I can’t believe it has already been a week. Or that it’s only been a week. Time is wierd.

Housing

Since I’m travelling with workaway, I’m staying with hosts instead of at hostels, resorts etc. There I help them in whatever way we agreed on beforehand to “earn my keep”.

In this case I’m staying with Phan and her lovely family and tutor her 8 year old twins in english and miscellaneous school subjects during the afternoon. My mornings are free and so are any meals I eat with my hosts! It’s a great arrangement.

The kids are the most delightful kind of brats: smart, quickwitted and very empathetic. Incredibly stubborn though, which can make my job incredibly hard some days lol.

Food

Meals with my host are all simple typical vietnamese ones, served family style. Think one big plate full of various dishes that everyone can pick and choose from and eat with their own bowl of white rice. Its usually one vegetable dish, a protein (usually fish or pork) and some sort of starchy, saucy concoction (like beans).

When I dont eat with them I usually get something from a street vendor. More often than not it ends up being some sort od fruit I either don’t know or really like. So far I’ve tried green coconut, rambutan, longan and pink dragonfruit as well as “discovered” a strain of mango and persimon I hand’t tried yet. No complaints so far, everything was delicious!

Although I have learned that, just because you are familiar with the concept of a fruit, it does not mean you actually know what to do with them. To be less cryptic: I bought some persimmons because I’ve loved the ones from Spain and German supermarket. When I bit into one, I was instantly betrayed. It was bitter and coated my whole mouth in a fuzzy, dry feeling. You know the one.

When I asked Phan if I got it wrong and the fruit wasn’t a persimon but one meant for alcohol brewing or so, I got laughed at. Turns out this type of persimon is ripe, when it turns a bright red instead of the deep orange I was used to. I bit into an unripe fruit. The freakings things need to literally look like tomatos to be edible. They are delicious though, if you wait that long.

How do I get places?

So generally Phan drops me off in front of her workplace and picks me back up for the way home. for the time in-between i just kind of wander around and get lost (mostly) on purpose. If I want to go somewhere a bit farther away (or I wandered to far off to make it back in time/without suffering on my part) I can order a ride over the Grab app. This app offers a kind of taxi service by connecting registered car and motorbike drivers with it’s users (kind of like Uber I think?). It is pretty cheap, especially if you ask for bike drivers, as most locals do, and so far hasn’t let me down once. A feature I really apreciate, is that it gives you a set price. That way I get to feel less paranoid about being ripped off ).

Foot trafic is… basically nonexistent and I can see why. Hanoi is not particularly pedestrian freindly by design and a lot of the space that should be used as sidewalk instead serves as a platform for steet vendors. (Their food is delicious, interesting to look at or both usually, so I cant complain too much. Even if my first walk along one of the main(ish?) roads scared me halfway to hell at first).

So how was the week?

Great! I’ve had a lot of fun, without feeling pressured into always doing something (à la tourist sightseeing schedule).

My host family is amazing, the food is really good and I’m even getting the hang of living with a toddler (they have one of those too! She is both super cute and cheerful, as well as an agent of chaos).

The weather has been mostly cloudy, which is good because it saves me from the more unpleasant temperature ranges, with sadly any wind. There has been little rain since the first day and enough humidity to make drying clothes really hard.

I’m having a blast and hope the next week is going to be at least as great as this one!