Day 217: Free Morning — Water Puppet Show — Body Painting — Saturday Night!
We had a free morning so we let the kids sleep.
At breakfast we were discussing things we want to do when we get back to NYC. Teddy told the kids we could have a whole bookshelf of their very own kids’ books. Willa goes, “Mom…is he serious? We can really have our *own* bookshelf of our own books??”
I personally am looking forward to getting back to the library card and paper books for the kids.
BBC World News was playing on a TV in the hotel’s small breakfast room (current stories: Hong Kong protests, El Paso/Dayton shootings). While discussing home, Teddy and I added that we might have to switch to BBC for our news when we return to avoid the daily nonsense of the 2020 race.
James and Teddy went to the room for some AC’d school while Willa and I walked the streets in search of a quiet cafe. The streets around our hotel are closed to cars on weekends so we wandered a bit and did some people watching before settling down.
We also paid $4 for Willa to sit for her portrait. Don’t have a photo of the end result, which looked like a better-looking version of 15-year-old Margaret Bensfield.
Willa thought, correctly, that the top left one looked like Beepaw Jim:
Willa on people-watching: “I love looking at people and wondering where they’re going and what they’re doing today. I try to make guesses by looking at their clothes.”
We quickly discovered that a popular weekend activity for local youth is stopping English-speaking tourists on the street to practice their English and take selfies. We had two such groups stop us and ask us questions from their list (Why did you decide to come to Vietnam? What are the differences between here and home? Have you tried the food? Do you have any festivals you like to celebrate back home? Etc.) Saw many more talking to others. Incredibly endearing.
We also passed a family taking a group photo around their elderly grandpa. Willa goes, “I bet he’s seen a lot.” (I had tried yesterday to explain to her the Vietnam War — or the American War as it’s known here).
Eventually we found a deserted cafe back on our hotel’s street called the Conifer Four Seasons. No AC, no other patrons.
We ordered fresh lemonade and Willa goes, “Finally, a country that ‘gets’ me and citrus!”
She promised me she wouldn’t make school difficult today and she kept her word. It was mildly enjoyable.
The afternoon’s itinerary was random but the kids loved it. We joined up with our guide and drove out to an outskirt neighborhood to the home of a master “water puppeteer.”
This guy’s a 7th generation water puppet master. Water puppetry is a traditional rural art specific to Vietnam. The stage is a shallow pool, and wooden puppets come out from behind a curtain via pole extensions operated by the puppet master in the water. He wears waders.
This guy had the nicest house on the block. Tourism and water puppetry have been good to him.
That said, we couldn’t help but notice that he was just going through the auto-pilot motions of his spiel a little bit — low enthusiasm/energy (could’ve used a lesson from Beijing’s Mr. Liu, the cricket fighter — “Hello!!”).
But the kids didn’t care. We sat in the homemade theater in his house and were entertained by a lengthy water puppet show.
Afterward the kids got to give it a try themselves.
Of course then we were invited to his workshop for a mumbled, low-energy “demonstration” of how he makes the water puppets — and, of course, an invitation to please shop his collection!
We got a fish; the puppet master went back to smoking cigarettes on his fancy stoop.
We drove back into town for a fun but totally random activity: Hanging out with a professional body painter to try body painting ourselves.
But first, a snooze on the ride for this guy, who stayed up too late riding his toy cars.
For some reason when we saw this body painting excursion on the guide’s itinerary we assumed it was another traditional Vietnamese art to learn about. But not really — this artist is just an art professor at Hanoi’s fine arts university who specializes in the relatively new art of body painting.
It’s probably not fair to him, but the only other time I’d seen body painting was from pics of Hugh Hefner’s Playboy Mansion parties. Google it.
We sat on the steps outside of the university — it was 111 degrees and all adults had rivers of sweat running down faces — while the kids used brushes and face paint to create “designs” (aka huge messy blobs) on their arms and legs for over an hour.
Not sure what the point was, Vietnam-wise (the artist was super nice but we couldn’t really chat with him because his English wasn’t great), but the kids had a blast and were entertained, which definitely counts for something.
Even I got into the project for one small design:
We all had to get in the AC (and the bathtub) immediately before everyone died.
But first! We requested Khan take us to his favorite banh mi place to grab some sandwiches for a to-go snack. Got two of the pork variety and they were delicious.
Back at the hotel we let the kids play in the tub for an hour while we drank a beer, ate our sandwiches, wrote this blog, checked email and generally zoned out.
By 7 pm we were refreshed and ready to wander back out into slightly cooler night again, excited for more of the same energy and people watching we’d loved last night.
We were not disappointed. Not only were there the exercisers and dancing grannies, there were also dancing kids with their dance-mom/dance teacher, and wannabe pop star teenagers performing their best K-Pop routines in matching silver “hip hop” outfits.
The streets — still shut down to cars for the weekend — were more crowded. Tons of families and friends out strolling and taking in the excitement.
We ate a yummy dinner at a place recommended by our guide called Downtown. Our server was a 19-year-old local who couldn’t get enough of our kids — we’re following each other on Instagram now.
We capped the night with a long walk back to our hotel and a 20-minute final ride on those damn electric ride-on toys cars, which the kids had been begging all day to return to
I had to shower again.
