dynasties of Vietnamese history, roughly correctly, since a very long time ago. Not really useful, but I'll find a chance to do it again sometime hopefully soon before I forget them! I wrote nine pages of essay on history in three hours. I impressed myself with that! Wednesday afternoon I studied Vietnamese. Wed night I went out to a nice French restaurant with my tutor and hung out for awhile before coming home to study some more. Thursday morning I took the Vietnamese final which also went well, my teachers were happy, I was happy, hopefully my grades are happy too. Then I started writing my Contemporary Vietnam paper (it was all researched before, just not written). My computer died, 3 times in a row and I got tired of resuscitating it. Then my bike died. So I borrowed someone else's and did find an internet cafe where I wrote a big piece of my paper. I did the rest of it, this morning, wow, it seems like longer ago than that! That was it, no more studying. Wow.

This afternoon I did that whole sending my dan bau thing, and picked up my passport with the Lao and Cambodia visas in it (yippee) and bought books on Lao and Cambodia and drank coffee and went to yet another nice restaurant with my classmates and, yeah, it has been a pretty good week. Way more relaxed than any finals week ever at home!

Lần đầu tiên ở Việt Nam

Outside Hoa Lu, the first capital of Vietnam

South of Huế

Inside the imperial capital in Huế

Around Sapa, in the northwest

Hà Nội

Vịnh Hà Long

Nha Trang

cả lớp học

Lakes

It costs 27$ to take a bus to Laos. Yes that is more expensive than my bus out of Tibet, so hopefully it will be nicer. With a/c, maybe. Not like the one out of Tibet needed A/C, but anyway. That is not for another couple weeks.

Anyway, I was downtown tonight and I poured down rain while I ate dinner and sat in a cafe reading. And on the way home (on my bicycle, oops) I was back to riding and holding an umbrella at the same time. It works ok usually, but tonight, I guess it rained more than usual I don't know, there were like lakes in the streets. There are a lot of lakes in Hanoi, but tonight there was a lot more. When the water came up over my knees, while I was riding bike, I decided to skip trying to hold the umbrella and concentrate on steering and hopefully stopping if it got too much deeper. It didn't get much deeper. Surprisingly, the little headlight on my bike still worked after all that splashing :) Anyway, it was amusing.