Family Vacation to Vietnam

In Danang we took a taxi down the coast half an hour or so to Hoi An, where we stayed at the Golden Sand Resort right on the beach. By this point, Marcus was sick, and Robert wasn't feeling great himself, so Samantha and I went out and brought back dinner for Robert. Just across from the hotel were three or four seafood restaurants all in a row, all with identical menus and catches, as far as we could tell. We picked one basically at random, and they let us choose our fish before they pulled it out and weighed it. "Whoa! Why's it such a jumpy fish?" Samantha asked.

The hotel was lovely, with another big "family room" like we had in Hanoi, with two big beds and a couch that one of the kids could sleep on as well. We had a view of the beach from our room, and the next morning we walked along the beach before breakfast.

Marcus was at last happy--he found a coconut! Samantha found a teeny tiny baby coconut.

Breakfast was a nice buffet, where Robert had all the coffee he wanted and where I made as much limeade as I could drink. Limes seemed basically free, here (or lemons--they called them lemons, they looked in size, color, and shape like limes, and their flavor was between the two), and my strategy in general was to just order any drink that had lemon ("chan") in it. That usually resulted in a nuoc chan, lemon juice, or lemon/limeade, which was nice, or a soda chan, a fizzy limeade, sometimes with a fancy simple syrup and more often with just a pile of sugar at the bottom. Once we got lemon juice mixed with sweetened condensed milk over crushed ice, and that was pretty amazing--it seemed to be a version of a sinh chan, a lemon smoothie, which tended to be made with yogurt made from sweetened condensed milk, and was also one of the most refreshing things you could ever imagine putting in your mouth.

After breakfast, we hung out with Dung, the bartender who shared a birthday with Marcus, as she cut a coconut for Marcus to eat. We drank the coconut water, which is not his favorite part, and he ate a lot of the fresh crispy meat, just like in Panama.

Lunch was back at one of those seafood restaurants across the street, this time for tamarind shrimp and grilled garlicky baby squids, and a neat giant rice cracker that Samantha loved.

The kids loved the pools and the beach. There was a bit too much sun for Helen at both places, so I would come out for a little while and then retreat inside with Helen, but that was fine, as I'm not a huge water lover anyway (Robert calls me a cat).

The next day was Marcus's birthday. The day started inauspiciously when he again showed he hadn't yet kicked the virus they were passing around between them, but things improved from there. We took a food walking tour of Hoi An, led by another friendly tour guide. She let Samantha and Robert sit on her motorcycle, which greatly pleased Samantha. Motorcycles, obviously, are ubiquitous here--every family has one per adult member, and most motorcycles you see have at least two people (or one person and a lot of stuff) on them. It wasn't uncommon to see three- and four-person families on motorcycles, and although the motorcycle pictured below right was the only one we saw with anything resembling a child seat, babies and kids rode them frequently. The traffic in Hanoi and Saigon was of course worse than in Hoi An, a much smaller city (town), but there were still lots of motorcycles and lots of honking here. Everyone told us that the secret to crossing streets effectively is to go straight and confidently across, and that did seem to work well--the motorcycles and even cars would just flow around you, and you'd be fine. On the other hand, we saw a few foreign tourists huddling on corners, then darting out wildly running, which didn't seem to be a winning strategy at all. The foreign tourists themselves here were interesting--apart from the Chinese and Korean tourists, there were a lot of Germans, a good number of Australians, a smattering of Americans, a very occasional Brit, and, unexpectedly, a bunch of Russians. I couldn't figure out why tourism patterns seemed so different here than in Thailand, which is right next door but which had a lot more British tourists when we were there.

At any rate, we walked along the streets of Hoi An, Samantha discussing everything with our guide, Marcus chilling on Robert's back.

Our first stop was the restaurant that makes the famous "white rose" shrimp dumplings that are served all over Hoi An, a nod to the Chinese heritage of the region. Apparently they are all made in the back of this restaurant by young women who wear a uniform and live upstairs above the restaurant with the owner and his family (except for a couple of the women who are married and are "allowed"--as it was explained to us--to go home to their children at night). Other restaurants send motorcycle couriers to pick up orders of uncooked dumplings to bring back to their restaurants elsewhere in the city to cook and serve.

