Today is the beginning of a 12 day trip Tash and I are taking through Vietnam and Laos. We both have holiday from school because of Songkran, the buddhist new year celebration.
We flew from Bangkok to Ho Chi Minh City and then to Hue (pronounced hu-way), Vietnam. We stayed at Hue Happy Homestay; the owner could not have been nicer. After settling in we met friends in our room who took us out to experience our first authentic Vietnamese meal. I ordered beef noodle pho (pronounced fu) which was quite delicious (minus the one questionable meatball-ish looking specimen at the bottom of the bowl). After, we went to a local bar called Brown Eyes. We sat at an outdoor table and enjoyed cocktails during the buy one get one free happy hour special. The waitress decided to bring us out a special drink that she lit on fire and then encouraged us all to try (I still don't know the name of it and haven't found it anywhere else-- it's not B52).
On our walk home we encountered two men who were lighting a fire on the side of the road and burning paper in it. Earlier in the day, we had seen many of these fires burning on the roadside and assumed they were for trash. We decided to stop and ask the men and they explained that they lit these fires in remembrance of ancestors who had gone before them. When many fires are burning, it means it is a festival or moon day, but when only one fire is burning, it for a reason specific to that family. I read more online about this and found that Vietnamese people will make paper replicas of money, motorbikes, etc and then burn them so that the spirit of the gift can ascend to heaven for the ancestor to use.
Upon our return to the homestay, we noticed that the breakfast table was moved to the side of the room and that the owner and his family were sleeping under a mosquito net tent on the floor. This was the same man who offered us water bottles and fruit when we arrived and whose wife (unknown to us at the time) would be cooking us a gourmet breakfast in the morning.
It was incredibly humbling to see this.
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