The An Hoi
See here for explanation.
It starts with tea and then it moves on to beer. Then it’s rice wine because, well, you have to.
And you have to drink with everyone individually.
I got home early in the afternoon and decided I need to sleep off the excess. I woke at 10.30pm with a raging thirst and hangover. My head hurts and I can’t find my wallet and I need to eat something badly but ringing out for foods requires skills I just can’t quite seem to get together.
A very lovely day though.
Rest of the pics here.
Tea, cake, whisky, cigarettes and cash
Opposite me on the table are three cylindrical pyramids each over two feet high.
The first is made up of individually boxed slices of wedding cake. The second of small, wrapped cartons of tea. The third is made up of gifts we purchased following my wife’s own negotiations. It’s a basket of cigarettes and whisky.
These are the gifts I will present tomorrow to my in laws as part of the “an hoi”. I’ve referred to it in the past as the proposal but I’m aware that this isn’t a very direction translation.
A small amount of money is changing hands too. Before you jump to conclusions about the foreigner being bled dry – at a recent extended family an hoi, five times the amount I am giving was accepted.
My parents inlaw weren’t impressed. There’s a fine line between saving face, doing the right thing and looking like you’re selling your daughter. Too little isn’t good – too much is arguably worse.
It’s a sentiment that has been carried through to the purchase of the whisky and cigarettes. I was told that, as a foreigner, I really ought to go for a foreign brands. It would be expected. If I’d been local then Vietnamese vodka would have sufficied.
But they told me to get only Johnny Walker Red, not Black. The relatives from the countryside wouldn’t know the difference.
These gifts are supposed to be carried with me by young, single friends. Virgins essentially.
Not only are my lot not virgins, they’re bringing their kids with them. It’s as if they’re boasting not only their lack of celibacy but also their virility.
We also won’t be turning up in traditional cyclos and we won’t be wearing red ties. It’ll be smart trousers and an open neck shirt for me.
I’m winging all this. My wife tends to give me instructions on a need-to-know basis. Essentially, however, the gifts get handed over. We chat. We eat. We leave.
I should mention about the money that it’s marginally less than an amount given to us by my inlaws a couple of weeks back.
Later, at the wedding, people will bring cash envelopes. Everyone pretty much pays for their meal – those who are a bit flush may pay a little extra.
At the lunchtime bash which my inlaws host, they will take the money. In the evening – at the drinking and dancing do on the lakeside – we will take the cash.
It occurs to me that me, my wife, my parents and the diners all potentially finish pretty much even.
I reckon there’s a very good lesson about Vietnam in that conclusion.
I was just the driver
We took these shots just as the whole #hanoi1000 was kicking off. For some time we’d been living with a new road being built just around the corner from our home in Nghi Tam.
As annoying as the work was, completing a road around Westlake did, begrudgingly, seem like a good idea.
I’m not sure whether its completion was timed to coincide with the celebrations but traffic chaos meant that, on one trip home, I decided to head the other way around the lake instead – wondering how far the new track would take me.
It took me all the way home. A nice little drive. Peaceful and quiet enough to take off your helmet and enjoy the sun and breeze on your face.
Later I returned with Loan and she snapped these shots from behind me as I drove.
I’m half tempted to get a bicycle, but will this quiet little run soon be discovered by the boy racers and the SUVs?
I hope not.
Rest of the pics are here.
Happy Birthday Hanoi – I love you and miss you
A friend, who has been in Hanoi ten years, has said the recent Hanoi millennium celebrations has left him more cynical about the country than ever before.
Sad, very sad. I’ve been here, in total, less than half that time but it’s left me feeling the same. Lack of transparency probably means we’ll never know what the fallout will be but I am absolutely sure that someone will get the mother of all arse kickings for this debacle.
But will the failings ultimately prompt improvement or be just another reason to come out fighting?
Whatever the case there is no denying that few cities in the worse deserve to celebrate as much as Hanoi.
The style of the celebrations may be questionable but this is a truly remarkable capital. However, I doubt I’m the only one who will be happy to see the end of #hanoi1000. I’ve really felt like I’ve missed the place over the last ten days.
Happy birthday Hanoi, I’m looking forward to seeing you get back to your old self.
