{"id":162,"date":"2008-06-06T21:44:18","date_gmt":"2008-06-06T20:44:18","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/?p=162"},"modified":"2008-06-06T21:44:18","modified_gmt":"2008-06-06T20:44:18","slug":"virtual-travel-vietnam","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/?p=162","title":{"rendered":"Virtual travel: Vietnam"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"vietnam-flag.png\"<\/a>I’m doing a fun thing for myself whereby I choose a country each week and find out something new about it.\u00a0 It won’t necessarily be a representative overview of that place, but a little something eclectic, eccentric or interesting.\u00a0 I have a list of countries, and country-like areas that I feed into random.org<\/a>.\u00a0 My country for the week is the one that gets placed randomly at the top of the list.\u00a0 This week it was Vietnam.<\/p>\n

I started out thinking that all I knew about Vietnam was the war.\u00a0 I had even forgotten that it had also been colonised by the French at one point in it’s history.\u00a0 I began wondering how the Vietnamese people feel about the war now, and how they remember it.\u00a0 I found one answer to this, but not before I discovered something more cheerful: the poems of the 18th Century poetess Ho Xuan Huong.\u00a0 These are usually erotic in an intellectual kind of way.\u00a0 These two translations of The Jackfruit give the idea.<\/p>\n

\u00a0Jackfruit, trans. John Balaban
\n<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

My body is like the jackfruit on the branch:
\nMy skin is coarse, my meat is thick.<\/em><\/p>\n

Kind sir, if you love me, pierce me with your stick.
\nCaress me and sap will slicken your hands.<\/em><\/p>\n

The Jackfruit, trans. Nguyen Ngoc Bich<\/em><\/a><\/p>\n

I am like a jackfruit on the tree.
\nTo taste you must plug me quick, while fresh:
\nthe skin rough, the pulp thick, yes,
\nbut oh, I warn you against touching –
\nthe rich juice will gush and stain your hands.<\/em><\/p>\n

You can find several translations of her poems on the Internet, but I liked this page<\/a> because it reproduced the poems in the original language side by side with an English version, and you can get an idea of the original rhythms.\u00a0 I wish there were sound files of the originals so we could get an even better idea.<\/p>\n

This turned out to be one page in a very beautiful project, a site with articles about 54 things that the author chose as representative aspects of Vietnamese culture<\/a>.\u00a0 The choices include individuals, like Ho Xuan Huong, concepts like education and everyday objects like bamboo and boats.\u00a0 There is also a page on Griefs of War and one on French Men, so it was interesting to get a perspective on those two aspects of Vietnamese history.\u00a0 There are enough references to all sorts of literature, film and history here that anyone following them all up would certainly learn a great deal about Vietnamese culture.\u00a0 For now, I just enjoyed reading the site and musing on all the ideas.\u00a0 It was also interesting to think about what I would choose as representative of my own culture if I had to make a similar list.\u00a0 It seems that the author of this site may be currently living and working in France.<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

\"vietnam-rice-field.JPG\"<\/p>\n

<\/a>
\nVietnam seems to be one of the more densely populated countries on the planet, but it still has a lot of natural beauty.\u00a0 I enjoyed this gallery of photographs<\/a> from various parts of the country.\u00a0 The photo above is not part of the gallery, where copyright presumably applies.\u00a0 Instead it comes from Wikipedia<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Next week I’m going to Argentina, virtually!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I’m doing a fun thing for myself whereby I choose a country each week and find out something new about it.\u00a0 It won’t necessarily be a representative overview of that place, but a little something eclectic, eccentric or interesting.\u00a0 I have a list of countries, and country-like areas that I feed into random.org.\u00a0 My country … Continue reading Virtual travel: Vietnam<\/span> →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[22],"tags":[41],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=162"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/162\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=162"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=162"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.yellowhousehomeschool.net\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=162"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}