Vietnam: Hanoi

My mom, my sister, and I are now most of the way through a 17-day tour through Vietnam and Cambodia. The tour started in Hanoi, Vietnam, and will finish in a few days in Bangkok, Thailand.  The trip was Stephanie’s idea- she has travelled with this company, G Adventures, twice before and had really good things to say, so- Voilá! Here we are on a mother-daughter vacation.

We all met up in Hanoi. Stephanie arrived a day early and already had the lay of the land when Mom and I showed up.  There are literally millions of motorcycles and scooters zooming around the narrow streets of the old city and shop wares and tiny plastic chairs from the eateries spill out onto the sidewalks. (By ‘literally’ I mean that there are about 7 million people in Hanoi and approximately 5 million motorbikes). The result is that you are constantly dodging objects both moving and stationary, you are sucking down exhaust fumes all day long, and your senses are generally overloaded in every possible way.

One of our local guides gave us some advice regarding crossing the street (traffic lights don’t seem to exist in the old city): “Close your eyes, think of the Happy Buddha, start walking, and the motorbikes will go around you.”

And, in my experience, he is pretty much right.  If you walk at a constant speed, the drivers can judge your progress and navigate around you. I felt a bit like Moses parting the Red Sea at right angles.

                        

                                                              A street market in Hanoi

Another tour guide said that he only frequents corner coffee shops so that he can chuckle at tourists trying to cross the street while he sips his coffee. He claims that he can tell how many days someone has been in Hanoi purely by how confidently they stride out into the busy streets.

Needless to say, Hanoi is a bit of a shock to the system.  We had roughly a day and a half to see as much as possible before the tour started so we walked around Hoan Kiem Lake and saw people doing their morning calisthenics, visited the Fine Arts Museum and the Temple of Literature, and wandered all around the French Quarter. Stephanie had already visited Ho Chi Minh’s Mausoleum and told us that, given our time constraints, it wasn’t worth the wait.  Instead, on our second day, we went to the Vietnamese Womens’ Museum and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology where we stumbled upon a water puppet show already underway.  We had read about shows in our Lonely Planet guidebook- this art form originated with rice farmers in flooded paddy fields. They would stand in waist-deep water behind a bamboo screen and operate the puppets via bamboo poles concealed under the water. After 10 minutes spent listening to the piercing falsetto of the Vietnamese narrator and watching wooden puppets splash around, we felt like we sufficiently grasped the concept and never needed to watch water puppets ever again. Too harsh? Maybe the jetlag was making me a little more judgmental than usual… 

                                                         The actors waiting off-stage

Hanoi, while a little frenetic at times, provided a great introduction to the themes that have continued to pervade this trip: warm and friendly people, rabbit-warren street markets, motorcycle mayhem, rice with every meal, and photo opportunities around every corner.

Having my cake and eating it too in the Bay Area

Well, I enjoyed my time working at Alta Bates Summit Medical Center in Oakland so much that, since my last blog post, I extended my travel contract yet again. In fact, I extended my contract so many times that I reached my limit. One can only work in a particular geographic area for 12 consecutive months and still retain the title of (and reap the tax benefits of being) a travel therapist. Longer than that, and it looks like you are ‘putting down roots.’  Alta Bates offered to hire me on as permanent staff member and I debated long and hard- agonized, really- over whether to accept.

Pros: I have wonderful co-workers here and the acute rehab setting is my favorite thus far; the Bay Area landscape is beautiful; the arts, music, and food scenes are all flourishing, and outdoor opportunities abound within a 4-5 hour drive.

Cons: the cost of living- and the cost of real estate, in particular- is incredibly high.  Many people with good salaries end up being life-long renters because they cannot afford to buy property; traffic is pretty terrible a lot of the time; it is on the other side of the country and multiple time zones away from my family and many of my friends and, because I would lose the tax benefits of being a travel OT, the pay cut would be significant.

It is more complicated than that, of course but, in the end, I turned down the offer. Although don’t want to accept a permanent position at the present time, I don’t feel ready to leave the Bay Area just yet either.  I basically want to have my cake and eat it too! There are 2 ways to ‘reset the clock,’ so to speak, so that I can resume work as a travel OT.  One is to take a 45 day break from working; the other is to take a contract greater than 45 miles away from Alta Bates, and then return.  Alta Bates would be happy to have me back but it gets tricky because, no matter which option I choose, there is no guarantee that they will have an active need for a traveler when I’m ready to return. And then I would have to find a position somewhere else in the Bay Area- in a potentially less enjoyable setting, and in a potentially less convenient location. It all depends on what is available at time. This is sort of what I imagine high stakes gambling would feel like...

My last day at Alta Bates was December 28^th. I’ve got my recruiter on the lookout in case any convenient short-term contacts pop up but my plan, at present, is to take 45 days off. And a chunk of those days are already accounted for by a trip to Vietnam with my mom and my sister!  In fact, I am writing this long-overdue blog post from my bed in the Lantern Hotel in Hoi An.  It has been a fascinating trip so far with so many sights and smells and sounds to take in.  We fly to Ho Chi Minh City tomorrow and I’m hoping I can use the flight time to write a small post about what we’ve been up to so far.