Hoi An 2014

HOI AN

Well to say we loved this place is a massive understatement!! It was the best holiday.....beach, pool, food and books....repeated over and over again.

So after the puppet show that I mentioned above happened we went back to the hotel, got our stuff and took off to the train station as we had decided to give the kids a real asian experience....sleeping overnight on a train!!

It was.....fun??.....I mean the kids thought it was great, we endured it because we knew they would get a real kick out of it. Sharing a skinny bunk with Tobias was not “fun” but Noah's grin in the morning as he hung his head over told me everything....this was a memorable way to travel around Vietnam.

The journey started at 7pm with grins and laughter, it ended at 11am the next morning with groans and grumbles....but aside from that the kids still talk about it with fond memories....at least we didn't get one of the conductors coming in for a wee kip in the middle of the night like I heard from some other people!!! I did have to go and ask the conductor to stop smoking at one stage, but he was so smiley and stopped straight away that you can't hold it against the guy!

So after the train trip South we jumped in a taxi and headed off to Hoi An. Only half an hour from Danang so that was great and the reception we got at our hotel, The Lotus, was so lovely!! Cold drinks and lovely smiley ladies all bowing to us. The kids loved every minute of it.

We settled in in record time as everyone had glimpsed the pool on their way up to our rooms. Yeah!! The weather was warm, the water was warm and we were the only people in the pool....it was bliss!

 That night we took off to the beach and the kids swam and mucked about in the sand while we drank beers and tried to find them in the twilight darkness...such great parenting.

When we finally rocked into some restaurant we felt like the grubbiest hippies ever, sand everywhere and blow up toys and sand toys and basically with 5 of us we move around like this huge octopus....a really loud octopus....so as we dumped all the toys at the front of the restaurant and basically ended any semblance of quiet atmosphere in the restaurant the staff must have been thinking “what, who, where did these people come from?” but they are so gracious they covered up all their thoughts with sweet smiles and little bows...gotta love that about them.

So thats how each day went, beach in the morning for swimming and soccer, then off to some restaurant for lunch, back to the apartment for a movie and sleep for mum and dad, then off to the pool till dinner time.  It was a fantastic schedule :0

Bias actually fishing with his "rod"

While at the beach all the kids found their own mojos and happily played. Bias the cutey always wanted to find fishing lines (long sticks) and would happily "fish" from our mat all morning.  He sometimes insisted on joining in on the soccer game...but got so hot that fishing worked out better for him.

India loved collecting all of the pottery (broken old bits of pottery that she called treasure).  She came back and worked on her collections every day, and of course wanted to take them home (can you imagine!!) but I said a photo would have to do....so here she is collecting and showing her final collections.

Noah just loved, loved, loved having space to play soccer (sure beats our apartment lobby which we call our backyard and is the place where most soccer matches occur at present!!!).  Under the coconut trees the boys found shade and of course having a couple of trees inside your pitch does make it an interesting game :)

The things we loved while in Hoi An:

The silk village!! 

 It was so good....so informative and they let the kids touch and try heaps of things. We even inadvertently managed to bring a silk worm coccoon home to Hong Kong and it hatched one night so then we had a silk worm moth for a while, and the darn thing laid heaps of eggs and I thought, oh man, another Derek situation....but alas silk worms only eat Mulberry Tree leaves and as I haven't seen any of them growing in HK the poor wee thing died...but it was amazing that it had survived being chucked in my bag (they gave each kid a coccon to take away – who would have known something living would come out of it!!) and then flying to HK, living in the pocket of my bag for a week or so and then hatching....amazing.....Julia Donaldson could probably write a book about it :)

The cooking class!! 

 This was sooooooooooooo much fun. The whole family went and I bet everyone else on the course were all put off having kids :) That or they all thought, thats what I want to do when I finally have kids, just drag them to all the things I want to do....who knows but we had a fantastic time. 

Our guide for the cooking class

The live fish you could choose from

Lovely smiley granny in the fish market selling tofu - she sits up there all day and smiles about it!!

The tour of the market was fascinating.  I mean in Hong Kong we have some pretty interesting markets (think live toads and flapping fish just cut open etc) but this took it to a new level of understanding where our food comes from :)  Here is Noah showing me what he knows about ball and socket joints that we could see.

