doberman pizza. a baha'i (bahai, bahá'í) blog.

The Bahá’ís of Vietnam have just finished electing their new Spiritual Assembly at the National Convention in Phan Thiet, in the southern province of Binh Thuan. Quynh, Nu and Lam were there, along with 300 other Bahá’í friends. Quynh and Lam travelled on the overnight train from Da Nang, and friends came from as far away as Hanoi, all the way in the country’s north, to be there. Apparently it was amazing and a joy to attend. Quynh got to meet with several Vietnamese government representatives and members of Bahá’í institutions responsible for Southeast Asia. The Vietnamese press dutifully covered the convention too, with an item on the evening news (aired twice) and a number of news articles. I was surprised to see that the news was available online almost immediately after the convention, not only in Vietnamese (2, 3), but also in English and French. It looks as though one article was written by the Vietnam News Agency (VNA) and reprinted in a number of places, like the English press would do with AP or Reuters stories. Here’s the English article:

The Baha’i Community of Vietnam held its fourth National Congress in Phan Thiet city, the southern province of Binh Thuan, on April 23 and 24.

More than 300 Baha’i dignitaries and followers nationwide attended the congress, which also saw the participation of representatives of the Government’s Committee for Religious Affairs and the Baha’i advisory board for Asia and the Board of Trustees of Huququ’llah for Southeast Asia.

The congress elected a nine-member religious council of the Baha’is of Vietnam for the 2011-2012 term.

It also set forth key tasks with the emphasis on mobilising Baha’is to live up to the motto of “living well in one’s life and one’s faith” and strengthening the nation’s great unity and solidarity with other religions.

Introduced into Vietnam in 1954, the Baha’i community now has more than 7,000 followers in 43 cities and provinces, mostly in central and southern regions.

The Baha’i Community of Vietnam has been recognised as a religious organisation by the Government’s Committee for Religious Affairs in July 2008.

This article—a short one to be sure—isn’t a direct translation of the Vietnamese one, nor is the French article. The original reads something more like the article on the Can Tho convention in 2010 I blogged last year, with a lot more references to the Baha’i Faith being completely lawful and being in full accordance with regulations, etc. Despite not saying much, of course, the English article’s at least correct. I’m mostly just surprised they included the word “Huqúqu’lláh”.

Anyway, as soon as I get a little more time, I’ll take a stab at translating the Vietnamese and French articles for a little comparative coverage. Keep your eyes peeled. And if you’re interested in reading more articles like this, then why not follow me on Twitter and let me know?

Read about last year’s Baha’i National Convention in Can Tho.

I don’t often get excited about mobile apps (heck, I haven’t even downloaded Angry Birds yet) but as far as I’m concerned, this one is the best thing since sliced bread: Google Goggles, part of the official Google app. It’s a piece of image recognition software that uses pictures you take with your mobile camera to search the web. In a nutshell: search with images instead of words. It’s not perfect yet, but it does seem to be good at recognizing things like logos, landmarks, and so on. To give you an example, I was able to take a picture of Dogs Playing Poker and it knew what it was. On the other hand, I took a picture of a logo off a bottle of Brio Chinotto and it couldn’t tell it from a no-smoking sign.

But by far the most exciting feature of Google Goggles is that it will recognize text—block letters, not necessarily handwritten—and translate it. I tried it with some bilingual signs on an OC Transpo bus here in Ottawa and the translation turned out to be more or less correct. Here’s how it works:

Take a picture of some sort of text. It should be fairly legible; I figure block letters are best. OCR isn’t the best at picking up messy letters. Goggles will find the text in your picture and tell you what it sees. In this case, it’s pretty close.

Click through to the translation screen, and you’ll see Google Translate giving you roughly what the words say. It’ll automatically tell what language is displayed and translate it into English (or whatever else).

