Happy Water

After a week in Sapa I moved accommodation to a cheaper place as I have decided to stay here for four more weeks. When I was checking out of the hostel I had been staying in on Sunday monring the owner Mr.Oaiy invited me and another volunteer who had also stayed there to join his family for dinner that evening. Little did we know that dinner would involve many shots of ‘happy water’ (rice wine) and turn into a comedy affair where every guest who walked through was invited to join us for shots. Some were bemused, some happy to be invited and some frankly just ran on up to their rooms in a bid to avoid the happy water shots. Probably the wise choice I suspect they knew something we didn't.

Roll your own

It was however lovely to be invited to a family dinner and the food we had was my new favourite, Vietnamese spring rolls and a clear soup to dip them in. These spring rolls were however of the roll your own variety. I was surprisingly good at it having never got the hang of the whole tortilla wrapping deal. It seemed our host needed no excuse to down a shot with a cheers every time and glasses were refilled without you even noticing. It reached a point where I started sipping every time we charged our glasses and as our host got less and less comprehensible we tried to make our excuses to go home. No deal.  Sometime later we did manage to actually leave the premises and make our way home. It was a great evening even though I didn’t understand everything that was going on. Large parts of the conversation were purely in Vietnamese and I’ve still not progressed much beyond ‘thank you’ ‘no thank you’ ‘hello’ and ‘cheers’ which I remember because it sounds a lot like chipmunk. More language learning with Kasia no doubt to follow.