Sweaty Santa

MERRY CHRISTMAS

We needed a Santa for the Christmas Fair, and the beard just looked natural.

 

Every one wanted their picture with me including staff and their infants.  Anyone who isn't currently pregnant at our school, has a 1 year old.

These are two of the many toddler Santas.

My Assistant Teacher Ms Ha.

 This is the little sister of a girl I have in Math club, she and I have met a few times.  She was never quite sure if I was in a costume or not and had no idea who I was. She followed me around and petted my beard for about 2 hours.

Some of my 5th graders.

A co-worker who couldn't resist getting his picture taken.

The balloon animal guy copied my outfit.  I asked for a picture with him, he went rogue and hugged a little more enthusiastically than I am used to with strangers.

Janet and our friends were smart enough to sign up for hallway duty.  I don't see a hallway anywhere!

The Christmas Fair was on December 15th.  Everyone has warned us of the freezing horror that is Hanoi in winter.  Well the 85 degree weather was lovely, hot even.  A great day to dry laundry  out by the lake.

 A great day to prepare the lotus grids to hold the plants in place while they grow.

Construction is an on going thing everywhere you turn.

Selling corn by the lake.

Fishing on a narrow man-made dirt wall to separate the large lake from a small fishing/lotus pond.

50 feet from our door.  I have only one question.  How did he get to the perch without going swimming?

These weren't at the market before; snout otter clams.  All of my prices have been cut in half or more at the market.  It has paid off to go to the same people for the same things.

If you want fajitas but can't find tortillas, just throw it on a bun, delicious!

Merry Christmas from the Wrensen's!!!  Have a great time no matter where in the world you are. :)

Love,
Jeff and Janet

Thanksgiving

I (Jeff) almost forgot about Thanksgiving.  Well, I didn't forget about it, but I was a bit absent minded about the date.  We did not have a day off - which is fair, it is an American holiday and we don't live in or work for Americans.  I saw frozen turkeys and turkey legs at Metro.  I picked up the turkey and quickly realized that we have no oven.  Bag 'o' turkey legs, sure, we can cook them in our little convection 'oven' that I got at Metro a month ago:

Why am I cooking turkey legs on the floor in a glass broiler?  I live in Hanoi, there are no rules...and no counter space!  We had potatoes boiling (no instant potatoes - which would be great since we had to work till 5:10 tonight) and we had zucchini frying.  So the cutting board, resting halfway into the sink, was taking up our remaining counter space.

Most expensive thing we bought: 3 buck can of Campbell's gravy.

All in all, I'm just pointing out the crazy situations we get put into in order to keep our traditions alive.  We had a nice evening.

(Yeah it's a fake tree with fake snow... it makes us feel at home so we are happy with it)

Saturday we are joining a colleague at his home for Thanksgiving.  It should be a great day sharing Thanksgiving in Hanoi with them.  The best part is, because it is an ignored holiday... we get to celebrate it more than once!!!  Having Turkey Day a few days late in the USA would be a felony in certain states.  Here, we get to have our Thursday night (not evening - we didn't eat until 8pm due to cooking after school) and we get a lovely afternoon enjoying Thanksgiving at a friends house.  A friend who has a stove! Not the normal Hanoi "you are an expat-we put an oven in your house-oven"  but a real oven, big enough to cook a turkey!  Ovens like this are few and far between here.

Where ever you are reading from, Happy Thanksgiving!

We are thankful for Skype - we may be far away, but we have been able to talk to our family and friends a lot more than the old days of barely-audible, expensive Jakarta - NY phone calls and 2 month postal waits.  We may be far away, but I think we couldn't have lived in a better time to be close to family through technology.

Gracias SkyNet.

As we approach league play.... ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK!!!!

Rules?

I think I've posted this quote before.  I know I mention this quote 8-11 times a week.  In The Big Lebowski, John Goodman utters the phrase: "This isn't Vietnam...There are rules."
Although he was talking about the Vietnam War (American war as it is known here) the comment still holds true, there are no rules.

Coming home from school on Wednesday I saw two things.  One, in Ciputra where the school is (a very nice, gated community) a 4 year old girl was squatting and peeing into the fountain.  Nope, it was around the back of the fountain.  Nope, her dad wasn't shielding her from everyone watching.  He was simply sitting on his motorbike, not even pulled over all the way.  The fountain, by the way, is the center point of a round-a-bout so she was dead center in the middle of traffic.  Two, we see this everyday, but it really struck me this time.  We come home on the lake road.  All along the road lovers stop on their motorbikes and cuddle.  Enterprising women sell drinks and snacks to people who are lounging on floor mats.  And...cars think that they are tiny.   No cars should be allowed on the road.  It is often barely wide enough for 1 car.   Two cars passing each other is common though.  Both hike a wheel up on the sidewalk and at about 2km an hour they ease past each other.  The motorbike community can't seem to understand why they must go slowly so from both ends, people honk through the whole ordeal.  This happened about 7 times on Wednesday.  It is terrifying when an SUV (overkill of a car in a city where the top speed is 45km and roads are repaired quickly) and a bus passed each other.  Restrictions on where to drive: none-there are no rules.

Today Burger King opened!  After our softball games (one planned, two against a Taiwanese A/B team who happened to be on the adjacent field) I went to the new Burger King with our school's PE teacher and his kids.  Oddly enough he lived 3 doors down from me in Indonesia in the mid-90's.  I was so excited for BK that I didn't think about the price.  Whopper JR in the USA: $1 Vietnam: $4.  Large coke in the USA: actually large Vietnam: size of a US small.  Anyway, I was just so pleased that it tasted exactly the same.  So price gouging: no rules.

Janet's motorbike ran out of gas on Friday (gas gauge doesn't work).  It was a surprisingly easy problem to fix.  I took a large water bottle, went to the gas station, and they filled it.  The attendant's only question was: "full?"  and "How long you live here?"  It was not the least bit odd to him that I was getting gas put into an unapproved container that would actually melt if I left the gas in it overnight.  He also asked if I spoke any Vietnamese, his English was good, good enough that he should have asked: "Why the hell are you bringing a water bottle to get filled with petrol?!?!" and "You crazy American, you are going to start a fire!"  Nope, I just strapped the green liquid (petrol is yellow in the USA, green here) to the rack on my bike said "Com-un" (Thank you) and zipped off.  There is a rule against this everywhere else in the world!!!!  In Vietnam, there are no rules.