Now, at the moment, Goggles seems to only be able to recognize a small subset of languages, among them English, French, German, Italian, Portuguese, and Spanish. It definitely seems to work best at recognizing languages written in Latin characters. It was even able to recognize some Vietnamese text I found, although the sentence it spat back at me was mostly garbage. I tried it on a number of other alphabets that use non-latin scripts—Chinese characters, Russian, Lao, and Thai—and didn’t have any luck; it didn’t even recognize them as language. That would probably be my main request to the Goggles team—recognizing non-latin scripts, especially things like Chinese, Thai, Korean and Japanese. Definitely a promising app, though, with sweeping potentialities: imagine if you could understand any shop sign you came by on your trip to China, or Japan, or wherever, just by snapping a picture of it with your smartphone?

This post is the fifth in a series on Vietnamese customs relating to death, from a personal and a Baha’i perspective.

It’s been several months since Quynh’s father Hai passed away, and the one hundred days—the “tốt khốc” (“end of tears”), marking a resumption of “normal” life after a loved one’s passing—have elapsed long since. Being surrounded by family has helped Quynh’s mother Lam cope with the tragic loss greatly. Quynh commented on her mother’s evident sense of joy at the large turnout for the 100th-day commemoration—sixty people or more arrived to pay their respects and to be with the family, if I recall correctly.

Vietnamese people are tightly interconnected with those around them. When I first came to Vietnam, I often mused about how little “personal space” I enjoyed, chalking it up to a case of high population density. Vietnam’s a small country, right? Long but thin. It must be hard to fit 85 million+ people in here. But more than that, the Vietnamese people aren’t afraid to be close as a community. Since returning from my first trip, I began to note how woefully separate, isolated I felt in Canada—as if every trip back home was like shutting myself into a cell. In Vietnam, there are no such barriers isolating people—or at the very least, they’re much less apparent than in the “developed” West. Sure, it means that people can pop in unannounced for a visit at all hours of the day, but hey, is ten minutes’ worth of tea and chatter so much to ask? Or are those ten minutes really better spent holed up watching TV? (Full disclosure: I tend to hole myself up with my laptop, which isn’t much better. And yes, I reproach myself for it.)

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ok, so I said the last post on “Death and Life in Vietnam” would be up before the new year, but I’ve gotten a little sidetracked—not in the least by the arrival of the newest letter from the Universal House of Justice to the Conference of the Counsellors, which, along with the Ridván Message of 2010 (167 B.E.), basically describe the aims of the coming Five Year Plan.

so yeah, look for the final post sometime this week. I’ll be back in Vietnam in about two weeks to celebrate Tet, so I’ll be nice and busy visiting relatives and taking pictures. What a blessing, to be involved in uniting the East and the West so directly.

This post is the fourth in a series on Vietnamese customs relating to death, from a personal and a Baha’i perspective.

On these, the coldest winter mornings when the roads are covered in snow and ice, I roll groggily out of my bed to get ready for work. Shower, brush teeth, shave. Get dressed in long johns, spiffy tailored pants and shirt from Da Nang. Lumber downstairs and feed the cat. Then pull a little piece of black plastic out of my pocket and pin it above my breast pocket, and walk quietly into the den, where the shrine awaits. Gaze with love at the portrait that stands there, and take three sticks of incense, applying a flame until they smoulder. Then holding them before me, I utter a quiet prayer, and bow three times, repeating the Greatest Name of God. Planting the sticks in the handmade ceramic pot in the centre of this small, humble shrine, I bow once more and turn away to start my day.

I used to burn incense, but only because it seemed cool and exotic. It didn’t occur to me that I could ever use it to pray.

Well, not pray. I can’t really use a stick of incense to pray, or can I? Maybe worship is a better word. I’m still not sure where that line is, or if there even is a line. I know how Baha’is pray, and I know the way we were taught to pray in Catholic schools. I know the Lord’s Prayer by heart, and I’m doing my darndest to memorize the Tablet of Ahmad. I even know what Muslim prayers look and sound like. But I still wonder whenever I see people offering incense at shrines, temples and pagodas: What exactly are you thinking? Not in a “wondering about your sanity” way, of course, but genuinely wondering what goes through the minds of the Vietnamese, the Chinese, the Koreans and Japanese when they offer incense. How exactly do you pray?

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This post is the third in a series on Vietnamese customs relating to death, from a personal and a Baha’i perspective.

