Hanoi Kids

We spent this afternoon and evening with Ngan, a student tour guide with HanoiKids.  HanoiKids arranges private tours of the city led by university students.  There is no fee for the tour.  The students practice their English in exchange for taking you around Hanoi.

The first thing we did was to go out to lunch and I interviewed Ngan.  We quickly learned that Vietnamese words are extremely hard to pronounce.  There are six tones for each vowel.  We couldn't pronounce our guide’s name correctly no matter how many times or how hard we tried.  She would laugh at us.  We took to spelling her name, N-G-A-N, for lack of a better way to address her.

The rest of the afternoon Ngan showed us sights around the city and accompanied us on a few errands that we needed to accomplish before we left for Cat Ba Island the next day.  When it was time for Ngan to leave, in the parking garage, we had to move two motorbikes out of there places to get to Ngan’s.
- Brook

Here are some things we learned from Ngan:

• All the way through high school, kids go to school either in a morning or an afternoon session;
• You have to take a military class in school; 
• The Vietnamese accent differs throughout the country;
• The Vietnamese like to stay at home not travel; 
• Ngan is studying economics but doesn’t want to have job related to economics. She is applying for a job as an English teacher; and, 
• At a Pagoda, anyone wearing a white headband is morning a dead relative.