Day 20 - The Real New Year's Eve

We woke up late the next day and went down to the street to get some breakfast. The hotel receptionist mentioned some sort of Tet party but was hazy about the details. Since it was still raining we just had breakfast somewhere close by and then came back to the hotel. When we asked again about when this party was she said that it was going on right then at this sort of open room right above us. We went upstairs to find a table full of food and about six Vietnamese guys and one western guy sitting around drinking. The western guy got up said something about having to use the computer than disappeared downstairs never to return. At the table was the guy who had convinced us to come to the hotel yesterday along with the guy who drove us. There were a few people we had never meet before, one had his wife there as well, and there was a guy who had been advertising a different hotel yesterday. They said that even though they worked at different hotels they were friends and spent time together. In fact it was sort of like that everywhere, cab drivers and such would negotiate prices, but they wouldn't directly undercut each other. In River Town the author describes an arrangement like that among the people whose job it was to carry stuff all over the town, life, he noted, was hard enough for them without cut throat competition to top it off.

We sat down to drink with them, swearing off any food since we had just eaten, and were immediately given beers. Like in China, in Vietnam no one seems to drink unless they are toasting. They would hold their beers up, maybe clinking them once, then shout something like "One, two, three, drink! One, two, drink! One, two, drink!" though in Vietnamese. Then they would talk for another minute or two before they started drinking again. They were ruthless about the drinking too. If they thought that you were drinking too slowly they'd pick up your beer to see exactly how much you had drunk, which also meant they knew when you were out. The beer kept coming from seemingly never ending cartons of beer they had with them. They drank continuously but weren't a versed in American beer drinking skills. At one point after Dave had just finished a beer one of the Vietnamese guys challenged him to a race finishing off the next one. Dave, with some egging on from me, agreed and beat him handily. The downside of this was that the guy spent the rest of the afternoon seeing how much Dave had drunk with each toast and trying to drink more.

One of the guys there was an English students and the son of the owners of the hotel who basically worked there when he wasn't at school. They all worked for hotels so they all had pretty good English, which made talking pretty easy. Drinking wasn't quite so easy as it was still early in the day and I had just eaten a big lunch. We were all drinking pretty hard for quite a long time. Every time one case of beers was exhausted some women, who still seemed to be working, would appear with more beer. They were all incredibly nice to share all this with us and never accepted any money. People in Asia can be a little strange and sometimes stand offish, but they also have been incredibly nice to me during my whole time here. At the end the guy whose parents owned the hotel agreed to take us to see the fireworks later. I'm not usually a big fan of naps. My students love to nap. They rush off to the lunch room after class to scarf down their lunches so that they can rush off to their rooms to catch a little sleep in between classes. I don't usually like them though, it just takes me too long to fall asleep and once I do I don't like to get up again. But after all that drinking in the middle of the day it was pretty easy to take a nap. By the time I finally got up it was pretty close to dinner time.

We went to grab a quick bite to eat at a little restaurant that was still open on this big holiday. We were joined by this really nice Vietnamese couple who lived in southern California but had come back for Tet. The person who took our order, and seemed to be in charge of the restaurant as well, said that she hadn't taken a day off in 17 years, and they would be open tomorrow as well since the fact that many restaurants were closed meant great business for them. There was also some white guy around who seemed to work there. I had seen westerners who seemed to be working at Vietnamese restaurants or bars before but it was always an odd sight. We stayed at the hotel until around 11:30 when we started to make our way over to the Citadel, which the Vietnamese guy said was the best place to watch the fireworks from. We were joined by a guy from southern California who used to be an X-ray technician before he got feed up, sold his house, and started traveling all over the place. He was the person who had excused himself from drinking with the Vietnamese guys before. He explained that he had some medical condition that made it especially bad for him to drink too much. I talked with him a bunch about traveling and he made the interesting point that we were lucky to be young since when you are young and you travel and have no money people just think it's cool, but when you get past 30 people start to ask you when you are going to get your life together.

We came to a big field covered with people and parked motos to watch the fireworks. The fireworks started at 12 but with no real interersting fan fare like a count down or anything. The display was pretty interesting, though I'm not sure fireworks in the US produce so much smoke. As soon as they were finished, as if some one flipped a switch, everyone filed out to leave. Ken said that at the concert he had gone to in Changzhou people had left before the last act even though he was by far the biggest star. I wonder if the fireworks in China were better since they set off a ton of fireowrks at the drop of a hat.