Yesterday, a number of us took a bus to a residential area of Hanoi to prepare and eat lunch with Huyen's family. Her house had hardwood floors. Is is culturally inappropriate to lay down and caress someone's floor? Too late. We all gathered on the kitchen floor, cutting vegetables and mixing things. We made fried spring rolls, vegetable stir fry, fresh spring rolls and some assorted fresh vegetables. We sat on the floor of her living room and ate to our hearts' content. She has the sweetest family. They took such good care of us and made us feel completely at home. Then I got really sleepy and took a nap upon returning to school.
This morning, I got up early with Kim and Maeve to go to the Hanoi zoo with the kids in our English class. We walked around looking at the different animals, but there wasn't a whole lot of animal diversity. So many of the cages held the same animals whether they were deer, tigers, or macaques. There most definitely were civet cats, though (shout-out to Mom!). We eventually made our way to a gazebo. We sang some of the songs we learned in class and played some games. The big winner was Simon Says. One of the boys was laughing hysterically at every turn of Simon Says. The Vietnamese people at the zoo that day would stop and watch us at the gazebo. It was our turn to be the animals on display. The zoo was followed by a restaurant for lunch where we got bun cha and nem. Nem is the word for the fried spring rolls, and these ones had seafood in them.
We had a Halloween party for our roommates to celebrate one of our favorite holidays with them the way that they celebrated Mid-Autumn Festival with us. Due to my limited costume resources, I decided that I had jeans and a hoodie and could easily pull off Justin Beiber. I then decided that since we were going to do Thriller, I would be the zombie Justin Beiber. I back-combed all my hair to make it stick out like crazy, put on some heavy eye-liner for the dead effect and got Maeve to draw a scar on my face. It was a successful costume. There were a lot of other really great costumes as well. Unfortunately, I didn't get any pictures, but Maeve did, so they will get disseminated at some point. At the party, we ate ice cream, had a costume contest, drew on pomellos (since we weren't able to carve pumpkins), danced to both Thriller and The Time Warp and watched Bettlejuice to finish it all off.
The funny thing is that we had been learning/practicing Thriller for about a week. We started off hiding in bushes and behind cars around the courtyard. When Burcu ran out screaming, we all zombie walked in to zombie attack her and then got into position to begin the dance. The beginning of the dance was fantastic. We lost it a bit towards the end, but recovered fully. It gets really fast at this one part, and it's hard to keep up. Someone did film our performance, so, if you are lucky, it just might get uploaded at some later date. The only sad part is that I don't think any of our roommates had ever seen or heard Thriller. They all seemed rather confused when we finished dancing.
Regardless, a great time was had by all. We had so much fun learning and performing Thriller, the ice cream was amazing and who can pass up the opportunity for some Halloween movie-watching?
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