Apart from the family memorial gatherings and the weekly devotional gatherings for Quynh’s father Hai, my time in Vietnam was rather quiet and uneventful. It rained heavily for a good part of my stay, which left me stuck inside most of the time. In my free time I did some tele-work for my employer in Ottawa, using a remote access provider to debug CSS and code up ASP.NET controls from the comfort of my chair in Da Nang. Yes, that was my free time. Whenever we weren’t visiting Hai’s resting place south of Da Nang—replacing flowers, planting rows of incense, refilling oil lamps—I mainly puttered around the house, taking care of chores. As I mentioned before, I spent a lot of time figuring out how to be a good son-in-law (in Vietnamese, con rể), hoping to learn the ropes, as it were, of Vietnamese family life. It turned out that my main task was, well, to stay in the house and wait for things to happen.

I eventually got into a routine that involved taking care of a few daily chores: preparing rice for lunch, taking out garbage, and fetching cola and other small items from nearby shops. Another big part of that routine was to take care of the family shrine—meaning, offer rice and keep the incense burning at all times. At every mealtime, we would take some of our rice (or noodles, or whatever) and place it in a little bowl on the shrine. Quynh explained to me that while she and her mother, being Baha’is, didn’t necessarily believe that her father’s spirit would “consume” the food—or that his spirit would even need such sustenance—the act of offering food to the deceased was mainly for the family, to help them grieve. Offering incense, she said, carried the same significance.

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This post is the second in a series on Vietnamese customs relating to death, from a personal and a Baha’i perspective.

The gesture of offering incense is omnipresent throughout Asia, it seems. China, Japan, Korea, Vietnam, India—anyone who’s Buddhist, Hindu, Taoist, Shinto—even some types of Christian—knows what it means to offer incense. “In North America, not so much,” as I would tell everyone in Da Nang. In the West, most people treat incense as a way to make your house smell good, not as an object of religious practice.

I spent my time during my last trip to Vietnam trying to discern how to be a good son-in-law. Eventually, I figured out a few things that seemed to be key: preparing rice at lunch, taking out the garbage, fetching things from nearby shops, and regularly offering incense at the family shrine. If you remember my post about Vietnamese funeral customs, you’ll recall that when someone dies in Vietnam, a shrine is erected as a memorial, and that a central element of that shrine is a pot of sand used to plant sticks of incense as offerings, generally placed in front of a photo of the deceased. This shrine is an active centre of worship for (at least) the 100 days following their passing. “Worship?” I hear you ask. Yes, worship, or at least that’s how they refer to it—the act of paying one’s respects by offering incense. Vietnamese, even Baha’is, tend to draw a line between this act of “worship” and the personal prayers one might say before bed, or in times of trouble, and so on. Paying one’s respects at the family shrine is one of the most fundamental acts of Vietnamese spiritual life, and this applies irrespective of “membership” in one religious community or another; it is a tradition that helps to define what it means to be Vietnamese, and acts as a base for the family and society. Without understanding it, you cannot understand Vietnam.

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This post is the first in a series on Vietnamese customs relating to death, from a personal and a Baha’i perspective.

Arriving in Da Nang on September 6th, i was just about two weeks too late to say goodbye to my father-in-law. I had only a vague idea of what had happened, pieced together from brief phone calls as the nightmare unfolded. Upon arriving, the family had me offer incense at his shrine—a traditional gesture that would become very familiar to me in the following six weeks. This gesture is performed at every funeral in Vietnam—and during the six weeks I was there following Ba’s passing, no fewer than three close friends and family members also passed away. You bet I got a lot of practice. (More about offering incense later—lots more, I promise.)

Vietnamese funeral customs are based on a mix of Buddhism and indigenous spirit beliefs that date back several millennia. An extensive set of rites and customs govern every aspect of death, before and after it takes place, even extending years into the future. The process of grieving itself involves not only whole families, but whole communities, with entire neighbourhoods gathering to help mourn a loss.

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my recent trip to Vietnam to visit family after my father-in-law’s passing afforded me a lot of time to think. Even while I was still there, I knew I wanted to share with the world reflections on the experience of losing a loved one across cultures, from a personal and a Baha’i perspective. as it turns out, I’ve actually got a lot of notes, so much so that it’d probably take way more effort than I can give at the moment to put it all into one big essay-type format. So I figure I’ll split it into a few posts, covering a few different—but very related—topics. These may change, but I figured people might like to know what I’m planning.

