XIN CHAU!!!

That means hello in Vietnamese! This is Jenny and I figured I'd start off our with our first blog entry.
We arrived in Hanoi on Sunday night, February 14th. After an amazing trip up Vietnam, we were happy to finally see the city we're going to be living near for the next 8 weeks. Since our official first day at Peace House (the main dormitory Volunteers for Peace uses- about 17km outside Hanoi) was set for the 15th, we spent our first night in a hostel, right on Hoan Kiem Lake, which is the center of Hanoi where the Old Quarter and downtown area are set. We walked around as the sun went down, and immediately loved it. Hanoi is gorgeous, and very busy. The Lake is beautiful and has this statue right in the middle of it, and surrounding the lake are shops, restaurants, cafes, and millions of people on motorbikes. It's hard to explain traffic here any other way besides that it is literally organized chaos. The vast majority of Vietnamese ride on mopeds, and there are a TON of people. It's not strange to see an entire family on one actually...dad or mom in front, infant in front of them, other child behind them, and other parents closing them in. One one moped. It's pretty nuts. They all weave around each other with no real rules, and cars on the road are involved too. The best is seeing all of this work on a traffic circle. Often you'll see people riding against the tide of everyone else.
Enough about the motorbikes, I have to talk about the food. IT IS AMAZING. The three of us are pretty adventurous when it comes to eating, so every city we've been to in Vietnam has been great for trying new things. In Nha Trang, the beach town we stopped at, we went to a restaurant where every table gets their own little mini grill, and we grilled our own beef, fish, eel, and vegetables, dippping them in the sauces given to us, sooooo good. In Danang, we ate somewhere that was a cross between a street cart and a restaurant, they'd call it a foodstall here. This guy sitting next to us had been to America for a few years, and introduced himself and ordered for us. We were given different skewers with pork and beef, and lettuce and mint leaves, and thin rice paper to create our own little spring rolls! Most of the food we fall in love with is street food. Almost anywhere you go people have little carts where they make anything from Pho (pronounced Fa, probably the most popular dish here) which is a noodle soup, or sticky rice, or Bun Cha (vermicelli with grilled pork), and lots more I can't remember the names of.
Everyone at the Peace House has been great. We're with a lot of other volunteers, but not everyone is staying for as long as we are, so we're going to keep meeting people from around the world as time goes on, which is awesome. The food they provide us here is very good, and we're close to Friendship Village, where Lauren will be working with disabled children. She hasn't started yet because the children are still with their families for Tet, the new year, but when they are back at the center she will have a lot to do. I started at my NGO on Thursday. It's called Research Center for Management and Sustainable Development (MSD). So far it's going very well. We're still working out my schedule, but I've already edited a lot of documents for them, which will be one of my main tasks there. Right now I am working on a project proposal for them, which lays out a plan to educate and organize women who live in fisherman villages in HaLong Bay. The goal is to reach the women, and have the women reach the larger community, on ways to change behavior harming the environment, as well as ways to more efficiently use their natural resources. I think MSD should be more specific, so after I finish editing hopefully I'll be able to do more research and add in things that need to be on this grant application. Anyway, that's an example of what I'll be doing. Lisa starts at her NGO on Monday, and will have more detail about that soon. The two of us have to take buses to get to work, which is a different kind of process here to say the least. I'll explain that soon.
The weather here in Hanoi is much colder than the rest of our trip has been, but it will warm up in a few weeks apparently. We're just glad to be here and take in Hanoi, and talk to all the interesting people at the Peace House and at work! Next blog entry to come soon!