Ha Tinh is beautiful!

I feel a great sense of frustration and disappointment with guide-books and the general public sentiment with regards to traveling. It seems like everyone wants to go to these "impressive" destinations with tons of  good restaurants and night-clubs and and museums and places to shop and blah blah blah. And, ok, I'm guilty of this too when I'm traveling to new places. But it makes me so angry that Ha Tinh isn't even mentioned in guidebooks of Vietnam, and that it's shunned as one of the most boring parts of the country.

In reality, I am having a blast here. Every day I see something new and beautiful, and I am surrounded by such incredible natural beauty that I just feel sad for everybody who is missing Ha Tinh on their get-away vacations to Vietnam because they preferred something more "famous" or "exciting." I don't want to sound elitist (but I probably do anyway), but I wish people could experience what I'm experiencing here.

It is so peaceful. Yesterday I went on an hour-long walk where I allowed myself to get lost and forced myself to find a creative path to get back home. I think this is the only way that I will be able to get directionally oriented with the city here, so I thought this was a great success for my usually awful sense of direction. First I walked down this dirt road that is near my school. I walked past a beautiful pagoda and a path leading up to the Ha Tinh water tower (possible climbing and picture-taking day in my future? We shall see...). Then the dirt road became much more rural, and I walked past a family of chickens with around ten baby chicks who were peeping and hopping along after their Mommy and Daddy chickens.

The air here in Ha Tinh is thick with dragonflies and butterflies. Seriously, they are EVERYWHERE, and they add such a mystical quality to the scenery. On my walk I saw countless dogs (some trailing behind litters of puppies, which was quite precious!) and cats and horses and cows and water buffalos and tons of ducks, and I might as well have been on Old McDonald's Farm. The dirt road was surrounded by banana trees and palm trees, and the leaves gave such a jungle quality to the scenery that I really felt the exoticism of the place where I live.

The dirt road eventually turned into a country road that goes through a rice paddy, and I walked through an entirely open space filled with women in conical hats, cutting rice and loading it into wagons. It's been hazy and foggy here lately, so there was this incredible spooky mist just hanging over the rice paddies, and the whole scene, coupled with the swarms of dragonflies hanging in the humid air, was so reminiscent of my idea of primeval Vietnam. It could have been any time period, pre-development, pre-France, pre-American War, pre-Ho Chi Minh, pre-anything, and that scene would have appeared the same.

When I kept walking, I passed a bunch of men who were working a rice harvesting machine which was fascinating to watch. It kind of looked like a wood chipper, but somehow it separated the grains of rice from the rest of the stalks, which flew out the other side and were disposed of into the forest, presumably to be used to enrich the nutrients in the soil.

Watching the harvesting of the rice gave me such goosebumps because I was witnessing the direct source of the staple grain in my diet. In America, we are so far removed from our food, which makes it difficult to appreciate the labor and energy and resources that go into producing the food, transporting the food, and preparing the food. Here, I can see with my own eyes exactly where my rice is coming from, and it makes me feel so proud of Vietnam that they have not lost that connection with their food the way that the US has.

As much as I complain about the all-inclusive meat servings here (bone, skin, fat, sometimes bristly hair, and cartilage come with almost any meat that you eat, not to mention the brains, heart, liver, and intestines that are often served - waste not, want not, after all!), I do appreciate that it serves as a reminder that this food comes from an animal. There is no forgetting, upon seeing all of the components of the animal included in my meal, that this food came from another living creature, and I better be grateful for it. In America, it is far too easy to forget that the clean, neat chicken breast that comes in the styrofoam package at the supermarket comes from an animal, and lots of "edible" parts are wasted because they are gross to us. Here, meat is so expensive, so why would you dare throw any of it away?

I love being in Ha Tinh and feeling so much more connected to my natural surroundings than I do anywhere in America. I know that the produce that I buy at the market comes from within 50 miles of where I am currently standing, and the teeny-tiny eggs that I initially complained about were probably not hatched by chickens who were injected with tons of hormones. Being here, I just feel healthier, and my body feels cleaner overall.

Granted, I know that I've never been a "city person," so this kind of rural living suits me. When I found out how tiny Ha Tinh was, I was actually a bit excited at the thought of NOT getting overwhelmed and lost in a big city, for once. I imagine others might find Ha Tinh incredibly boring and limiting, and I suppose that is a valid reaction as well. I guess what I'm trying to say is that Ha Tinh has been good to me, and I am really enjoying it here.

Granted, the weather has not been the nicest over the past week or so, but yesterday towards the end of the afternoon, I saw the sun for the first time in a week or so, and the sky was actually blue for an hour or so after being hazy for days on end. I'm hoping that the yucky rainy foggy spell is burning up and I can have a couple nice weeks of good weather before "winter" begins and kicks my butt. Then my opinion of Ha Tinh might change a bit...

In other news, I got in my first motorbike accident yesterday. I'm fine, they're fine, my bike is fine, so there's not much to be said or dwelled upon besides the take-away message that I need to CONSTANTLY be careful and vigilant. I'm used to American traffic regulations and logic when driving, and I'm used to a quirky little concept called the "right-of-way." I need to remember that other countries use different logic (and much fewer traffic regulations), and the safest assumption is that I NEVER have the right-of-way. It is easier to always yield the right-of-way to the other driver, only because it's not safe to assume that they're going to yield it to me.

With that said, I'm bruised and a bit more banged up than I realized I was yesterday after the fact (discovered upon waking up with soreness throughout my body), but I will be fine, and need to learn from this. I'm not going to never get on my motorbike again, because I legitimately need it as a form of transportation and freedom. However, I'm so lucky that this wake-up call occurred early on in my motorbike-driving career, because I hope that it will humble me enough to remember that I am a visitor in this country, and I need to drive like one too. These are not Americans on the road, whose moves I can anticipate after years of American driving experience and logic ingrained in me. These are Vietnamese on the road, and they have different customs, different logic, and different rules of the road.

So now it's two Advil and back to bed. I'm hoping that when I wake up, the sky will be a bit bluer, and there will be time to fit in a quick trip to the beach. Fingers crossed!