February 9, 2012
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Vietnam Part 14: School Reunion.
We start off the morning meeting my cousin up for coffee. Vietnamese people love their cafes and my cousin says he goes here for an hour every morning with his friends to shoot the breeze before going off to work. Seems like a pretty nice lifestyle.
Throughout our stay in Hue and during the long car rides, my parents talked with my cousin about life in Hue these days. My cousin was joking that if you get pulled over by cops in Vietnam while driving and you’re an American, they’ll usually just let you go because they don’t want to hassle with trying to speak English with you. I believe the average wage for an office worker was to the tune of $3000 US per year. Getting a wedding photographer and videographer in Vietnam costs about $250. With an income of maybe $3000 out here, that’s comparable to the cost of a photographer/videographer in the US. Interesting to see how the prices roughly reflect their US counterpart.
This is the backyard. My cousin told me that the day after we left Vietnam, the country pretty much flooded and they had to close down the airports. He was knee deep in water in the back yard.
We went to the back to the old house that was still attached. Here’s a family tree.
The ancestral area in the back.
This is the room my dad stayed in when he visited in 2000. He said it was a bit creepy and I agree- everything is extremely old in this room and it seems like the doors or windows wouldn’t hold up against g-g-ghosts.
My cousin had written down a history of the house by hand.
My cousin’s house. It, of course, has more than one floor. I don’t even know if there are any one-story houses out here.
For dinner, we met up my dad’s old elementary school classmates at an outdoor restaurant. It was pouring rain and I had them bring over an extra citronella candle because I was getting eaten alive by mosquitoes.
A bottle of Chivas out here runs about $25
My dad’s old classmates. Some had driven an hour to meet up and would be staying overnight. These men all seem to have aged differently over the years, but it’s nice to think that they’ve all been able to keep in touch for nearly 60 years, past a civil war and the hardships of life. I’m awful at keeping in touch with even people from college which is why I’m always impressed that the sense of community is so much stronger with my parents’ generation.
End day seven.
