So this is what a blog looks like

Well, I'm making good on my promise to start a blog while in Vietnam for the next 7 months (or 13 months for Alison). Since my volunteer work hasn't started up yet and all I'm doing is a few hours a day of research for an HGSE professor, I figured I'd have plenty of time for telling stories on this thing. So here we go.

We arrived in Hanoi last week (Wednesday night for Alison, Thursday afternoon for me), and were fortunate enough to have some super nice folks from the U.S. and Canada let us stay in their house for a while until we found an apartment of our own. Here's the view from the balcony outside the living room we've been staying in:
We didn't quite expect to still be there almost a week later, but the apartment hunting hasn't gone as smoothly as we thought - although things are looking up at the moment, and we'll hopefully have a place by the end of the week. As far as our days go, Alison started work at IUCN on Monday, but before that we did a lot of wandering around and just absorbing some of the sights, sounds, and mostly smells of the city. It was all fairly overwhelming at first, with motorbike exhaust, meats grilling on the sidewalk, piles of produce, and yes, a woman skinning eels on the side of the street. But after a day or two it's starting to feel more manageable, and crossing the street isn't quite so intimidating. We've found that people don't really want to hit you if they can help it.

One thing we both were looking forward to before coming here was the food, and that's been fantastic. We've mostly had street food, which has involved bun cha (grilled pork and vegetables in broth with rice noodles), com rang (fried rice), a pork dumpling soup that we can't figure out the name of, and of course pho for breakfast (although I had that at a place called Dan's Grocery and Diner). The highlight though has to be a meal we had Monday night: seafood and chicken hot pot, which sounds fairly straightforward. Turns out it involved dumping every kind of sea creature we could think of (clams, octopus, squid, shrimp with shell, legs, and head, crab) and bits of raw chicken on the bone into a pot of water boiling at our table, followed by huge amounts of unknown vegetables. We must have looked extremely confused, because the waitress kept coming over and showing us what to do with everything we were supposed to eat. The rest of the wait staff sort of sat around watching us, I think mostly to see what we would do next. All in all an excellent experience.

And now we're about to head out for dinner and drinks at a place called Legends Beer, which is supposedly a microbrewery. Who knew?

--Scott