It was hot though and the kids basically ran out of steam....so it was great that the tour planned a cold drink/ice cream break right at the melt down point.

Once we got back to the house and started cooking the heat really got going!!  I mean literally!!

  It was soooooo hot with 3 gas burners going.....but oh man it was soooooo good. We ate and ate and ate and ate....the kids just crept into the kitchen now and again to snaffle bits of food and then raced back to the computer to watch another movie in their champion 3 hour tour of duty.  At the end of the cooking class we all sat around to chat and celebrate with a small glass of wine - Bias on my lap asked for a couple of sips before me and me taking the French approach of letting them try it a little may stop later binge drinking said "no problem".  It wasn't until I finally took a sip that I realised it wasn't wine at all, but vodka!!  Well needless to say Bias was out like a light pretty soon after that - he had a champion sleep :)

 The old village!! 

 Hoi An itself is so amazing...kind of like a spanish old fashioned town....the publeo style houses with wisteria and bouganvillia growing everywhere. There were twinkling lights and lanterns and great restaurants and basically it was just a nice place to walk around and then settle into a restaurant to eat. 

It is so hard to get everyone looking good in a photo....but we keep trying :)  Pa and the kiddles.

Ma and the kiddles...we were enroute to dinner so they weren't that keen to stop and smile for the camera :)

We found some yummy places to eat!  This one restaurant was a big hit....pizza and cocktails....yes!!!

We installed said method of getting peace (3 screens, 2 drinks) and yeah!  It was a great night.

Ohhhhh....the bliss of a great holiday.  I suppose it's no surprise that we are going back is it :)  Yeah....bring on Easter 2015 I say.

Our trip to Vietnam - the Hanoi part

This is late in coming but I sooooo wanted to blog about it and as I find I have 5 mins to spare I figured I would.....

We finally made it to Vietnam this Easter just gone. Life was racing by as usual so I didn't pay too much attention to our looming holiday – except to worry about accomodation that went awry and train tickets that couldn't be paid for online. This is sort of how I travel....I don't look forward to it too much so that it is a pleasant surprise no matter what happens.

So early one Saturday morning we took off to the airport, glad to be away from a yucky rainy Hong Kong. We flew into Hanoi which was the kids first real taste of South East Asia. We hired a car to get us to the hotel and sat back to soak up the sights. The kids were glued to the windows as we passed water buffalo, hundreds of mopeds, some piled high with different things. We wove through tiny little streets and abruptly stopped at an intersection. I thought to myself, "there is no way this is where we should be dropped" but the universal sign for “this is the end of the road in my car" was apparent so we dutifully jumped out. Whoops watch out for that barbed wire kids....and hello friendly toothless lady selling native dumplings....sure we will take 4 at three times the normal price, gee how did you know we were tourists? Surely not the 5 suitcases surrounding us! 

Well our tour leader Paul assured us all that this was in fact correct, we were meant to get dropped off at the intersection as the street for our hotel was too narrow for a car. So we started walking, narrowly escaping a roaming roster and numerous motorbikes we came to our wee hotel. It was opposite a really cute place so we could almost call it quaint as we did at least look out at very nice shuttered windows, I just imagined thats what ours looked like (it didn't but imagining that just made me feel better). 

The reception we received was very friendly, lovely cool drinks and warnings never to eat food from the dougnut sellers (whoops!!!) - prayed over all of us who had consumed a doughnut or two from the toothless lady and got on drinking my watermelon smoothie. Once all our bags had found their homes in our room we took off to explore this interesting city. 

First stop was the Museum of Ethnology. It didn't look great from the outside, and bit of bummer it had been raining all morning so there were puddles everywhere (wouldn't have been a problem except for one princess in new sparkly shoes and a older boy who slipped over)....but let me say.....if you haven't seen this Museum and you are going to Hanoi....YOU HAVE TO GO!!! It is so much fun, and so informative. 

Basically the government has moved examples of authentic houses from all round Vietnam to this one site so you get to do a tour of living conditions from North to South, beach to moutains....fascinating!!! And the great thing is that lots of things are there to be touched. Beds are to be slept on, pots to be banged, handles to be pushed, holes to be peered into, thatched roofs to be stroked....just so interesting. Our kids loved it!!! There were low flat houses, really high ceremonial houses, long houses, clay houses with ladders, houses with stables inside. 

