Tour of Vacation

So this one is a little late, but I wanted to get it up nonetheless. After all, I made a promise to Slim about contributing to the blog, and I'm definitely only going to break the promise a fair amount rather than entirely.

Growing up, I was obsessed with Viet Nam. One of the first movies I remember was Platoon and the first television show I really remember watching over and over again was Tour of Duty. If you're not familiar with it, it rain on CBS for three seasons from 1987 to 1990. Season 3 is preposterous and not worth watching, but Season 1 in particular tells some solid stories following the members of 2nd Platoon Bravo Company at Firebase Ladybird. The show can be cheesy at times, but as a child, it helped me create some sort of reference for what I thought my father might have gone through.

It's absurd, but when I landed in Viet Nam, I couldn't shake the idea of my father landing as a 20-something almost fifty years earlier. I kept looking for a deuce and a half hauling soldiers down a dirt road and imagined a whole world that in most ways has disappeared. It was the first time I had ever been in a country about which I had such strong preconceptions. I knew Viet Nam would be nothing at all like the movies about a war long since ended, but I couldn't help but try to reconcile the two and was surprised by feelings of nostalgia for a place I had never lived and a life I had never experienced.

In Hanoi, there were men walking about in the old NVA helmets and plenty of people wearing peaked hats. On our way to Halong bay, there were plenty of rice fields and a few water buffalo to be seen. Outside of Ho Chi Minh City/Saigon, the Cu Chi tunnels still exist and were particularly eerie to see during the Tet Holiday. But the NVA helmets were worn by armies of people riding on motorcycles going to and from work, home, and God knows where else, the rice paddies dotted a well-traversed highway leading to a tourist destination and one of the most beautiful places I've seen in my entire life. The tunnels no longer serve guerrillas, but teach Vietnamese children about their country's long and violent history and the path to reunification.

I can't wait to go back. We, of course, have a laundry list of places to go in the region, but a return trip to Viet Nam is a strong possibility and I wouldn't mind serving in Hanoi or Saigon for a couple years. I'm still going to replay the old Tour of Duty episodes, but I can't wait to see more of what the country has to offer outside of the film reels.

Multitude of New Year's

PM and I now have three different New Year's to celebrate. We start with what we know as simply New Year in America on December 31st from the Gregorian calendar. Next comes Orthodox New Year on January 14th, which is based on the Julian calendar. Finally, this year, we ended with Lunar New Year on February 19th, which is derived from the lunar calendar.

Most people are familiar with how America celebrates New Year's Eve and those of you who have followed our blogs since Macedonia got to learn about Old New Year, but this year was our first celebrating Lunar New Year.

Some of you may be confused because you have heard of Chinese New Year, rather than Lunar New Year. They are one-in-the-same. I am choosing to use Lunar New Year as it is celebrated elsewhere, not just China (China is just the largest population to celebrate). Lunar New Year is also celebrated in Vietnam, Korea, Japan, Mongolia, and Tibet.

With the New Year drawing closer, PM and I were asking around about how the multi-day holiday is celebrated here. Most people we talked to, compared it to American Thanksgiving. There is lots of food and lots of family. There is a great documentary about all the migrant workers in China who return home for the New Year's celebrations and I can only imagine how packed the train stations were here in Guangzhou.

For PM and I and our friends at the consulate, Lunar New Year means time to travel but also many amazing decorations displayed everywhere.