Casually not gonna have power for 2 hours at school tomorrow...

Those are cages full of birds

Alley way wedding hall

My friend, Katie, found these lil guys growing in her bathroom at our Homestay 🙄

Currently laying on the floor of this sleeper bus.

So I'm sitting at a restaurant. A group of girls was sitting at the table next to me. After they got up to leave, I watched as the man working dumped her left-over tea (from one of these glasses) into her empty bowl and then replaced the glass with the others on the table to be used again.

This hat belongs to a child.

http://aelfwine.net/egypt/photos/cairo/rabbits.jpg

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Vietnamese_name

Father: Once upon a time, there was an emperor whose family name was Nguyễn. The people whom he ruled over wanted to show their loyalty to him, so they all changed their family names' to "Nguyễn."  Now, those people have had kids and their kids have had kids. However, you can still find the place where 40% of the citizens have the same name.

Son: Really?!  Where is it?  Can we go there?!  

Father: Yes, we can go to Vietnam, son.

Dear Reader,

As you may have noticed, I have changed the format of my blog.  I believe that this format will be more engaging for you, the reader!

If you see small text directly underneath an image, it's a link to the website where I got the pic from.  If you see no text, that means that I took the pic (or vid)!  Ideally I'd be using all of my own pix, but I can't always snap a pic in the moment.

I welcome your constructive feedback about the content and layout of my blog as I'm still figuring out what works best for me as well!

Happy reading :)
Rena

You can learn a lot about a culture based on how they collect trash.  For instance, here in Vietnam...

(Put in head phones and blast the volume for full effect.)

Thank you, Katie, for taking this pic - allowing me to continue driving safely!

Unfortunately for me, I learned of this fact about 15 minutes too late.  My cleaning lady came into my apartment and noticed that my bedding wasn't on my bed.  She correctly assumed that I had thrown it in the washing machine and said, "I just washed those yesterday."

As this is my first post, I will include things that I've seen & done over the last few days.  In the future, I will do my best to keep the events of respective days separate.

1. Yesterday I drove behind a guy on a motorbike who was playing Pokemon Go as he drove...through an intersection.  
2. Yesterday I drove down the street as a man drove perpendicular to me in order to cross the street - driving with his right hand, holding a baby in his left.
3. Today as I drove to school, I drove behind a motorbike that had a bamboo ladder attached to it.  The ladder was roughly 12 feet long.
4. On my first day here, I was the passenger on a bike that drove past a bike with a mattress tied to it.
5. Tonight I was at a Bia Hoi (a little place where one goes to drink beer).  I needed to pee.  The man working directed me to a closet and said "floor."  I proceeded to pee on the floor.  (There was a small drain, for those of you who were concerned about that.)
6. Last week, I received a text message from an unknown number entirely in Vietnamese.  This is how Google translated it:

So... I live in Hanoi now.

After living in Korea, people are constantly asking me to compare and contrast the two.  Not to mention, people always ask me how Vietnam is different from the U.S.

To put it simply, living in Hanoi is vastly different from anywhere else I've lived.  I've utterly lost my frame of reference for what is "normal," and constantly ask myself, "is this normal?"

As such, I've decided I want to record these things that I see (& sometimes do) so that I can remember them forever.  I also figured you'd all benefit from reading about the questionably normal things that I see and do.

I know that the most-read blogs have pictures.  Ideally, I'd like to include pictures here.  However, a friend of mine once explained that he doesn't like taking pictures when he travels because he feels awkward documenting how different his life is from the lives of locals.  I feel similarly, and thus will only snap pix when I feel it's appropriate.  If you really want to understand these things, I urge you to buy a plane ticket and come see for yourselves :)

Please keep an open mind when reading my posts.  There is no room for judgement here, just you learning a bit about Vietnamese culture (specifically in Hanoi) as I try to figure out, "what's normal?"