We all tried our hand at making the dumplings, and we were all horrible at it for different reasons--too heavy a hand, too light, too large dumplings, too small. Thankfully we had some pretty patient help standing by to correct our most egregious failures, and ultimately we came up with a steamer of dumplings that weren't too dreadful.

Thankfully, they tasted good even if the dough was obviously inexpertly stretched--too thick, too thin--and handled. The owner came downstairs while we were there and gushed over Helen, running back up to bring down his grandbaby's stroller. It was Helen's first time sitting in a stroller or even buckled into anything other than a carseat, and she seemed enchanted by the novelty of it--for about 30 seconds. After we'd eaten the dumplings, another dish (which thankfully we didn't have to make) appeared in front of us. It was described to us as "Vietnamese pizza," and the guide explained that basically they take the same rice dough that is used to make the white rose dumplings, make a larger round, put a dollop of the same shrimp dumpling filling in the center, and deep fry it. Then they top it with herbs and a fresh tomato sauce. Robert and I loved it--convenient, since our children wouldn't touch it (though they did like the shrimp dumplings).

We had a black sesame soup on the street, some coffee and tea and coconut juice and a nuoc chan, and Anthony Bourdain's ("You know Anthony Bourdain?" more people than we could count asked us over the two weeks. "Yes," Robert took to saying, through gritted teeth, no longer bothering to explain that we weren't fans) pick for the best bahn mi in Hoi An. We also ogled a goldfish seller's wares, and walked into the main market, down a street lined with huge old trees that are considered sacred, with ribbons around them, and incense and offerings ("Do not climb these trees!" I hissed to Marcus).

In the market Marcus picked out an orange (green outside, orange inside, flavor good but texture really not ideal for eating, better for juicing), a pomegranate (smaller, stranger looking than Israeli pomegranates, with seeds that are white to pale pink, very large, but still quite juicy and delicious), and a few other fruits, and we also sat down at a stall inside the market to eat cao lau noodles, made with water from an ancient well in the area, mixed with rice flour and finished with lye. Topped with roast pork, herbs, and deep fried wonton chips, they were lovely and chewy, one of my favorite things we ate all week, and found only in Hoi An.

The food tour ended by returning to our guide's "office," which seemed to be a spa ("Is 'spa' a euphemism here?" Robert wondered to me), where we ate the freshly sliced fruit while getting foot and leg massages. This was a total surprise to me, but we went along with it mostly out of shock. The guide also brought out a birthday cake for Marcus, since we had mentioned it was his birthday.

Back at the hotel, we went to the pool and rested a little in the afternoon, and then went out in the evening to the town's night market, where the kids had kem (ice cream) in the shape of long popsicles on pointy wooden skewers, unmolded individually from metal molds carried around in a chilled cart. We also had freshly made potato chips on a skewer, and delicious grilled cakes made of corn, and bought cheap little light-up toys that flew up into the air and returned to you. We ate at one of the miscellaneous tourist restaurants in front of the new bridge, eating more cao lau (Marcus and I couldn't get enough of it) and a bahn xeo, a turmeric-colored crepe stuffed with shrimp and eaten rolled up with herbs and lettuce in rice paper wrappers. Back home, that is one of my very favorite Vietnamese dishes, and here I ordered it every chance I got. At one point, later on, a guide scoffed at me, saying that that was "winter food" (you know, when the temperature drops to 70 or so....) and wondering how anybody could eat it in the heat. Um, Robert wondered how anybody could eat anything in the heat, and I was just thrilled to get quite so many different renditions of bahn xeo in a short space of time. Some were plate-sized, some bigger, some smaller, some with very delicate edges, some thicker, some with plain old shrimp and some with gorgeous juicy plump freshly-caught shrimp, but all were delicious.

The next morning at the hotel there was a lot of time spent on the beach, in the pool, or feeding day-old bread to the fish in the hotel pond.

Helen found her feet while we were in Hoi An. One day she didn't have a clue what her feet were, and the next day she suddenly discovered that they were there, ready to be clutched and grabbed and played with anytime she got too lonely or bored. We love feet!

