It's Christmastime In the City...

 


There's been another cycle around the sun, and Christmas is upon us in Vietnam! 

There's nothing like a visit to Hang Ma Street to convince a person that it is Christmastime, even though it doesn't seem like it should be. How can time have gone by so quickly, and yet so slowly, that it's time to pull out our Christmas tree and our moose?  Oh, wait... We kept our moose out year 'round because he's such a cute moose.  But still...


Hang Ma Street never disappoints; this December it is filled with red and white decorations and fluffy smiling bears and elves and fairies. My only challenge is not buying more things that I would need to figure out how to get home!







It turns out we ARE being stalked by the Ba Dinh missionaries! The same ones who followed us to the rainbow slide last p-day! (How do they find out where we're going?!??)

We found a neighborhood pagoda all adorned for the holiday and looking festive!



Then we walked over to Saint Joseph's Cathedral, which was all decorated for Christmas.


We'd never been inside, so we had a treat today...
It's beautiful.


This was a week for taking care of our health, doctor check-ups, Game Night, and wandering through the mall. On one of our trips to the mall, Allen noticed a post office set up to send letters to Santa, which was unique to Vietnam, we think. It does say Santa...


While we were trying to take care of our health, Mother Nature was conspiring against us. One day, a report said that breathing the air in Hanoi was like breathing the second-hand smoke from 2 cigarettes.

Ugh.

On Friday morning, we were given the task of inspecting a couple of missionary apartments in the Ba Dinh area. The missionaries are held to quite a standard of cleanliness, and we had to be the heavy hands this week. Fortunately, they were both wonderful, with very few items needing work! But the picture I've included is the lobby of one of the apartment buildings. This is so very interesting, and so typical of Vietnam. It's a very nice lobby, with clean tile floors, and not-so-clean scooters parked in the entrance, across from the elevators. Just so "Vietnamese", and something we find fascinating even after a year. Personal homes are the same way, with scooters parked in the front entry of the living rooms, and each doorway has a little ramp for the scooters or motorcycles. There might be as many as 6 scooters in the front entry of a home.

We kept walking around the neighborhood, and saw a few Christmas decorations...


Friday evening was our Young Single Adult activity, and we had a fun one: we learned/taught how to make chocolate chip cookies! There is a fireside Sunday night for the YSA and we will be providing 2 dozen of our homemade cookies. Woot! Woot! We learned how to measure ingredients, how to use a hand mixer, how to double a recipe, and how to put cookies on a tray and bake them. We ALL had a great time!!





Saturday was Transfer Calls! Our sweet young missionaries in our District (the sisters are sweet; heaven forbid I should call the Elders sweet--they're just awesome) like to come hang out in our apartment while they learn their fate. This month, we are losing one of our sisters who has been in Vietnam for 3 months--here the entire time--and one of our Elders, who has been in Vietnam for 7 months, and here for 3 months. She was a bit more upset than he was, understandably. We are doing our best to convince her of the adventure she is about to start by transferring to Saigon.



We had a total change of topic by going to a member's home for lunch. This is our RS president's home; she invited Allen and I to dinner when we had been in Vietnam only 1 week, and yesterday she invited us to eat the same meal again: Banh Xeo. It was delicious, again.




Tuan is the Branch Clerk, Phuong is RS President, I am her 2nd counselor, Allen is 2 counselor in the Branch Presidency.

This is the hallway leaving their apartment.

Sunday was a good day! We had so many visitors in our meeting today that the missionaries were jubilant. A less-good thing was not having 2 of the 3 talks show up, but they seemed to take it in stride and the branch president filled the time with departing missionary testimonies, and then his own extemporaneous comments. A lot gets lost in translation, I'm afraid.
And then I was the teacher for Relief Society. I enjoyed teaching about the Holy Ghost and how He testifies of Jesus Christ, and then we talked about how He will teach us and  help us teach each other, if we just engage in the lesson. It's possible a lot got lost in translation, I'm afraid, but I enjoyed it.

The YSA fireside went well tonight, our cookies were well-received (along with all the rest), and it was fun to see so many people there we knew, including other senior couples. Success!

Ten days until Christmas Eve. I think I should accept my own challenge from RS today and think of one name of Jesus Christ on each of the next ten days--study that name and learn about Him in that context, and see if Christmas isn't a bit more meaningful.

I challenge you...

Merry Christmas. 

Here is our own lobby, all ready for Christmas.





























































l





























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