All Things Absurd: A Montage

One of the best aspects of living in Hanoi is the absurdity of daily life.

The extreme cultural differences and my awkward attempts to navigate life here accumulate to one ridiculous existence. For example, the fact that I (all 5'1" of me) tower over people or that I am somehow now on Viet Nam's national women's Gaelic Football team being neither Vietnamese, Gaelic, or knowledgeable of the rules. Or the fact that utility bills are collected by random women on bicycles who ring your doorbell unexpectedly at 10pm and demand to be paid 1million dong for something written in Vietnamese on a 'bill'. Or that I spent most of lunch yesterday at work discussing with my Vietnamese co-workers the linguistic complexities of blink vs. wink and wobble vs. jiggle.

I am starting to get desensitized to some of the things I found wonderfully ridiculous before. So for your viewing pleasure and to remind myself of the reasons I am here, I present to you the following images.

This is how I look most of the time while traveling the city.

Viet Nam's recycling and waste management system: wooden carts and lots of grunting.

Everyone has business cards here. You're nobody without one.

People put anything and everything on the back of their bikes- like this women with a collection of giant red dog pinatas.

Sometimes pointing to random words on the menu doesn't work out as I would hope.

I frequently dish out millions of dong.

Goal #439: get my picture on one of the ubiquitous 'Star' tables in cafes around the city