Mai Chau: Saturday

On Friday night I went with Bryan on his xe may to Finnegan's after sitting outside his room reading a book and waiting for him to finish talking to his family. I wanted to shower but our dorm hadn't had water all day. Who knows why. At the bar around 10:00 pm, Bryan and I found some close friends already drunk, had some hot coffee, and left. We drove around and finally found the night market, took some pictures, and then came back to the dorm before 1:00 am. At my request, we found a deserted street and he taught me to drive the xe may. It was fun but won't happen again hahahaha....

Saturday morning I got up at 6:00 am in order to pack a small backpack for the weekend trip and grab some breakfast. By 7:00 we were off and I had again chosen to sit in the van with our professor and his wife, Natalie and Graham, Cathy, Sarah, and our guide, Long. I tried to listen to music but fell fast asleep and woke up at 9:00, when we arrived in Hoa Binh, which is home to the largest hydroelectric power plant in Southeast Asia. We walked down inside the earth, where the house the eight generators. They also led us on a quick tour down below the generators and then up to this room above the generators which looked a lot like an old James Bond movie. That's the second picture above.

At 11:00 we got back into our vans and drove up this mountain that overlooks the dam and there lives the biggest statue of Ho Chi Minh. We took pictures and tried to make it look we were shaking his hand. He's the freakin' man. After half an hour of taking pictures and goofing around beside Uncle Ho, we rode down to the town at the base of the mountain and got some lunch. I had fried rice, cumquats, and a Coke. They had all kinds of animals sitting in huge glass jars of wine. I saw bear paws and dogs along with the usual snakes.

I slept on the bus from 12:30-1:30 and then we arrived in a village in the middle of nowhere. The Muong people (not to be confused with the H’Mong tribe of Sapa) live there in houses on stilts and literally grabbed onto our vans as they pulled in. I was immediately "claimed" my this one woman and she led me to her house where she fed me this weird white fruit (tasted almost like a pear) as well as some tea, rice wine, and then sticky rice with sugar and egg yolk or something. Your guess is as good as mine. :) She spoke with me in Vietnamese for a while before asking me to buy things from her. I then felt used and realized why they were so excited to see us. I quickly left because it was getting awkward with her and an onlooker, a young woman nursing her toddler. These remote villages in Viet Nam have somehow become so touristy and I really think it's awful. I don't even think we should've been there and I wish they would stop taking us to these places.

After about an hour I paid to use the bathroom and then got back onto the bus and slept for the next two hours, predictably. I wasn't even tired, just bored. At 3:30 we arrived at Mai Chau, another little village. We pulled next to one of house on stilts, walked up the stairs, and put our stuff in the big room. I then explored the entire village until 5:30. In that time I took some really cool photos, and touched a water buffalo. It had thick skin and weird, tough, hair that was sparsely distributed over its huge back. When I laid my hand on its back, the muscles in that area began to twitch, as if I were a tiny fly that it could shake with some simple muscle movement. I was glad it didn't gore me, though it looked pretty chill.

At 5:30 I returned to our house on stilts, number nine, and wrestled Bryan. I won, of course, and somebody videotaped it. :) We had an amazing dinner at 6:30 and ate right beneath our sleeping room. There was goat, rice eggs, chicken, green beans, spring rolls, and Coke. I then talked to people in our group until the traditional dance performance that began at 7:45 pm. I walked upstairs to our sleeping room and six women and three men from the village danced for us. I took a short video of their last dance, which included large bamboo poles that they clacked together to keep the beat and the dancers just jumped over as they danced around.


The performers invited us to try it with them and of course I volunteered. It was relatively easy if you memorized the simple beat. After they finished singing and dancing at 8:30, they asked us to sing some songs from our country and we sang "Wonderwall" and "Buttercup." They then offered us some banana wine that we all drank from this clay put using long, skinny bamboo straws.

By 9:30 the host family had made more than 20 mats with sheets and set up all of the mosquito nets and sheets to divide us into groups of four. I set up my pictures and stuffed animals, wrote my journal entry for the day, and then explored the town in the dark with Bryan for about 45 minutes. I returned to our home stay and went to bed at 10:30 pm.