Day 227: Vespa Tour!!
Today was a big hit. After a video chat with Grammie to wish her a happy birthday (it was still Aug 19 back in DC), we were picked up at our house by our guide Jan and a crew of orange-shirted Vespa drivers from Vespa Adventures.
Our plan for the morning: Take a Vespa tour of the countryside!
Here are the breakfast ladies seeing us off.
Willa got to ride on the back of her own, while James rode between me and my driver. Our lead driver was a cute 20-something named Bean.
We were a little tentative at first — Teddy in particular, as he comes from a long line of anti-motorcycle safety freaks — but we all quickly relaxed and loved it.
We rode through town, then out to the countryside, The first stop was to visit a traditional house with an ancestral home.
Then we hit up a boat-making yard, where guys were working in the scorching heat to build wooden traditional fishing boats.
After that we met two sisters who weave mats for traditional Vietnamese beds.
Our guide said about half of the country sleeps on these mats instead of western-style mattresses. He even said that it’s not uncommon for Vietnamese tourists to check in to luxury hotels in town and ask reception for a traditional mat so they can sleep on the floor instead of the fancy bed. This blew Willa’s mind.
Willa and James tried their hand at weaving.
It takes these ladies three hours working together to make one mat, which they then sell for less than a dollar each at the market in town.
Our next stop was way out in the sticks (that was the best part — weaving through small village after small village, far away from the tourist stuff).
We went to the home of a local rice cracker maker. This lady works from 3 am to 6 pm everyday, with many of those hours in this very small, brutally hot kitchen area making her rice crackers. She works 7 days a week and makes 400 crackers a day, which she sells to local restaurants at the market. She has been doing this for 24 years. She has two daughters at university that she is supporting.
Do you think any of this is sinking in for Willa and James? I really really hope so.
They helped her make some crackers.
We all took a break outside for some sugarcane juice and….rice crackers (which were delicious).
Next we watched a combine harvesting rice in a field.
After that we went to a coffee shop called Cavalry for some traditional Vietnamese coffee (woweeee that’s strong).
The kids had a cocoa powder and condensed milk drink. You can see how I felt about that post-sugarcane juice sugar bomb here:
Final stop was lunch at the Vespa Adventure cafe called Zoom. We sat with Bean and Jan and had a great time. Two things we learned:
- When you cheers in Vietnam, the younger generation clinks the glass at a lower height than the older generatio as a sign of respect. Similarly, a host clinks lower than his/her guest as a show of welcoming. Big no nos if you get this wrong, apparently.
- When using chopsticks at a family-style meal in Vietnam, you turn your chopsticks upside down to the fat side so you’re not putting your cooties all over everyone else’s food. Smart!
At last we settled up and made our way back to our house.
Such a fun morning! Bye friends!!
We did school. Willa’s been into jokes and writing her own lately, so we’ve been using writing time to focus on that. Here are some she’s written this week:
Q: What do you call a hang-gliding rhino?
A: A rhino-SOAR-us!
Q. Why did the dog fall out of the tree?
A: Because he lost his BALL-ance!
Q: What is a small house’s favorite snack?
A: Cottage cheese! (Not, as James guessed, “people.” Haha – “because they go inside the house!”)
Q: What is a mammal’s favorite kind of story?
A: A furry tale!
After school I spent some time on the piano. I forgot to mention that there’s a piano in this house and I decided to see if I could learn a song in our time here. Amazingly I can still (haltingly) read music from my may years of piano lessons back in the day. I’m making progress on an “Amelie” soundtrack song and will maybe get some video up here before we go. Stay tuned.
By around 5 pm we walked to the beach and drank a cocktail while the kids swam. They had a blast.
We walked to an Italian place nearby for dinner.
We came home to do our stretches (8 days left and Willa’s VERY close to being able to do the splits and I’m not), read some of “The Witches” and got the kids to sleep by 8.
MISC:
A random thought I had today about free, unstructured time for kids:
Mildly woke, progressive American yuppies like us are always lamenting the fact that American kids are so programmed and have no unsupervised free time (see NYT article cited two days ago) — and we romanticize this idea that kids in rural far-off lands are somehow healthier/more adjusted because they do.
But the reality is less quaint, from what I’ve witnessed.
Most of the kids we’ve seen around the world — whether they’re the Brazilian privileged set on vacay at that resort in Bahia or the poor nomadic kids in Mongolia’s Gobi Desert — have two things in common, always: 1) They’re eating candy/sugar/crap and 2) they’re watching crap on screens, usually a phone. All junk food and unsupervised screen time, all the time. No shame, it’s just the accepted norm. Kids are grazing constant sugary snacks and drinking Coke like it’s water…and it’s 100% acceptable to put even the smallest kids in front of hours of unsupervised YouTube.
Turns out we’re probably doing better than we thought?
