Vietnam

Gratitude to you all for 2023

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(Long post! If you’re short on time, you can scroll for the photos!)

This past year was pretty spectacular. Some people say that about every year (except 2020). Some people say every year sucks (especially 2020). Most years we experience a mix of joy with other things – sometimes really difficult. But I feel lucky: this past year brought so many people into my life, and I need to acknowledge how much of an impact they have all had on me.

So, for my 2023 reflections, I decided to share with you all a photo collage of all the people that sweetened my life this year!

Autumn in Rocky Mountain Park!

The problem is that when I started combing through my photo collection (which contains thousands from 2023 alone), I suddenly found myself with nearly 50 photos that I felt I HAD to post. That’s way too many for one blog post! So as you scroll through the people that made my life amazing in 2023, please know that this does not include everyone!

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Termites and Gibbon Songs in Cat Tien National Park, Vietnam

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We sat on long benches in the middle of large flatbed trucks with 50 of our closest friends as we trundled along a lightly paved road in the fading dusk. Our night safari tour guide at Cat Tien National Park stood at the front of the flat bed, leaning on the back of the cab of the truck, his searchlight scanning the landscape and the lower branches of trees that sometimes came rather close to our heads. Large termites, drawn to the light, joined our tour.

The termites come out to interact with tourists on the night safari at Cat Tien National Park.

They landed in people’s hair and pelted us on the forehead and cheeks. We should have known that this would be our closest wildlife encounter. But no one wanted photos of the bugs. Cell phones were trained on the landscape beyond, where we occasionally spotted deer – large and small – grazing in the wide-open grassland. I only managed to get photos of the termites.

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Snapshots from another sinking city

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My room on the 9th floor of the Sheraton had a view out across Sông Cần Thơ River that runs along south side of the city of Cần Thơ. After a morning at Cần Thơ University listening to students’ proposals to build climate change resilience, my brain felt tired but inspired. Foremost on my mind was this: What is it that gives you hope when your world is sinking? How do you plan for a future that might be underwater?

Sunset over the city of Cần Thơ in the Mekong Delta.
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Preparing our students to build a new world

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On the first day we talked about clouds. I needed a hook, and, given the abundance of different cloud types one can observe in the city of Dalat in a day (sometimes even in an hour), this seemed like a good place to start a short course on Tropical Meteorology and Climate Change. Who doesn’t like clouds? My first class in Vietnam was not unlike a first class in any of my other courses back home. I had the same objectives: I wanted to know my students. I wanted them to understand what we can expect from each other and from the course. I wanted them to feel excited for what we about to learn together.

With students at the University of Dalat, after we learned to sketch out patterns of global atmospheric circulation.
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Singapore’s unwelcome parting gift

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Note: I’ve been back in Colorado for the past month, but still have a lot of stories to share with you from Vietnam. I first wrote this post in April and debated whether to publish it. People – especially in the US – get really sensitive when you remind them about the pandemic – or about masking. I wrote this mostly to process my own emotions around getting COVID for the first time (hopefully the only time, but I really doubt it). So, this post sat in a folder, neglected until this week, when, once again here in the US, I had a bunch of reminders that COVID is still floating around and impacting people’s lives every day.

Singapore sent me off with an unwelcome parting gift. When you have successfully avoided the plague for three years (especially while living in the US), you start to get a little cocky. You see advertisements for studies of ‘people who have never tested positive for COVID-19’ and you think: Yes, that’s me! I’ve never tested positive!

If you really want to avoid COVID, N95s work really well! This one from 3M is comfortable enough to wear on an 11 hour flight.

But when you wear a mask in public, avoid crowds and indoor gatherings, generally do your shopping online, and find yourself checking for hand sanitizer and a mask in your bag as religiously as you check for your phone and your keys, it IS possible to avoid the virus. N95 masks are spectacular protection, based on my experience on several trans-oceanic flights where I’m now sure there is always someone who is COVID positive on board.

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Life on Trần Khánh Dư Road

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A tall jacaranda tree across the road from my apartment bloomed thin bright purple flowers all through the spring. The blossoms would carpet the road across from the neighborhood trash bin. It was a nice contrast to the piles of food scraps and plastic bottles that some how end up outside the bin. But one day, a crew came along and took out the whole tree. I almost cried at the sound of the chain saws. I had grown so accustomed to seeing that tree. At least they waited until it had finished blooming.

