To celebrate Tết, Vietnamese decorate the entrance ways to their homes and places of business with flowers, in some cases with two simple flower pots on either side of the entrance, in other cases with elaborate flower displays that can transform otherwise grey Hoi An streets lined with ramshackle buildings into rainbows of color.
Vietnamese pagodas, beautifully maintained year around, positively glow with flowers and color during the Tết holiday.
Today is the first day of Tết, the lunar new year’s holiday in Vietnam. Join me in Hoi An and welcome the Year of the Snake!
Before new rice is sown, the paddies are flooded and the soil is plowed and smoothed, in Hoi An these days, using tractors. The paddies are then drained and the farmers broad cast the rice by hand onto the muddy soil. A few days after the seeds begin sprouting, the fields are flooded again and the new rice grows quickly. For the first two or three weeks after planting, the farmers wade into the paddies every day to work the soil with spades on long poles. I presume this effort loosens and aerates the soil to facilitate growth of the new rice. In any event, when the rice reaches a certain height and density in the fields, this work stops and the rice is left to grow until harvest time in the summer.
Vietnamese women, like these market sellers, really are the heart and soul of this culture. Vietnamese men do their part for sure, but without the women keeping their eyes on things, this country would almost certainly go off the rails.
After weeks of endless cloudy days and rain, yesterday was dry, sunny and gorgeous, offering a perfect opportunity for a dinnertime stroll through the Hoi An Old Town. The recently refurbished Japanese Bridge – it was built in the 16th century by a community of Japanese traders living in the area – looks great, all clean and shiny and lit up in the evening.
Hoi An was treated to a fiery, magnificent sunset last night. The brilliant colors of this sunset may just be serendipity for those of us who got to watch, or they may be a warning announcing the arrival of tropical storm Trami, which is somewhere in the East Sea heading for central Vietnam. Generally speaking, I am not particularly interested in weather and am not fluent in weather folklore, so I cannot say one way or the other. The exception to my general rule of being uninterested in weather is when big weather events are headed my way. And with top wind speeds well over 100 kph and a deluge of rain on offer, Trami qualifies as a big weather event. Being in the path of such a storm gets me interested, in this case, interested enough to download the Windy app so I can track Trami’s movements. From the looks of things, the center of the storm with its destructive high winds and rain will make landfall quite a distance north of Hoi An on Saturday 26 October. Here we are almost certain to get bucket loads of rain over several days – after all this is the rainy season in central Vietnam – but with some good luck we will avoid Trami’s howling winds and the damage they cause. Or maybe we won’t. One report in a Vietnamese publication suggests the storm will turn south after making landfall. At that point it would be headed towards Da Nang and Hoi An. Just have to wait and see. In anticipation, I did a lot of food shopping yesterday.
As some of you know, I just returned from a couple of weeks in Japan. I have loads of photos from the trip, and had planned to get started processing and posting yesterday, my first full day back in Vietnam. That plan was derailed by a ten hour power outage, during which time a crew of a dozen or more guys in orange suits worked on the big power box at the end of my street. Said power box has been acting up for a couple of months now with several outages of short durations, and hopefully the extensive refit it got yesterday has put recent problems to rest. I can at least hope the repairs give me a better chance of having power during the storm. Whatever, I will get started with the Japan photos in the next day or so.
The Bà Lê market is close to my home; I do much of my shopping along this market street. Tomorrow is the lunar new year’s eve, and today was the final day to shop before the big holiday. By late morning when this shot was taken, the crowd had already begun to thin out, and by mid-afternoon most of the vendors would be closed up. Tomorrow, there will be a few stands selling their wares at much higher prices than usual, but most of the shops and stands will be closed, in this market, in Hoi An, and for that matter, throughout Vietnam. Tết is definitely holiday number one in Vietnam.
Today, the street was lined with people selling flowers, both various kinds of cut flowers, and some flowering plants in pots. These flowers are beautiful, but not purchased as decoration. They are part of the worship that will take place on the first day of the new year (this Saturday) and at other times during the holiday. My partner, Minh, uses the English word “worship” to describe the activities of Vietnamese families on the first day of Tết. In fact, this day is one of the occasions when families pay respects to their ancestors. In Vietnamese, the expression is cúng tổ tiên. The word “cúng” can certainly be translated “worship,” but the English word comes loaded down with considerable Judeo-Christian baggage that has little to do with Vietnamese practices. I personally prefer “pay respects to” or “honor” ancestors to describe what Vietnamese do on Tết and at other times of the year, though I have no doubt there are people who will disagree with this interpretation.
In any case, many of the market’s transactions consisted of the sales of flowers.
Not everything was flowers. This man is loading his cart with coconuts for delivery to a seller who will make coconut milk drinks for shoppers.
Finally, I am guessing this woman is done with her shopping and thinking, “Let me out of here.” That is certainly what I was thinking by the time I took this shot.