We spent a little bit of time in the hotel play room, though we could never quite make head or tail out of the posted list of daily activities, as it kept changing, sometimes during the activity itself (i.e., we would be in the playroom ready for the posted activity, whether it was archery or Vietnamese lessons, and meanwhile workers would be outside changing the sign on the board). Still, Samantha and I learned how to say hello (xin chao) and thank you (cam on), and Helen got to roll around on the floor for a little while. The one worker was spectacularly bad at interacting with children, though she did get pretty animated with Helen. She explained to me that she has an eighteen-month-old baby, and that she pumped milk for her baby until the baby was a year old. She asked if I nursed, and was very pleased when I said yes, that Helen hadn't had any other food yet. Strangely, this was not the first breastfeeding conversation I had partially in a language other than English, and with the help of visual aides/hand motions--this wasn't even the first or last I'd have in Vietnam, where many, many people felt free to ask me how old I was and if I nursed. This was actually one of my favorite directions a conversation about the kids could go, much better than the gender direction. "Three boy!" someone would say, approvingly, nodding to Marcus, Samantha (whom everyone kept reading as a boy), and Helen in turn. Three children at all, much less three boys, in a land where families are limited to two unless they have two girls first, or they are an ethnic minority with no governmental constraints on children at all, is a sign of wealth, both actual and figurative, and they were genuinely happy for me. They'd give me a thumbs up, or smile broadly, or sometimes say "Very good!" if they had that much English. "One boy, two girls!" I'd correct, trying to match their broad smile before it rapidly faded. They'd still gush over my baby, but the subtext was clear, and they often tried to hide their disappointment for me.

About an hour before we were going to check out of the hotel and head back up to Danang, with Robert and the big kids taking their last dip in the lovely, large pool, I came out of the hotel room having changed Helen's diaper and popped her into the sling to join them. Helen was sleeping, and I walked over on the wood platform by the bar, before stepping down onto the sand, aiming for a hammock near the pool where I could relax in the shade as they finished up their swim. Instead my ankle turned in the sand and I went down. No problem, I figured, I'll just get up and rest it for a bit, but it became obvious that my ankle wasn't going to hold my weight. I was sitting awkwardly in the sand now, but I hadn't made a sound, and Helen hadn't woken up, and no one was really paying any attention to me. I looked around hopefully, but couldn't see Robert and the kids. Finally, after what felt like ages but was probably just thirty seconds or so, a Korean family nearby caught my eye. The wife looked at me and told her husband something like, "You idiot, that woman hurt herself, go see what's going on!" in Korean, and the man charged over to me. "You hurt?" he asked, and I said "Well..." and just sort of sat there. "Hey!" he yelled in the general direction of the bar. "He hurt!" At that two bartenders scurried over and stood over me, and as the four of us stared down at my ankle a lump the size of a tennis ball popped up, while the Korean man gave that characteristically Korean gasp. The bartenders took it from there, and he gasped his way back to his wife. One bartender got me some pillows behind my back, the long ones usually on a lounge chair, and then doubled them up, while the other brought over an umbrella to shade Helen and me, and then a second umbrella because the shade wasn't as complete as he wanted. I kept saying, "If I could just get up--" and imagining that with someone giving me a hand I could get to my feet and find Robert, and what with the language barrier, and the fact that my getting up just then really wasn't the brightest idea, I kept being ignored. One of the bartenders brought me some ice wrapped up in a pool towel, which was actually a very ineffective way of keeping ice on the side of my ankle, but was clearly better than nothing. Finally one of the bartenders managed to ask me, "Family?" and gesture around. "Yes," I said, "My husband is here. With our two kids? He's tall?" I was met with blank stares. I pantomimed a tall person and then two short people, holding up first one finger and then two. "Ah, yes, yes!" the bartender said, and went off and sure enough returned with Robert and the kids in about a minute. Robert visibly started panicking but trying to hide it. "Everything's fine," I said. "Mommy just sprained her ankle. Helen is fine, she didn't even wake up, and I'll be fine." Samantha had a million questions, which I tried to answer, while Robert looked paler and paler. The other bartender returned with the hotel nurse. "Hotel nurse!" he said proudly, gesturing at a woman dressed in white and carrying an old-fashioned doctor's bag. She sat down on the sand next to me and the umbrellas were again adjusted to provide better shade. "Massage," she said, with the emphasis on the first syllable, and she started to massage my ankle over and around the large lump. "How does it feel?" Robert asked after perhaps five minutes of this vigorous massage. "Massage," she repeated again. "Well, it would feel a lot better if there wasn't all this sand on my ankle," I said through gritted teeth, because really, massaging a swollen, painful body part which happened to be covered in sand felt just about as comfortable as it sounds. "SAND massage!" the nurse said, pleased to have understood something and started to break down our communication barrier. She picked up an extra handful of sand and started rubbing that in, at which point I realized that the sand part of the "sand massage" had been intentional, rather than accidental. Later on, with Internet access, I looked up sprained ankle care, because although I had sprained my ankle a few times as a teenager and once about ten years ago, I couldn't quite remember how long to immobilize it for, when to start doing range of motion exercises, etc., and I came across the helpful acronym "RICE," which I knew, and was planning on doing, to remind people of what to do with a sprain, and "HARM," to remind people of what not to do: heat, alcohol, running, and, yes, massage. "Fantastic," Robert muttered, upon learning that. "I'm surprised they didn't offer you a drink too." After another five or ten more minutes, the nurse declared her sand massage at an end ("Massage!") and seemed to dismiss me. "What are we going to do?" asked Robert. "You can't walk on that?" "Of course I can," I said. "We're going to go up to our room and pack up and check out and get in a cab to Danang. If only I had an ace bandage. . ." I turned to the nurse, but "bandage," and "wrap," never mind "ace" were not words she knew. Finally I grabbed the tail of my sling (Helen, again, still sleeping) and wrapped it vigorously around my wrist, then pointed to my ankle. The lightbulb went on. "Ah!" she said. She hurried off, and did indeed return with an ace bandage, which she wrapped tightly around my ankle. Robert the next morning complained of her wrapping technique, and watched a bunch of Youtube videos before he wrapped my ankle up again, but it was fine for the moment. Leaning on Robert and a bartender and the nurse, with someone holding our towel dripping melted ice, I got to my feet and we started an awkward parade up to our room, where I sat on the bed and supervised the packing.