• vietnamese funeral customs
• taking care of the shrine
• the life of a vietnamese son-in-law
• say a little prayer
• grief and the value of community

As noted, I expect these posts will come out every 3–4 days, as I have time to work on each of them (that said, the dates noted here are approximate).

Edit: All posts are now up (finally)!

Via @DASLucas on twitter, here’s the text of a nice little article about the Ottawa Baha’i Centre written by Ruby Pratka in a local newspaper, Perspectives Vanier (see the original front-page article in the PDF version of the paper). It begins by mentioning the Centre, which is located at the edge of Ottawa’s east-central Vanier borough, and quickly goes on to give an overview of the Baha’i Faith through the voices of two representatives of the Ottawa community. It even ends off with a mention about junior youth groups and other core activities organized by the Ottawa Baha’i community. Not an in-depth article, but a great front-page teaser that will undoubtedly help to answer a few questions—and raise even more—for curious locals who may have wondered about that building on MacArthur Avenue.

Baha’i Centre of Ottawa in Vanier since 2007
by Ruby Pratka

Heather Harvey and Ayafor Ayafor want to build a better world. And they believe that a better world starts in the front room of a former Mexican restaurant on McArthur Avenue.

Ayafor and Harvey are members of the Baha’i faith, a religious community that they say has about 1000 adherents in Ottawa and about 5 million scattered across the world. The Baha’i presence in Ottawa dates from 1948, says Harvey.

“We’ve gone from nine in 1948 to over 1000 now,” she says. The Baha’i Centre of Ottawa has been in Vanier since 2007.

The Baha’i faith was founded about 150 years ago in Iran, by a spiritual leader who believed he was the next in a series of prophets serving the same God. Baha’is consider Abraham, Moses, Buddha, Jesus and Muhammad to be prophets as well. There is no clergy, only a democratically elected ‘spiritual assembly’ in each area with a Baha’i presence. The faith has since spread worldwide; according to the Centre for Faith in the Media it is the second most geographically widespread faith after Christianity. Baha’is, Harvey explains, respect the texts of all major religions and believe in the “unity of God” across world religions.

“At its basis there is a commonality to what our relationship is with God…and to life after death,” says Harvey.

“One of our fundamental principles is the idea of the oneness of mankind,” says Ayafor, who was born in Cameroon and raised a Christian. “Fundamentally we are like cells of a body; we’re evolving. The writings are there to bring unity in the world, but Baha’is don’t know how that is going to happen.”

Harvey and Ayafor say they believe that it is impossible to separate science and religion, and that world peace is inevitable. They also believe in the importance of community service.

“To work in the service of humanity is highly looked upon,” says Harvey.

To that end, she says, the centre holds youth study groups for teenagers to figure out how to best serve their community. “It’s all about ‘what can I do tomorrow?’,” Harvey says. “The reality of what you can do varies from neighbourhood to neighbourhood. In those study circles things emerge, like a literacy campaign or a health campaign. . Our junior youth groups clean the parks; simple things can be done and something leads into something else. It’s very important for youth–and everyone–to believe they have a purpose.”

In addition to the youth groups, the centre holds devotional meetings where attendees study the texts of all major religions, children’s classes, and summer day camps. And anyone is welcome to come to the centre and have a look around. These programs are open “to all people, whether Baha’is or not,” says Harvey. “We are not an inward-looking community.”

A little behind, but as I mentioned a little while back, here’s an English translation of a Vietnamese news article on the third National Baha’i Convention in Can Tho, Vietnam, on May 2, 2010. I’ve added my own explanatory footnotes below. The article is a little off on a few facts, but overall it’s pretty good. This translation should at least give you a good idea of the general state of the Faith in Vietnam, and how it’s viewed by the institutions of society; in my opinion, it also offers an intriguing view of the perspective of modern Vietnam on religion in general. Thanks to Quynh and Google Translate for help with the translation.

On the morning of May 2nd, nearly 300 followers of the Baha’i Community in Vietnam attended the third annual National Convention of the Baha’i Community in Vietnam in Can Tho city.

