Thursday morning

We leave the hotel in about 13 hours, and I am up enjoying some quiet time while the rest of my family is still sound asleep.  We had a great night last night at Suzanne Watzman's place in the West Lake section of the city.  She has a beautiful home and daughter and her cook whipped us a delicious meal for us too.  She is an artist whose main home is in Cambridge, MA but she spends time intermittently in Hanoi trying to get her business going of making gorgeous bags.  We hope to see her again today, as Anthony is helping her out with getting some advertising going. We started packing last night and I can't believe it but we somehow have replaced pretty much every square inch of space in our luggage that I thought would be vacated by all the gifts and donations we brought and left here.  Guess the shopping I can do today is automatically limited.  While I'd hoped to go out to the Van Phuc Silk Village, 15 km out of town, I don't think it'll happen. I guess we'll stay close to the hotel today, try to nap, do a final trip to the lake, and go around the neighborhood with our video camera trying to catch some sights and sounds both for our memories and to share with Bizou. I can't tell you how melancholy we are to leave here.  We were sitting down in the hotel lounge yesterday at the table near the window which is right on the street and I was watching all the activity on the other side of the glass and I just started to cry.  I am so in love with this city and its people and its difficult-yet-simple way of life.  One of the waitresses who is so kind and loves to hold Beatrice while we eat came over to us and asked, in her very shy English, when we were leaving.  We told her "tomorrow" and she had a tear in her eyes.  She mustered up the courage and words to say what dozens of others have said "She is lucky, lucky baby."  We again repeated that we are luck too, all three of us are lucky, and she smiled and walked away.  It is so hard not to give all the remaining money away to the staff here who works so hard and is probably severely underpaid by our standards, although I think a hotel job is a fairly good one overall, to the people on the street who sit outside their stalls twelve or fifteen hours a day hoping someone will come in and spend a few dong each day, to the disfigured folks hanging out by the church with an inverted non la (conical hat) hoping a passerby will drop some coins or dollars.  For a million reasons that are mostly based on luck, we have so much of what they have to work so hard to get a morsel of, money. But, believe me, they have a sense of community, love for one another, and knowledge of hard-work that I can only dream about.  We will do our very best to try to pass on these values to Beatrice, but the reality is that they are hard to come by when one wants for very little.  I asked Anthony if he thought it possible to live successfully and happily in both this culture and at home, and we decided it would be very difficult. Something must be sacrificed for the other. There's little doubt that were Beatrice to stay in an orphange, her life here would be difficult and her options totally limited.  But I do not for one minute believe that the average child here in Hanoi has any lower quality of life than if s/he lived in the U.S.  Assuming s/he were loved, fed, and sent to school, and had enough money to cover basic medical care, then I don't think it's a better life, only a different life.  I could go on and on but I keep editing and rewriting and much of this is too personal for a blog, so I'll end with a list of things I'll miss most about Vietnam:

-a nightlife that never ends and an endless list of things to do;

-watching people of all different "classes" and means mingle together on the street;

-the way the traffic appears to be totally chaotic, but ends up having the grace and movement of an aquarium that I could watch all day;

-the way men's belts go all the way around them to the middle of their back;

-muzak;

-the perfect safety and trust that exists everywhere we go;

-the architecture featuring tall and very narrow buildings, many stories high;

-the scooters and the resourcefulness people show in carrying everything from their entire families to chickens to ladders to a generator on them;

-the food, especially egg rolls for breakfast, and drinking coconut water right from the fruit;

-seeing an item being made in the same shop you're buying it from;

-seeing people in long pants, long sleeves and a jacket on an 85-degree humid day;

-the Vietnamese "squat" which I may have been able to do at one point in my life, but never again; 

-the genuine love and care in a stranger's face as they look at my daughter; and

-knowing that at any moment Beatrice can be surrounded by faces that look like her own.

Here are some photos from our dinner last night, of the bib that I'd yet to put on her, and of my favorite moment of this entire trip, the first time she was placed in my arms.