The reality is that we probably couldn't have found a greater contrast in both environment and culture between our island life in Rarotonga (total population 13,095 people and declining) and the hustle and bustle of living in Vietnam's capital city (total population over 6 million and growing).
View the following Timelapse video to get a flavour of what I'm talking about: www.youtube.com/watch?v=8oZfRRanbdM
When we returned to New Zealand from the Cook Islands enroute to a holiday in Asia early in 2012 we were aware that our seven year old daughter (Imogen) had lived over half her life in Rarotonga and that this would obviously influence her views of the world more than her older sister and brother or Mum and Dad. It didn’t take long for us to realise how everyone's perceptions of things are influenced by our experiences. We got off the plane at Auckland airport and Imogen who was walking beside me froze in real fear as we walked up to an escalator – the sudden dawning on Jo and I that she didn’t know what this strange moving staircase was or what to do was one of these eye-opening moments and one that we often now laugh about. How ironic that by the end of that trip we were wandering around huge malls in Kuala Lumpur where there were probably 50 escalators and Imogen was always the first to want to jump on!
Fast forward 10 months and Jo secures a teaching job at an international school in Hanoi – so with our first expat experience and our trip to Malaysia, Singapore and Cambodia earlier in the year under our belts, it was off to Vietnam to live sight unseen! Armed with the knowledge of how quickly our kids could adapt to new situations like the escalator one above we had less than a month to pack up our lives in Rarotonga and arrive in Hanoi in time for the start of the second school term.
Everything I read and people told us about Hanoi went something along the romantic lines of the city being the Paris of the east; tree lined Boulevards in a historical city where the sophistication of the west meets the intrigue of the east, where ancient culture mixes with a colonial past and modern development with some sort of enchanted magic to see and experience. Maybe this is what I wanted our new home to be or maybe I should have drawn on earlier travelling experiences and remembered that it took till about my third trip to Paris before I really warmed to that city and started to see why people waxed lyrical about it!
Initially what struck me was none of the beauty, history and wonder of this place but the smog, the stench of polluted waterways, different cooking smells, dirt and constant traffic and noise – on reflection these contrasts were certainly heightened by being New Zealanders whose latest living experience had been on a sleepy island paradise in the middle of the South Pacific. It also didn’t help that the first few days here were calm winter days where the smog hung around as we now understand happens at this time of year. It would have been interesting to see what impressions would have been notable if instead of coming from Rarotonga we had lived in Cambodia or Papua New Guinea before arriving here? Would I have experienced such a complete assault on all my senses?
People told us about how full on the traffic was before we came here and I read about how to cross a busy street that doesn’t have any traffic lights or pedestrian crossings; basically you just start moving slowly across the street and as long as you don’t make any sudden movements the traffic parts and makes its way around you and you eventually make it across to the other side. Doing this with three kids in tow in the middle of 5 or 6 lanes of traffic coming from all directions is initially a horrifying experience but if you don’t learn how to do this then the reality is that you’ll end up standing on a side of the road where you don’t won’t to be for a long period of time.
The traffic is loud (there are an estimated 3.5 million motorbikes in Hanoi), travels on a different side of the road to what we are used to and is constantly on the move. To the uninitiated this seems life-threateningly dangerous and lacking in much that resembles Western notions of order and safety. But that is where it is easy to fall into the trap of judging this on what we are used to… yes telling your kids to start crossing the road or entering a roundabout without stopping goes against everything we know or have taught our kids, but that doesn’t mean it is wrong it is just the way things are done around here and generally seems to work well.
There are many other obvious differences (some of which may well be fodder for future blogs) such as the language, foods (including encountering turtles or snakes in the supermarkets or dog carcasses in the markets), transport (we are yet to meet a taxi driver who speaks or understands more than a handful of English words), housing, longer school hours and all the other day to day logistics of living in a developing country in Asia that is still party communist ruled etc etc
We probably all would have coped with any one of these in isolation, but being bombarded with all these changes at once, initially affected all of us more than I imagined it would. Only now are we really starting to recover and emerge from the initial battering that all our senses took.
My reflections over the past week or so have made me realise that although first impressions are important we really need to be conscious of what “goggles” we have on when we experience things for the first time. Are these goggles influenced by what we have read, what we have experienced previously or what we want something to be and will these first impressions cloud our enjoyment of things in the future
While telling ourselves that the challenges and differences are what make the experience so rewarding, we still have to be mindful that our family unit also includes three children between the ages of 7 and 11 who may have a slightly different perspective to us!! And who definitely cope with change in different ways.
Seeing things through their eyes can often open our eyes to things that we take for granted but to them are so different to what they have experienced in their lifetimes, that they can’t help but notice it. This of course is one of the pleasures and privileges of being a parent and at times their naivety can blow you away; make you laugh or cry. As a result there are times they are the best guides in the world because they see things that we don’t and no amount of money could buy that. We have quickly learnt that this insight into differences should probably also always be a reality check to us on how different this life we are living is to what we have lived previously.
This is one of the reasons that we find ourselves experiencing apartment living for the first time ever in the relative “normality” of a gated international city – as parents we consciously decided that all the differences were too much for our kids to cope with initially but will review this at some stage later.
Having said all that, we are definitely alive and well and coming to grips with our new life and all the adventures that lie ahead of us. Sitting on the back of a motorbike taxi driving round the lake near to where we live, going about the business of being a domestic god, I now soak in all the smells, noise and sights and realise how much this city has grown on me in the short time I have been here....maybe it’s time to go off to the old quarter and buy one of those tee-shirts with “I Love Hanoi” on it!!!
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