The convention elected nine members of the religious council of the Baha’is of Vietnam for the 2010-2011 term and set out key tasks, following the motto “Sống tốt đời, đẹp đạo” (“Living well, in one’s life and in one’s faith”), aiming to improve the lives  of their brethren and benefit their country, to work effectively and mobilize their numbers to promote unity within the nation and solidarity with other religions.

Speaking at the conference, Mr. Đặng Tài Tính, Director of International Cooperation for the National Committee for Religious Department, stressed that the Government of Vietnam always implements a consistent policy to respect and ensure the freedom of belief and religion of the people, but that the people also have to comply with Vietnamese laws.

The charter of the Baha’i Community in Vietnam confirms in its principles and objectives that “activities shall be held in compliance with the laws of Vietnam, and shall uphold the spirit of harmony and unity of the nation and of religion, for the socio-economic development of the country…”, a crucial principle which serves to orient believers and grassroots organizations following the doctrine and laws of the Baha’i religion and the laws of Vietnam.

At the meeting, representatives of the Board of Counsellors[1] for Asia stated their appreciation to the Government of Vietnam’s facilitation for its help in facilitating the implementation of the activities of the Baha’i Community in Vietnam.

Mr. Nguyen Thuc, head of the interim board of representatives[2] of the Baha’i (religious) Community of Vietnam, said that since the recognition of its legal status, the entire community has entered a period of development and has achieved outstanding large-scale growth in individual religious practice, religious education, Holy day gatherings, the formation of committees and work groups and other administrative functioning.

In whichever locality Baha’i believers live and practice their religion, they largely have good relationships with government at all levels, allowing their activities to flourish in accordance with the Government’s policies on belief and religion and the provisions of law.

The Baha’i Faith came to Vietnam in 1954. The Baha’i religious community in Vietnam has almost 7,000 followers, faith activities in 43 provinces and cities, mainly concentrated in the central and southern regions.

The Baha’i community of Vietnam officially obtained its Certificate of Operation Registration[3] with the Government’s Committee for Religious Affairs on February 28th, 2007.

After nearly a year of operation, in July 2008, the Government’s Committee for Religious Affairs decided to recognize the religious organizations of the Baha’i religious community of Vietnam.

Up to now, the Baha’i Community of Vietnam has nearly 80 representatives of the Provisional Committee in the local level.

Footnotes:

The article mentions the rule of law many times over. I didn’t see the point of this until I started to read up on the history of religious groups in Vietnam, most of which seem to have had the unfortunate historical tendency to not only quarrel amongst themselves but try to overthrow governments. Some religious communities still display these tendencies, hence the constant reminders in modern government speech. Baha’is, though, are already enjoined by the core teachings of their Faith to show obedience and loyalty to their government, as the next paragraph states—a fact which apparently inspires some shock and awe in Vietnamese officials.

The term “Baha’i Community” is rendered consistently as “Baha’i religious community” in the original Vietnamese, but I’ve translated it as simply “Baha’i Community” for English readability.

1: The Continental Board of Counsellors, a high-level, non-clerical institution, purely advisory in character, with counterparts throughout the world; rendered as “Continental Advisory Committee” in the Vietnamese text.

2: The term translated here as “board of representatives” refers to the National Spiritual Assembly, a national body elected by the believers in a country to oversee the administrative affairs and spiritual health of the community.

3: I’m not really sure how this should be translated, but basically it’s a cerficate that shows they are officially registered as a religious community with the Government, and they are authorized to operate and conduct activities as such.

traumatic things happen sometimes. shocking, distressing, heartbreaking and life-changing things.

Quynh’s dear father, a humble, steadfast believer who tirelessly served the Cause of Baha’u'llah in Vietnam for forty years, passed away at the end of August. it was an accident; no warning, nothing. the family was devastated, and remains so, although with around six weeks worth of coming terms with the reality of what’s happened, wounds are slowly beginning to heal—perhaps tears act as a soothing balm in this case.

