Hi Friends and future me!
We've hit a new season in Hanoi that everyone lovingly calls "Moldy March." Sounds terrifying, right? The extra terror is that it seems to have started at the end of January this year and has been accompanied by incredibly bad AQI.* I have personally started referring to this horrible pollution situation as a "dystopian hellscape" and we'll see if that catches on as quickly as the alliterative "Moldy March." It basically means that there are days (often in a row) where you can't see the sky or the sun.** We regularly are in the orange and red zone for AQI and I've also learned that the scale goes up to purple and then . . . brown. The official advice for these purple and brown days is "don't go outside and/or breathe air."
Fortunately, school and my house and most places I go have air purifiers pumping and all is well. Unfortunately, I have Seasonal Affective Disorder and find the lack of sunshine incredibly depressing.*** So, I have been self-medicating with hours spent sitting in front of my happy lamp and getting out of town every weekend for the past two months. It's mostly working!
For reference, here is the view from my classroom on an orange or red AQI day. The next time we hit yellow or green I'll get an even better picture so you can see there is actually a bridge in the center of the photo above the tree line and on a clear day you can see the bridge and the land on the other side of it.
Here is a picture on a brown AQI day. Entire buildings are gone. It is nature's photoshop.
But the weekends, man!! Whoooooooo! This is a very fast overview of the many delightful trips around Vietnam and a bit beyond in the past few weeks. The overwhelming feeling I have had on these trips and the entire year living abroad is that I feel incredibly fortunate to be able to see so much of this beautiful country/world. There is so much to see and it's always possible to get to better weather.
The first escape was with Andy visiting Hanoi and we went to Ha Long Bay. Ha Long Bay is a UNESCO World Heritage Site with lots of small limestone islands dotting the bay. The way to see it is to go on a one or two night cruise that takes you in and among the islands. We had a few stops to go kayaking, climb to the top of one of the mountains, and walk through a giant cave. Our cruise was accidentally a luxury cruise which meant we had a private dining table with multi-course meals, we walked on the boat to flower petals being thrown, and the most amazing lounge singer I think I will ever see in my lifetime.****
The next weekend's getwaway was to Phu Quoc, an island off the southernmost coast of Vietnam that is a popular beach destination. We sat at the beach, we ate the best pizza I've had in Vietnam, and then we sat by the beach some more! Will I go back? Absolutely.
The next trip I am particularly proud of because I convinced the rest of my music team at school to join me. For professional development funded by school!! As a long weekend!! In Hong Kong!! We attended an excellent conference on Saturday and observed at another international school on Monday and absolutely none of that is pictured here because we also toured around, saw some incredible art, and ate so much delicious food. Hong Kong is a very busy city with lots of nature in and around it and we spent lots of time looking down at the beauty of it. We also found a really fun street with murals everywhere and the Arte M Museum that had four different spaces with screens and sounds to create a really cool immersive experience.
As I list these off, this is really a lot of weekends and trips. But we can't stop now because next was Saigon! Or Ho Chi Minh City, if you prefer.***** Jessie and I were in desperate need of maximum sunshine so the majority of the weekend was at the pool. But we also walked around on the city's expansive sidewalk system****** and took in a food tour that motorbiked us around town!
And finally, we have made it to the current trip. This weekend I am in Hoi An and it is absolutely still winning as my favorite Vietnamese town. The bahn mis are perfection, all the other food is great, it's perfectly walkable and/or bikeable, and you've got a cute artsy town next to a beach. The weekend has proved to be just enough time to do all of my favorite things but I'll still come back here as often as I can to do them all again.
I leave this green AQI for Hanoi's red in a few hours and I'm soaking in all the sunshine I can! Am I staying in town next weekend? Heck no! I'll be joined by blog fan favorite AT and we are heading to the mountains for a weekend before we leave the country for Spring Break. I might be in town a weekend or two in April? We'll see what the weather does!
-KT
*For those of you, like me, that have not had any previous reason to care about this, AQI stands for Air Quality Index. If you're living in, say, Atlanta, Georgia, this is probably something you never think about because the air quality is good and a really bad day only puts you into the yellow scale. (Green is great! Yellow is next.)
**Or a reason to carry on.
***Shout out to my Mom who first figured this out when I was living in Boston but could not physically survive the winters. She got me a happy lamp and moved me to the South.
****Follow up with me if you need footage of her rendition of "Eye of the Tiger" which, honestly, keeps me up at night.
*****We asked around, people seem to use both with about equal frequency.
******Take note, Hanoi!