In Danang we checked into the Temple Resort Experience, a bizarrely named hotel which was about $45 cheaper than our luxurious, almost $100-a-night, previous hotel, and which clearly saved the money by having no hotel nurse and an interminable walk, along a courtyard seemingly under perpetual construction, from the lobby to the (rather spartan) rooms. We had lunch in the hotel lobby because it was convenient, and then Robert took Marcus and Samantha in a taxi over to the Marble Mountains while I limped into our room and lay on a bed with my ankle up for the rest of the afternoon and evening.

The Marble Mountains are sacred Buddhist mountains (really hills) with all sorts of little caves and grottoes you can climb into and explore, and I think they had a lot of fun there.

Marcus spent a long time by one of the pools peering in at tiny fish, eventually catching one in his hand and feeling pretty satisfied with himself before letting it go. Both kids had ice cream, and when they returned to the hotel with Robert they were hot and exhausted. Samantha and Robert went out to bring back dinner, while Marcus just read for awhile. I sent them to a no-name Chinese food street restaurant across the street from a gas station called Mi Total, where they got some delicious wide fresh rice noodles packed into a cake, then choppped up, deep-fried, and served with sauce and veggies. Then they went a few blocks away to a corner that had two bahn mi ga (chicken bahn mi) places across from each other. From what I read, this so-called chicken bahn mi on a round roll (unusual) is a favorite in Danang--it just happens to be made with pork floss, no chicken at all, because people say the pork floss tastes like chicken. Between it being a regional specialty in a city we were only in for one day and the whole "tastes like chicken" joke I kept hearing in my head when I'd think of the name, I knew I needed to try this sandwich. Robert got one from each of the two stands, and both were excellent--the spicy sauce, the mayo, and the pork floss all blended together into a sweet and spicy and creamy filling. Samantha was asleep a minute or two after she came in with Robert, and Marcus joined her a couple minutes later. Meanwhile, we ate our sandwiches happily and pondered this find in the hotel bathroom. While all the hotels in Vietnam provided toothbrushes and toothpaste in the bathrooms, this clearly won the Most Racist Toothpaste prize.

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Created: 9/3/16. Last Modified: 9/3/16.