Let’s have a beer sometime. Nowhere fancy. No need to dress up.
Your old clothes will be fine.
The good news – I received a six month Vietnam visa. Obviously that’s no permanent solution for someone who sees Hanoi central to his foreseeable future but it was still a joyous moment.
What is gives us is a little bit of time and breathing space to live to fight again in the bureaucratic battle for stability.
Loan’s (my Vietnamese wife – keep up) visa for the UK is a story still unfolding and so far it has been far from good.
So to recap: Lengthy visa application, even lengthier wait. But 23 days later we were told we had filled out an unsuitable application. Not happy.
We started again. Horrorstruck at the end of the process to find that the cost was around $700. We were further horrorstruck when we actually went to pay and the cost had been arbitrarily upped by $40. But but but…your website says…tough luck the price has gone up. Can they do that? They just did.
Worse came a week later when we were turned down flat for a five year visa.
We went from despair to incredulity rather rapidly when we found that key to our failed application was my HSBC account. But I have no HSBC account.
A mistake had been made.
In the returned documents they had also lost assorted pieces of paper – had the pieces of paper been lost before or after the application? Had they even seen them? Is this really $700 worth of service?
The general tone of the refusal was that if Loan was allowed to visit the UK then the chances are she’d end up begging, stealing or living off the state – then she’d have to stow away on a boat if she wanted to leave again as an airfare would be beyond her.
And yet, all we wanted to do was go and visit my family occasionally and for Loan to meet her new inlaws and spend Christmas with them.
Despite all of this there is a certain black humor in the Embassy taking $700 from you and then saying…sorry, you can’t come in…you’ve got no money.
Strangely Loan has been to UK twice without any visa hassle. In the past she owned no business and was not married to a Brit. However now that she has British family and is approaching being a woman of some substance with her own business – sorry…we’re going to have to turn you down.
And that’s it…whoosh…$700 gone. As Loan said – my country may make you pay but at least then you get a result. Better corruption than crapness perhaps.
However, last night was yet another night of burning the midnight oil compiling yet more paperwork to support our case. I posted my annoyance on Facebook taking care to tag ukinvietnam which was responded to. I emailed senior people at the Embassy. Being turned down would be annoying but turning us down based on a clerical error in another country (this is now all outsourced to Thailand) well that’s not on.
I wanted this sorted before the wedding in two weeks and I wanted it sorting without any more lots of $700 being paid.
This is where it appears to get better. Despite initial exasperation in finding that the Embassy was already closed at 4.30pm I did receive various letters from senior staff saying they would look into it as a matter of urgency.
Before 8.30am this morning I had already received emails and a phone call. Tone was vaguely optimistic that we might get a positive outcome – the suggestion being that the new info I had provided may also help.
Incidentally the new information refers to a property back home and the rental income from it (we are not destitute). It looks like it might swing it. So why wasn’t I even asked about property in the application process before?
They have admitted that not informing me of the sudden jump in price appears to be a mistake (no one changed the price on the website nor the email they send out).
Maybe but it’s not my mistake.
Can I have the money back? So far it doesn’t look likely.
And so we’re waiting on a happy ending. The general feeling is of good, decent people who care about their customer service and experience working within a system that is deliberately clunky.
It’s not meant to be easy.
Gosh if it was easy we’d be flooded with foreigners.
But then again if the system was more easily understood then perhaps that too would weed out the no-hopers. The no-hopers would know they were no-hopers. If the language was clearer we would know if we stood a chance. If someone was available to actually talk to us – then perhaps we’d have a good idea what our chances are rather then blindly blowing $700 on the off chance.
Visawise, what I have learnt is that my marriage to Loan apparently counts for very little. Seeing as she has been to the UK before, without visa hassle, before she was married – did I just make her case worse?
It’s all about money. What is upsetting are the small minds this system is obviously designed to pander to.
See this blog post title. Because yes, if we got this visa we’d just go over jump the queue for a council house, sign on the dole and start squeezing out babies that joyride cars and get involved in knife crime.
Or maybe we’d just go and visit my family and have Christmas together.
I want to visit the UK because that is where the rest of my family is. Funnily enough this kind of small mindedness was just the reason I left.
Still, fingers crossed for that visa.
