Another day another adventure in Vietnam. The day began with the housekeeper scheduling dilemma. Let me preface this by saying that the luxury of a housekeeper is a pretty cool thing. At a cost of $4/day, we were pretty quick to embrace the concept. Through a Vietnamese friend, a housekeeper was recommended. "She cleans many houses. She is very poor. She is honest and never steals things." Honestly, I stopped listening at the $4/day part. I was sold. She can steal all of my nasty, damp clothes if she wants, so long as she sweeps away the armies of ants and cleans the gecko poo off the walls, I'll be ecstatic.
I headed to school with the kids and left John to bridge the language barrier with Lan. We really had no idea what tools she would like to use to clean the house, so we figured we'd wait for her to arrive, survey the situation and make some recommendations. It's not like we can pop out to Walmart and pick up a Swiffer and Mr. Clean to get the job done. Our prearranged 9:00 cleaning time turned out to be 10:30ish. Lan speaks not a word of English, and John's "please" and "thank you" Vietnamese did not do much to bridge the gap. He tried to gesture to her about the lizard poo and the cobwebs in the corners, but she was intent on getting down to business and just jumped right in. The house got pretty clean. Some laundry got done, and the dishes got washed. The lizard poo seems to have been reduced, and tomorrow, when Lan returns, John's job is to figure out a way to make her understand about the spider webs. It will be an effort, but I'm pretty sure it beats having to do it himself.
Next up was the "culturally appropriate expression of sympathy dilemma." John had asked another Vietnamese friend/restaurant owner who has been very helpful what the appropriate expression of sympathy was for someone who had recently passed away. One of the hotel owners of the hotel where we spent our first three weeks while in Hoi An was very ill, and he died shortly after we moved out of the hotel. We wanted to send flowers but wanted to make sure that was an appropriate thing to do. When he inquired, Ha, the restaurant owner friend, said that flowers would be good, but they should all be white. She said her husband would arrange for them, and then would bring John to the hotel to drop them off. People just bend over backward to help. So, John thought he knew what was going on. Apparently something was lost in translation. He arrived at Ha's restaurant at the appointed time thinking he would be getting a scooter ride to the hotel with Ha's husband to deliver some flowers. Nope.
When he arrived at the restaurant they told him to go home and change his clothes (I wish they'd told him to shave, but that's another story). So, I found him at home agonizing over the proper funeral flower delivery outfit. Given the wardrobe limitations here (one pair of pants and one polo shirt) it really wasn't a difficult decision. He headed back to the restaurant to complete the flower drop off mission. However, it turned out that there were, in fact, no flowers. Ha told him to put money in an envelope. She wrote something in Vietnamese on it and told John to sign it. En route to the hotel(?), the scooter driver (Ha's sister not her husband) stopped at a store for John to buy incense. They wrapped the money around the incense and continued on their way.
Next surprise: they weren't headed to the hotel, but to somebody's house. John and his escort arrived on the scooter where a large group of women in white robes were kneeling and a gong was bonging regularly. They waited politely outside until someone else on a scooter arrived and escorted John inside. On the scooter, John had been given a quick tutorial in bowing. It seemed he needed to open the incense, light it and bow twice before adding the incense to the burning pot. He bowed, burned and tried hard not to offend anyone while wondering how in the world he had ended up here. A man in white thanked him for coming, and John passed on our condolences. He left shaking his head and wondering how he had gotten involved in this adventure. Somehow flowers had morphed into a full blown cultural experience for which he was neither properly prepared nor attired.
While John scooted about town on this little adventure, I was at home starving with the kids. We had arranged with Ha to have take-out food from her restaurant. John had told her he'd pick it up at 6:00. Fortunately he was just returning from the funeral, so he stopped into the restaurant to pick it up. Ha invited him into the kitchen because she hadn't started cooking yet. She said it would take about 30 minutes, so John said he'd go home and come back in thirty minutes - knowing we'd be wondering if he had gone up in a puff of incense somewhere along the way. He came home and gave us a quick rundown on the funeral experience and then left again with the boys to pick up dinner. An hour later he still wasn't back. Brianna and I were enjoying the peace and quiet, but the inside of our stomachs had begun to eat themselves when the boys finally returned. John was just shaking his head. "Ha thought I wanted to watch her cook, so she waited for us to get back before she began." Somedays the language barrier seems stronger than others. On this day, we just had to laugh. Ha Ha Ha Ha Ha.
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