So 5, Ngach 378/47 Lề Đuẫn

It’s what we call home, for the time being—a lovely house tucked away near the end of a winding labyrinth of alleys that come off of the lake called Ba Mẫu, on Lề Đuẫn Street, just across from Lenin Park. It’s amazingly quiet, considering the proximity to Lề Đuẫn, which is one of the major one-way southbound thoroughfares in Hanoi. There’s very little noise, and our bedroom has shutters on it that allow us to shut out the light on the rare mornings when we can sleep in. We have an adequate kitchen with a two-burner gas range, exactly two pans, a small refrigerator, cold running water, a microwave (!) and a hodgepodge of mismatched cutlery. So far no roaches, except one half-dehydrated carcass I discovered in the back of one of the lower cabinets. But I take it it’s not yet prime roach season, so we’ll see how long that lasts. We have one little kitchen gecko who’s usually waiting on the edge of the counter or inside the dish cabinet to greet me in the mornings.

The house has three bedrooms. The lower one is occupied by our friend Dave (from Denver). The middle one—a relatively luxurious suite with bay windows but no private bathroom—is home to a young man from Slovakia named Marian. He manages a team of IT employees in a Vietnamese company where he is the only westerner, and seems to get along just fine. His English is accented but nearly perfect. We’ve enjoyed a few dinners and drinks with him, and feel lucky to have such a cool housemate who nearly always does his dishes.

So we live in the top bedroom, just one flight of stairs away from the house’s private deck, where Brady and I have loved watching the bats come out at dusk and getting a peaceful and amazingly green view of our alley’s dead-end and the eight or ten houses that it leads to. One more flight up from the private deck brings us to the larger deck that is shared with the neighbors, who are also the landlords. The two houses are connected by the upper deck, where we hang our laundry, and the courtyard at the bottom, where we say hello in the mornings and admire old Mr. Hoi’s beautiful garden that he waters every day.

Hoi and his wife Phục live in the house with both of their adult sons, Ha and Nam, both of their wives, and their children as well; from what I can tell, there are about four of them between the two brothers, but I haven’t figured out yet who belongs to whom. But they are a lovely family, and invited us in for tea, which turned into wine, when we arrived on the first of the month to pay the rent. Hoi and Phục did a lot of smiling and nodding, and Ha, who went to university in Germany and speaks German and English, translated for us. We were wished a happy new year at least three times, our glasses of wine refilled until the bottle was gone, and given a bag of sugared ginger, which Hoi had just bought in Hue, his hometown—apparently it’s a local specialty. We tried to argue against him giving it all to us, but it was pointless. We also ended up with a box of dried sweet-sour plums, which Ha said are usually a favorite of the ladies. I’m not sure why that would be, but it proved to be true, as I loved them and Brady and Dave each tried one and passed on any more. They are nearly identical in taste to the Hawaiian li hing mui (sp?), which gave me a delightful twinge of nostalgia as I ate them.

The shared living room is adorned with a single, conspicuous piece of art: a terribly cheesy velvety tapestry depicting two frolicking horses, placed above the television and vying at any given moment for attention. The kitchen has a similarly gaudy large-format framed photo of a lake surrounded with flowers. Our room has a few decorations in it as well: a classic conical hat on the wall, a straw bag, and a lovely little folk painting of a traditional Vietnamese village. We’ve paid through March, so we’ll be in the house at least until then, and then we’ll see. We’d like to get our own place after that, but we love this area, and hope we can find a small house in the same neighborhood. I can walk across the road to jog around Bảy Mẫu lake in Lenin Park, which I’ve done a few times in the last week. It’s beautiful at dawn and dusk, and there are lots and lots of locals out getting their daily exercise in the mornings and evenings—walking, a few jogging, and several women dancing and doing aerobics to pop and techno. You also see a few older folks here and there, silhouetted at the edges of the lake, doing tai chi and calisthenics, and a few even practicing karate and kung fu.

Not only is the park so accessible, but we’re also only a ten-minute drive from the school where we’re doing our training. Also, our friend Duong lives in the same cluster of alleys, so it takes exactly 1:45 for him to walk from his house to ours. It’s probably not home for as long as we’re in Hanoi, but for now it’s our little sanctuary within the city, and we love it for that.

I've posted a whole album of photos on the Kodak EasyShare website. I think this is the right URL: http://adobe.kodakgallery.com/BrowsePhotos.jsp?UAUTOLOGIN_ID=601795612107&collid=601795612107.460585086307.1234689209611&page=1