Furthermore...

I am bubbling over with excitement, nervousness, and overall intense emotion regarding my upcoming move to Ha Tinh.

I'm ready to get out of Hanoi, and I'm ready to disassociate myself from the tourist culture here and build my life. I'm ready to go running and establish myself as a presence in the town. I don't mind being the lone "toubab" in a small city. In fact, I have mostly happy memories from Senegal being the lone toubab and all of the (mostly) positive attention it brought me. Everybody knew me as Bineta's host daughter or Amademe's girlfriend or any other number of associations that singled me out. It never bothered me because everyone was so friendly. I think I'll be okay with being the lone "tay" ("westerner" in Vietnamese... the closest equivalent to "toubab" that I could find) in Ha Tinh because hopefully everyone will be friendly and curious and want to know me. Maybe I'm being overly optimistic, but right now, this is how I feel.

6 months into my experience, perhaps I'll want more than anything to hide behind a mask of anonymity. It certainly does get exhausting being such a "public" image and being so easily identifiable. Still, I love the sense of a close community, so being immediately known and identified seems like a really attractive feature of living in a small-ish city, as opposed to the loneliness of living in a big city like Hanoi.

I'm excited to build up a friendly relationship with various food vendors whose stalls I will frequent. In the hotel here in Hanoi, I've grown close with the staff in the dining room to the point where each morning for breakfast, they ask if I'd like the same thing that I always get for breakfast (mi bo, which is a noodle soup that is, in my opinion, even more delicious than pho!), and then they remark that I must really like it. Likewise, the lady at the rice-and-point stand always laughs when I order peanuts because I like them so much.

It sort of reminds me of my relationship with various vendors from my walk to school in Senegal. There was the man who sold me a mango every day who called me "baol-baol" (cheap) and referred to me as his wife. Then there was Adama who sold us cafe touba about 5 times a day and become our personal Wolof tutor. I love those close relationships that form when you live somewhere and establish a life in a location, and I am looking forward to those relationships in Ha Tinh.

Of anything in Senegal, what I remember most of all are the wonderful people that I met and grew close with. I know that Ha Tinh is not a particularly "destination city," so the draw for me will be the people. And as Cousin Lizzy said in one of the blog comments on my earlier entries, when I had just found out about Ha Tinh and was feeling nervous, the cities that are the most poor in resources or development tend to be the most rich in culture and warmhearted people.


If that truly is the case, then I think I have a great year ahead of me...