Even houses with statues of naked men on the outside just so you can have a bit of a botany lesson at the same time (try to make these things seem really normal....oh yes that is a mans private parts, yes they are rather long, yes she is naked, yes she is pregnant, no we can't discuss how she got pregnant right now in the middle of the museum!!!) Ha ha ha....thank goodness Noah slipped over at that moment and took all the attention away from the naked statues that the kids were going around handling and stroking (I didn't know whether to feel very modern or embarassed, just tried to look like they didn't belong to me, I was just some hired aupair along for the family holiday :)

Anyway suffice to say, we loved that museum.

That afternoon we set out on a self guided tour of the Old City. It was interesting but a bit scary with little kids as the streets are narrow and there are lots of motorbikes. It was much more relaxing down by Hoan Kiem Lake. 

 Fascinating watching people out and about. It was packed all around the lake as people relaxed, socialised, fished and walked all around the lake. Naturally our kids just blended right in – NOT!!! They loved attention so they made sure people noticed them.

The street markets were really very interesting....fish guts....weird fruit.....unknown food types....lots and lots of sunflower seeds cracked open......

On Sunday we headed over to buy tickets for the circus. We were a bit early so had to take in one of the many parks in Hanoi. Interesting......kind of like finding WWI relics all throughout the park. There were these rides you could go on and honestly I thought they were so rusted out that they would just fly right off the ride – with us in the seat!!! But thankfully it all stayed together. 

Finally ten o'clock rolled around and we headed back to the circus. This is when you are pleased you are travelling with kids because it would just be weird for two grown ups to go to the circus, but seriously it was brilliant! If you just imagine there had never been an animal rights movement in history and see what sort of circus you can get - A REALLY GOOD ONE!! 

For two hours we were entertained by dressed up dogs jumping hoops and doing forwards rolls together, elephants standing on teeny tiny platforms with numerous limbs in the air, bears riding motorbikes, horses cantering and chimps doing chimpee type things. Paul and I think there was a lion but were not sure....there was definitely some moments where we thought....hmmmm back in our OSH structured world there is no way in the world we would be allowed to watch this animal this close up.....but it was brilliant! The bear actually drove the motorbike into the trainer....pretty funny....it didn't look like it was planned but maybe the guy was just really good at acting shocked. The trapeze person really did fall into the net, again was it planned?? Hard to say but the gasp from all the other trapeze people made it seem as if he were near death – just like a reality tv show. All I can say is that for 2 hours we sat and listened to Vietnamese and didn't miss a thing....we were so captivated by the whole thing that the suffocating heat didn't even bother us. 

So another great experience under the belt we headed off to dinner. What a find of a place. A big, and I mean big, outdoor restaurant where the canvas roof could be opened to show the blue sky while the many fans rotated to keep you cool. We had finally found our mojo with dining out with our 3 kids – its called 3 screens and 2 beers!! Its the perfect combination....they stare at screens like zombies and we drink a beer or two and stare at the menu like zombies....a great way to destress after a day out and about. I loved the food in Vietnam, the beef pho was awesome, the claypot dishes so tasty and yummy, the satay cooked in banana leaf just lovely. But sometimes it was hard to chose for the kids...heres one choice that went badly wrong...we thought Vietnamese pancake sounded safe enough....nek minute massive big crepe thing with soggy shrimps in the middle....nah dad I want sausage was the call so they consumed some sort of fried rice dish – who knows, beer googles also helped with meal times :) 

On our last day in Hanoi we went to a restaurant that only specialised in one dish – cooked fish and veggies. They cooked it right there at the table and then we just put together the mixtures for each member of the family – again employing the 3 devices and 2 beers mentality. Our kids thought the noodles hanging out of the mouth was hiliarious....so I dutifully took photos of all of them all doing it.

India, Tobias and I took off to the water puppets show while the boys walked to some musuem about war. Ours was way better....aircon and interesting. I wish I knew how they made the puppets move like that – they had them flipping and leaping, even had fireworks and fire happening and all the while the puppeteers stayed hidden somehow behind the set, while half submerged in water. They must have the wrinklest feet ever!!

Next stage of the Vietnam trip – Hoi An.....same bat channel for the next installment of our adventures......coming soon.