M R .   R O W E N ' S   T R A V E L S
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Hey everybody, I hope the school year is going well and you are all learning lots. As for me, I'm learning new things everyday. For one thing, after learning all that Chinese to help me travel through China, I had to start over and learn Vietnamese right after I crossed the border. It was really funny how I would say hello and thank you and things like that to people in Chinese, because that's what I was used to doing. These Vietnamese people would look at me like I was crazy. So of course, I had to learn Vietnamese. It's funny how different places can be. I crossed a river, which is the border between China and Vietnam, and all of a sudden all the signs were in a different language, all the people looked different, they all wore different hats, they spoke a different language. It was just a few hundred feet away, but I felt miles and miles from China. I also felt a little sad, I had been in China for two months and had grown to really like being there. But, now I was in Vietnam, and I quickly grew to love being there just as much, maybe even more. I crossed the border where the border guards check everyone's passports, their identification, and make sure you are not bringing anything bad into the country. Then I spent the next ten days traveling around the north west of Vietnam with a guy from Switzerland I met on the train from China. His name was Jurg and he was a great guy to travel with because he wanted to do the same things as me, ride local buses, eat at local restaurants, and really see and feel the way Vietnamese people live. We did just that and it was incredible. Many days we would not see any other people besides Vietnamese people. We went many places where you could tell they don't see foreigners very often. The local Vietnamese people's faces would burst into a surprised smile when they saw us walking along and they would call to the rest of their family to come see us. And when they saw our smiles and heard us say, "sin chow" (hello) they would smile and laugh and invite us to come over. The people we met where ever we went were some of the most friendly people I have ever met. And they were hard working too. All over we saw people working in their field, carrying stuff to market, building things, always working, but quick to smile and say hello. One say, Jurg and I rented a motorcycle and rode 60 km up a windy dirt road to a very remote, nothing really around, town. We went on the day it held it's weekly market where all the people from the surrounding villages, towns without roads to them, walked down to buy and sell what they needed. Many of the people who live in these villages wear their traditional dress and live much the way they have for years and years. The market was incredible. First of all, the women all wore beautiful bright colorful outfits, and the women from each village would be dressed in their own special outfit, slightly different from the others. These women were so proud. It was also amazing to see how everyone brought everything to and from the market on their backs. There are no cars in which to throw the vegetables you're going to sell at the market, there are baskets with ropes to carry it all. Almost everyone at the market that day had woken up with the sunrise to walk down out of their village to go to market, and they would all walk home after market was over. And maybe the weirdest feeling was being stared at, and I mean stared at. People could not believe what we looked like. My friend Jurg is tall, 6 foot four inches tall, and I had a beard and blond hair. Almost everyone at the market looked at us with wonder in their eyes. It's funny, because even though these women were wearing clothes that were very strange to me, I was stranger to her than she was to me. It was a weird feeling. But once people saw our smiles and saw that we were there to see new things and experience what their market was like, they warmed right up to us. It was a great day. It was one of many great days we spent exploring the north west of Vietnam. We then went to Hanoi, the capital. Hanoi is a city that constantly has thousands of motorbikes driving around. It was amazing to me how many people were always driving by on their motorbikes, and honking, and driving, and honking. There also didn't seem to be any method to the madness. There are no traffic lights at intersections, no lines painted on the road, nothing, juts a whole mess of honking motos. It really made me realize how organized America is, and how many rules there are. But it was astonishing to me how even with what seemed like chaos on the road, I didn't see one accident in the four days I was in Hanoi. One really cool thing about Hanoi is how some of the streets are organized. On certain streets all the shops sell one thing. So on one street, all the shops will sell only shoes, and only shoe shops will be on that street. Another street will have only clothes, another street will have only baskets, another street will sell only leather goods, another will sell rope, another metal boxes, another tools, and so on and so on. So when you want to buy something, you can just go to the street where that thing is sold and you'll see all the different choices. It was really cool because in America, there are stores like Wal-Mart or Target which sell everything. In Hanoi I saw a store that just sold tape. I saw a store that only sold belts. I saw a store that only sold balloons. It kind of makes sense, when you want to buy balloons, go to the store that sells balloons. I spent Christmas in Hanoi and on Christmas eve, the streets were packed with people. It was like new years eve in America. There were families, couples, kids, adults, all kinds of people just out walking around and being together. It was cool. Different than the Christmas eve I'm used to, but cool. I then moved down the coast fairly quickly. I did manage to spend a little time on the beach in the middle of the coast. Vietnam has beautiful beaches all along the east side of the country. And it was hot. In the end of December and January it was over 90 degrees every day, sometimes close to 100! And In Vietnam, adult men wear pants, they don't ever really wear shorts, so I did what the locals did and wore pants too. I sweated a whole lot. After New Years I traveled with a really cool girl from South Africa down to the southern part of Vietnam, called the Mekong Delta. The Mekong is a big river that comes down from China, flowing through Laos and Cambodia first, before flowing through Vietnam to the South China Sea. It's called a delta, because the river separates into many different streams as it gets closer to the coast. This growing fan of streams and smaller rivers makes a delta. It also makes a very wet place to live. The Mekong Delta is a place where a family has a boat instead of a car. There are so many streams and rivers and canals connecting them all, that the roads are on the water. Everyone has a boat. And everyone has a house built up on stilts or poles or something to keep it out of the wet. It's an amazing place, unlike any place I've ever seen. Even the markets are floating. One day we went to a floating market where the whole river was covered with boats. I think I could have walked from one side of the river to the other, just moving from one boat to the next. It was really cool. All around the Mekong Delta, because it has so much water and so much sun, boy was it hot, they grow tons of stuff. They grow rice and fruit and flowers and vegetables. But mostly they grow rice. Everywhere you look there will be a bright, almost electric green, field of rice plants shooting up. And as everywhere in Vietnam, you'll see women in their hats, working away in the fields. I definitely saw a few rice fields in Vietnam, and a few hats. They were all over the place! But also, everywhere I looked, in the rice fields, under the hats, were smiles. I had a great time in Vietnam because of many reasons. One was that the food was so tasty. Another reason was that it was a really beautiful place to walk through or ride through or just sit in, with mountains, beaches, fields with greener than green rice, and rivers and canals snaking into the distance. Another reason was how many new things I saw and thought about, the hill tribes, the Hanoi traffic, the stores selling one thing per street, and the floating markets. But the biggest reason I had a great time in Vietnam was the people. They were always so quick to smile, so quick to say hello, so quick to invite me over to share tea or fruit or whatever they had. Everywhere I went, I knew people would laugh and smile and be nice to me, me who was obviously a stranger and foreigner. It was great.
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