Daytripping around Hà Nội: Mid-Autumn Festival/Children's Day (Têt Trung Thu)

Lanterns are a big part of the Mid-Autumn festival. According to Wikipedia,

"...the legend of Cuội, whose wife accidentally urinated on a sacred banyan tree. The tree began to float towards the moon, and Cuội, trying to pull it back down to earth, floated to the moon with it, leaving him stranded there. Every year, during the Mid-Autumn Festival, children light lanterns and participate in a procession to show Cuội the way back to Earth."

So after work I headed over to Hang Ma to take in the sights and sounds of Hanoi on Tet Trung Thu, or Mid-Autumn Festival (also known as the Children' Day because of the association of children with purity, innocence, and the natural world). This is not just a thing in Vietnam, either. It's very similar, according to a coworker who had been in Korea formerly (and who is not with my center anymore, she left soon after this festival in fact), to the Korean Chuseok, which is a harvest festival. But it is the same holiday that is celebrated in China and Taiwan.

The Mid-Autumn Festival fell on a Sunday this year, which meant that I had a long day of work during daytime festivities and also that I got up very early to begin said long day of work. (I teach 4 classes, or 7 hours, on Sundays.) This is the best-case scenario of my Sunday morning... A beautiful sunrise and the hopes that the day will be grey and rainy, which softens the slog of being inside and working for a solid 12 hours.

Besides the making and hanging of lanterns, two other big parts of the festival which I did not get a chance to capture are the mooncakes (bánh trung thu), of which I was not really a fan. The savory ones seemed to usually have a hard-boiled egg in the center and the sweet ones I found to be nice but kind of bland. Apparently there are two different kinds, the bánh nướng and the bánh dẻo. I tried several of the bánh nướng which uses a wheat crust and and an egg wash to get that golden-brown color, usually baked in a mold to get intricate patterns on the top. The other variety, bánh dẻo, I did not try so I can't attest to its taste.

The other big part of the festival which sadly I did not get to capture although I did see was the dancing lion. Usually these are kids under a lion costume and apparently the tradition goes in Vietnam that the kids will go to door to door and ask to dance for the homeowners, who will then give them some "lucky money" (a small amount of money in a red envelope). It supposedly brings luck to the homeowners. I did some dancing lions although I didn't see them go door to door, they were just living it up on Hang Ma street, apparently just like everyone in Hanoi was. Witness, the mob scene:

The 5-point star is a traditional lantern shape.

Giant lit up pillar in the street depicting Hanoi scenes.

Balloons, balloons everywhere.

Mostly I will remember mid-Autumn festival as the time ILA made us make lanterns with every single student in every single class, with only about 5 staples to share between the whole staff. A very nice idea whose planning and execution left something to be desired.

Where are we again? Vienna? Vancouver? Verona?

At last, my travel buddy Joanna arrived in Milan! Though our meetup ran into a couple hiccups we did eventually find each other at the central train station, wherein I rushed her onto a train to Venice! She had wanted to see the cathedral in Milan and although it was a bit slapdash we did get a chance to see it at the end of our trip. But for the time being I had only one mission: get the hell away from Milan. So after some train station/ticket-buying confusion (WHAT is the point of a ticket machine that will not accept a DEBIT card, seriously?) we managed to get a standing room only ticket for the next train, leaving at approximately now, to Venezia. Venice. A city I'd heard plenty about. A city where I could not find a Couchsurfer host within the city, and where a "hostel" (Hotel Astoria, a "cheap" hotel that packed multiple people into every room, had no common area, no coffee/tea/breakfast/any service, and whose windowless bathroom was a toilet and a showerhead, directly next to it) set us back an amount of money that did not correspond to the quality of the place. But I'll give them this: the location was good. We were just one or two bridges away from what felt like the center-ish of town, San Marco Square. They gave us beds. The beds had blankets. There were doors. I'm scraping the bottom of the barrel of nice things to say about the place, though.

For that small bonus, I will also add: they locked their front doors at night, and when Jo and I tried to leave bright and early the next day, at 7 AM, which I think is a totally reasonable traveler time to be up and out, we were pretty dismayed to find ourselves locked in the hotel. We had to wait until about 7:20 before the guy working at the front desk finally showed up and let us out. I guess you can say we got what we deserved considering the place has a 62% rating on Hostels.com and is consistently rating badly for most of the reasons I just listed, but for those who are thinking: eh, it's just one night. I'll survive. I say to you: not if you're leaving on an early-morning train or bus, you won't.