My view of the jacaranda tree – until they cut it down.
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About the mask and what’s in the air

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I’ve been thinking about my lungs lately, especially as we recently passed the third anniversary of the week the world shut-down due to a microscopic lung invader. Don’t worry, I’m not going to preach about COVID. But I’m going to forego the usual travel blog this week to let my science nerd out. If you’re not into this, that’s fine, but I hope you’ll take a moment to at least wonder why millions of people in the world are still wearing masks, and why wearing a mask, for most people, is simply not the big deal that it is in the USA.

No one had to tell me there was a fire near town when I saw this sunset. This sight is all too familiar to a Coloradan.
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Snapshots from a city walk on a Saturday

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Written on a Saturday in mid-February…

I have a routine now. While it’s easy to imagine living in another country as romantic and exotic, each day filled with adventure and memories that will last a lifetime, the fact is, when you have work to do, the adventure necessarily gets set to the side, especially when your work involves a lot of mental energy. You start seeking rhythms and routines that feel familiar and help you get into that work mindset without burning out.

The rows of greenhouses nestled between houses and villas is becoming a familiar sight on my daily walks.

For example, Vietnamese coffee is world-renowned for being extra strong, extra sweet, and served in all sorts of creative ways – with egg, with condensed milk, with coconut milk. There’s even a cafe near campus that sells coffee with black garlic! This is garlic that has been aged at low heat and high humidity for several weeks. Supposedly, it loses the strong flavor of garlic and becomes a bit sweet. Not being huge fan of sipping on garlic cloves, I haven’t tried it yet! I’ve tried several other types of coffee, however, and enjoyed drinking it. But at home I settle for some version of English Breakfast tea. You can only find it in the bigger supermarkets here, since it’s not that popular. But that’s what I drink each morning here.

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Vietnam: One Month In

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That’s right. I’ve been in Vietnam for a little over a month. I’ve debated what to share here. There has been a lot to process. But I don’t feel I’m ready to tell a coherent story of my time here yet. I feel like this country is revealing itself me in tiny pieces. Layer upon layer. Not understanding really any of the language means that things tend to be mysterious in a way I haven’t experienced in a long time – not since my first trip to Germany. But even then, the rhythm and intonation of German felt familiar to me, and I picked it up quickly.

I’ve probably mentioned before how I tend to think of things in layers – maybe the byproduct of decades of thinking about how atmospheric models work. Dalat offers lots of vistas where you can watch the sky move in layers.

Here, I feel like a child. Everything I do requires some level of deciphering, some level of conscious effort for activities that come automatically at home, from learning to use the ATM, or my phone, to crossing the street on my own. Food can be especially confusing. I’m starting to realize that the same foods are sold just about everywhere in the city. But I still don’t know what they are. Gà is chicken. Lẩu is some kind of hotpot (but far be it for me to order one on my own – seems like something you do with a group.) Oh – and when I type lau into Google Translate, it tells me that this word means ‘wipe’ or ‘bathe’. Of course, the little symbols above the a make it an entirely different word. You see why I get confused? Or why the staff at a restaurant might look at me funny if I ask for lau gà? Am I really asking for ‘bath chicken’? I don’t know. So, while Google Translate is my friend, it can also lead me down dark alleys.

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Discovering Dalat

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When just about everything you see, hear, taste, and smell in a day is new, you miss a lot. Sensory overload happens when your brain is trying to take in more than it can process. Any traveler can experience this, and when you travel outside of your own culture, in a place where you don’t know the language or even what foods to eat, sensory overload can come on fast.

Welcome to Dalat! This city in the central highlands is known for it’s enormous variety of flowers, fruits and vegetables. Strawberries are in season in January, and you can’t walk around town without tripping on a strawberry vendor. Or motorbike (they are always in season).

I have a pretty good idea of when I’m overload. It comes up on me as a sudden fatigue, and a desire to go lay down. I could be walking down a street, a 45-minute walk from my hotel, with many other things on my to-do list, and I will have to make a change of plans. Too much to take in. When I was younger, I would race on to the next new thing, really not taking anything in too deeply. But I’m in a place and at a stage of my life when I want to take in things much more deeply.

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