Trippin' Around Vietnam

 

October 5, 2024 (Yes, I know it's Oct. 9, but I'm catching up!)

Since it’s already Saturday (here), I think time is flashing past quicker than I realize. This week was an interesting one because we got to travel south to Ho Chi Minh City (HCMC—Saigon) for the South Zone Conference with the young missionaries. We were excited to go see a new place, but we arrived after dark, were tied up in meetings for most of the next day, and left at 10 am the next morning; we didn’t see as much as we had hoped, but we did see enough to notice some differences between the North and the South. HCMC seems bigger and cleaner and more modern than the Hanoi, and Hanoi seems more like it's living in the past. 


We went outside of the District office where the meeting was and saw the rooftops of Saigon all around us. It was huge! And pretty spectacular.

We got to meet and officially greet the 24 or so missionaries who make their home in and around HCMC, and had a lot of fun doing it. The meetings are mostly in Vietnamese, so returned missionaries were translators for us. They tend to be soft speakers and the static-y headsets didn't help, but we enjoyed it anyway! The missionaries present a lot of the training for the zone and they had some creative ways to do it. And then they brought in a Vietnamese lunch for us all: some sort of fish/seafood/soup with slimy noodles that was pretty good. And we got to try our 1st ever avocado smoothie! Not bad...

We got to stay in a nice Marriott while we were there, and accompanied our Mission Leaders, the Howells, while they traveled to do some interviews, and then for dinner. This picture was from breakfast, where I liked to try new things...

This is some dragon fruit (white with speckles, sweet), some passion fruit (very tangy in the front), and the hairy raspberry is a rambutan--you peel it and eat the white insides (it has a pit) and it's very sweet. 
I enjoy finding interesting translations, or interpretations, of meanings everywhere I go, and Twinkle of Joys was one of them.


The flight to HCMC was about 1 hour 50 minutes; we were surprised to be on such a big plane going there and back!
From the air, it's easier to see how huge Saigon is. It has a population of  about 9.5 million people while Hanoi has about 5.4 million. There are 24 missionaries assigned to the south and 18 assigned in the north. There are 6 branches in the south and 4 in the north, and we are in the Hai Ba Trung Branch in Hanoi. 

We flew to HCMC on Monday evening and flew back to Hanoi on Wednesday morning, so we didn't have a lot of time there. Hopefully, we can get down there more often.

Once we were home, we were able to help the young missionaries with English Activity (class) on Thursday evening. They invite anyone and everyone to come have English conversations, and WE help provide some of the conversations! They teach a few things, practice some dialogue, play a game, and then visit together. It's interesting to not be the ones struggling with the language for once--although we're still struggling with the language right along with them.


Then bright and early Friday morning we hopped in a Grab car with the 4 other missionaries in our district and rode to the North Zone Conference, about 5 miles and 40 minutes away. Once again, we got to officially meet all the missionaries and listen to more training. This is our district!


The weather has been on a cooling trend, meaning it only gets up in the 80s, and the humidity has been low--60s to 70s! Autumn is upon us!

Now I'll end THIS catch=up blog and start the next one!!









Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Image
 Sept. 3, 2024  The day has finally arrived and we are official missionaries at the Missionary Training Center. You know how when you’re young you can’t sleep on Christmas Eve? Well, I couldn’t sleep last night even though I was very tired. That made for a long day today, but not a bad one!  After some harried packing and re-packing and searching through three suitcases for the few things I would need to put in one small bag for four days at the MTC, I finally gave up and Rachel drove us up to campus. (And now I remember all the things I was trying to find in those suitcases and now wish I had.)  Rachel said she had to drive us up so she could experience what we had experienced when we drove her to the MTC all those years ago. She predicted that I’d be crying all day so I did my best to prove her wrong, and I partially succeeded (it wasn’t all day—just a select few minutes here and there). I think she enjoyed turning the tables on us. The MTC has done an amazing job ...
Read more

Three Days Late, But Who's Counting?

Image
 I am definitely behind on getting this posted. Last week was busy with a visit from Elder Teh of the Seventy (a leading authority in our Church who has leadership over parts of Asia), coupled with our District Conference, which is the same as Stake Conference back home. The week began with Father's Day! But there were no kids around to shower Allen with affection, and as he likes to say about moms on Mother's Day--He's not my Dad. But our branch just happened to be having a nice pot luck lunch that day (they don't have a Father's Day) so Allen got some food beyond what I would have given him. Lucky man! Flowers in our apartment lobby Don't ask me to name what these foods are--I don't know. I only know if I eat them or not. I was so disappointed to miss a picture of our branch members eating pizza with chopsticks! Monday was a harbinger of the p-days to come--hot and humid; too uncomfortable to do anything outside. So we went inside! There's nothing like...
Read more

Closed for Lunch

Image
 Wait, What?? Who knew pagodas close for lunch?  Only some of them do! And none of the other ones we've gone to do! Only THIS one, the one we purposely took a ride out to so we could show our District missionaries the very cool pagoda we found! Instead, we had to go walk 1/2 mile in the heat to the 2nd best pagoda of the day, which was a darn good pagoda anyway, and which was on the river. These are the 2 pagodas that Allen and I discovered on the day that we walked across the Long Bien Bridge (remember? Threat of death at every step, looking down between the concrete slabs that shook with every step?). We were so impressed with these 2 pagodas that we wanted to share them with our youngsters, and it was too hot to go anywhere that took more energy. This little fellow was not having a good day, either. (This is something we don't see in the U.S., and we've only seen twice in Hanoi.)     Fish sold on the street; in this case, under the overpass. The second best pagoda...
Read more