Thankfully we weren't

Anyway, by the time our train got to Venice we had stood most of the way (around two hours), we had backpacks, although being a novice at the backpacking thing mine was a lot heavier/bigger/unwieldier than Joanna's, the sun was viciously hot, and we were starving. So we stopped at the first pizza place we saw and relaxed for a bit.

FYI: This is the size of my beloved companion, Big Boy Blue, when completely empty. Just for reference.

There we ate our first of multiple pizzas, soaked up that sweet, sweet wifi, and figured out how the hell to get to Hotel Astoria from the train station. This is me going from digital back to analog, because I am a Luddite.

After finding our abominable hotel and ejecting another couple pounds of clothing from my bag, Jo made our way into the city to see the sights. I know this post is sounding pretty whiney, and that is because I was not that in love with Italy. It was expensive, it was hella crowded, the service people (aside from Ostello Bello!) were either not helpful/friendly or were that weird, overly fake friendliness. Of course the city is beautiful, but there are lots of beautiful cities in the world. I don't regret stopping there at all, but I was definitely to move on the next day. The being said:

Cheesin'.

  

Beautiful things to be seen!

Crazy Pizza. I feel like this place can be taken one of two ways. First: we have so much pizza here, it's like crazy pizza all day every day. Too much, one might even say. Second: This pizza is insane. You're not gonna believe it. It is some crazy-ass pizza. I'm a fan of both interpretations.

So many shops like this, everywhere. Enough masks to disguise that small nation's obese, prompt and knife-wielding army from my last post!

I do not even really care about shoes outside of their comfort, but... I wanted those purple shoes. The shop keeper was NOT happy about my taking this photograph.

Dusk looks quite nice on Venice.

Very cool astrological clock, I believe this was in San Marco Piazza.

Probably one of the more famous places in Venice? I think, judging by its crowdedness? The Rialto Bridge.

The view from said bridge. Lovely, although this vacation and the results of my attempts at nighttime photography were what finally convinced me that my FujiFilm FinePix A500 (from about 2004, I believe) was really no longer cutting it. We had a good journey together, little FinePix, over several continents and multiple countries. Good night, sweet prince.

Some jokester did this with a bunch of the signs leading to various landmarks. It should only have one arrow. This obviously makes it a lot more difficult to navigate throughout Venice. Italy, so welcoming!

Gondolier checking his phone. So romantic.

San Marco by night.

One of several jazz bands playing outside. This was pretty lovely, I have to admit.

Masquerade, paper faces on parade!

Like I said, Jo and I were up and out bright and early the next day, after our hotel unlocked our front doors and released us into the wild. It was then that we discovered something that held true for most of the rest of our trip. Extremely touristic places are the practically empty first thing in the morning. I'm not even talking sunrise. These photos were all taken between like, 7 and 9 AM.

No one.

Ghost town.

Crickets.

Empty and quiet enough that the cats and birds were freely congregating around overflowing trash cans to rummage together for their breakfasts.

The same alley could not be seen the prior afternoon; it was a never-ending stream of people.

We had enough time to stop and have a leisurely coffee/croissant breakfast, explore one or two squares and tourist market areas we'd wanted to see, and still be at the bus stop with plenty of time to spare. It was a nice morning. Although, sadly, I bought a gloriously tacky fan (everywhere we went was hot and having a fan ended up being worth its weight) I ended up losing it on the next leg of our journey...

I would also like to say at this point that although Jo and I researched about a half dozen different ways to get from Venice to our next destination, Ljubljana/Postojna, Slovenia, we finally ended up paying a little bit more for the convenience of a GoOpti shuttle that took us directly from Venice to the caves/castle/park in Postojna. I would seriously strongly recommend this to anyone trying to get from Italy to Slovenia. Although there are buses and trains, each one is complicated and requires are least one or more transfer. There are some more direct routes to Ljubljana but even a lot of those require transfers. Plus our driver was on time, very nice, let us know what was happening each step of the way (we stopped to pick up some people at the airport and at another location), and the van was clean and air-conditioned. Even though I was disappointed not to take the train because I love traveling by train, in this case it was 100% worth it because we were on a schedule and this shuttle let us get to the caves quickly and then onto Ljubljana in the same day (although that was a bit more of an adventure since we took public transit). Anyway, GoOpti. This is my very strong recommendation for their services. Go GoOpti!