Happy New Year and 5-month anniversary

I remember that Jens, the ETA who worked in Ha Tinh last year wrote that I should expect to go several months without seeing the sun during the winter. He told me that he decided to start counting, and he counted 54 consecutive days without sunlight. As a New Englander who is used to cold, dreary winters, I thought he was overreacting and making a big deal over nothing. I should have taken his perspective seriously, though, since he is from Minnesota, and is equally well-versed in cold, yucky winters. However, I flippantly ignored his warnings.

He was so right. The sun has not been out in weeks. And what I mean by that is that the sky is perpetually filled with one giant monochromatic, post-apocalyptic grey cloud that covers the entire sky. No sunlight penetrates AT ALL. It’s been a dreary and depressing several weeks in Ha Tinh, which I’m sure have negatively affected my mood. No wonder I’ve been so cranky and cynical and unhappy, and no wonder I've tried to escape to warmer, more fun climates for mini-vacations on every possible weekend! I’ve been severely lacking Vitamin D, and those good old-fashioned endorphins that come from being outside and breathing fresh, clean air.

Today the sun came out, and it was an event to behold! There was one patch of clouds that was significantly less dense than the rest of the giant sky-long cloud, and the sun was able to peek through there! I even saw some patches of blue sky peeking behind some wispy, lighter clouds! Ha Tinh is so much more beautiful and tolerable in the sunshine.

I need to keep reminding myself that there are only a few more months of winter, and, if I had to guess (or just wishfully speculate), the worst of the bad weather is over. I can get through my time in Ha Tinh as long as the weather gets a little nicer and allows me to go outside for walks and sleep without socks and sweatpants at night. I CAN DO IT.

In other news, I am feeling doubly reflective right now, as the halfway marker of my time here coincides with the New Year. I feel like my New Year’s resolutions need to be extra good in order to encompass how I want to change and improve my experience in the second half of my Fulbright grant.

Overall, I think my most strived-for resolution should be to try to be more positive. It is so easy to be cynical and pessimistic and pissed off about all the stuff that goes wrong here (the newest example in my life of stuff that continues to go wrong over which I have absolutely no control: I took my laundry to the White Palace Hotel in Ha Tinh in hopes that they would send it out with their laundry service, because my wet laundry has not been able to air-dry in this recent cold weather. Inevitably, something went wrong, and my bedsheets went missing. Now I have to track them down and travel all over Ha Tinh to find the wash-woman who possibly lost them- just one example of daily life as a foreigner in Ha Tinh), but it is SO unhealthy for me, and for the people with whom I interact.

I fully recognize that I don’t always do the best job of managing my frustration. I may take it out on my mother (sorry, Mom!), my fellow Fulbrighters or the organization of Fulbright itself, or my coworkers and supervisors here at the University. None of this is effective, especially in a culture that is so focused on saving face and not arguing. Thus, my explosive, angry reactions to situations out of all of our control are actually not helping anybody.

So, I would say that my New Year’s resolution as well as my Halfway-Done resolution is to take more deep breaths before reacting out of frustration and freaking out about the injustice and ridiculousness of certain situations.

Breathe, Allie, just breathe, and then react later.

Oh, and by the way, I am writing this in the middle of the night from a hipster coffee shop called Puku, located in Hanoi, and open 24-7 to the ex-pats, backpackers, and artsy, avant-garde Vietnamese who like to work on their Macbooks to the sounds of Bob Dylan and Jimi Hendrix (or just show up drunk in the middle of the night for nachos and burgers). I took the night train from Vinh and just arrived, and I have a lot of time to kill before the rest of the city wakes up and I can go about my daily life business.

Until then, expect lots of back-logged blog posts for me to catch up on! I will be grooving on Bob Dylan's soulful melodies and pretending to smoke a cigarette in order to fit in at this cafe...