I’ve been in Vietnam since September 5th, or around two weeks after his passing, most of that time in Da Nang with Quynh’s mother, who’s taken her husband’s death the hardest. Part of my time is taken up with remote work for the Conference Board (a very positive arrangement that’s been working marvelously so far), and the rest with hanging being a good Vietnamese son-in-law—preparing rice for lunch, taking out the garbage, folding laundry, fetching things from nearby shops, doing odd jobs around the house, and keeping incense burning at the family shrine. I make sure to stay nearby in case Quynh’s mother needs anything, and I keep an eye open to make sure she’s not starting to sink into depression, which was common for the first while after I arrived. A 100-day period of mourning is common when a close family member passes away, and Hai (Quynh’s father) was very highly respected and very much loved by a vast group of friends and extended family. The hurt runs deep. I’m at a loss sometimes, because my command of Vietnamese isn’t good enough to express how I feel, or offer significant words of comfort. But I try my best, speak slowly when I need to, and things seem to work out.

When Quynh called me to tell me her father was in the hospital, I was having dinner with Catherine at a Vietnamese restaurant (a mediocre one—I won’t name names). after spending something like an hour speaking to her over the phone, I came back to my seat, finished my meal quickly, and cracked open the stereotypical fortune cookie, which told me to smile. Smiling was the last thing I wanted to do, especially after I heard the news the next morning. It was a difficult time. But I took it as a message, if not an incipient mission statement, for the journey on which I was about to embark: sometimes, especially when language and culture are barriers, the best thing you can do is to be strong, offer a shoulder to cry on, and smile. Sometimes i feel like I could, or should, be doing more, but maybe God has other plans for me right now.

As a postscript, thanks to all of you who’ve written with your condolences and assurance of prayers—even if I haven’t gotten around to thank you personally yet, you can rest assured that every single prayer has made a difference to the family.

I realize I’ve been pretty lax at blogging during the past little while; I blame the fact that so many eventful things have happened in that time. perhaps the most significant of these was my wedding—followers of this blog will remember that Quynh and I got engaged during my first trip to Vietnam; you may even have read the story. In the interest of saving some time while imparting some crucial information, I’ve collected a number of tweets relating to our wedding to share with you all. This installment covers the preparation for the wedding, beginning around December, all the way through to my arrival in Vietnam on February 20th. Check back for further installments and joyous reminiscing!

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Written on Feb. 25, 2010.

The air here in Da Nang is cool this afternoon, and the shade inside the dusty, cream-coloured offices of the Justice Department is a welcome change from the hot sun outside. I tap my thoughts and reflections out onto an iPhone as I wait for Quynh to finish her interview upstairs. We’re scheduled to be married in just over a week, and this set of interviews is the last legal hurdle to jump for our union to be recognized by the state – at least, besides signing a bunch more documents in triplicate.

I went under the scope first, and they brought in a translator to talk with me so they could make sense of my strange moon-language. The questions they asked were… bizarre. What’s her phone number? Her date of birth? Her email address? I guess I was expecting relevant questions, you know, like something besides what you’d put on a credit card application. But in retrospect, remembering what Quynh and I had discussed about the nature of the interview process, these banal questions make sense. They’re apparently intended to weed out arranged marriages, ones brokered through agents– proverbial “mail-order brides”.

I guess I always thought of the business of “mail-order marriages” as a big joke. I’d heard of stories regarding the practice and found them to be too unbelievable to be true. How could two people become so desperate– or morally directionless– as to reduce marriage to a mere transaction, to reduce a human being to a mere commodity? When Quynh explained to me that such “agency marriages” were a well-known (though strongly condemned) practice among Vietnamese women, I was filled with incalculable rage, so much so that I nearly fell off a speeding motorbike. it seemed to violate everything I’d ever believed about love, marriage, and human relationships.

supposedly the phenomenon is mainly driven by despair, on both sides. Quynh explained to me that many of the prospective husbands– the word “customers” brings my blood to a boil, although most are indeed customers– would be considered “past their prime”, and perhaps feel impotent to attract women in their own country. As a side note, some of Quynh’s neighbours have expressed astonished at how young I look– perhaps expecting her North American husband to be in his 50s. On the prospective bride’s side weighs the burden of percieved “marriageability”, or, in the case of a Vietnamese woman in her late 20s, the steadily dwindling levels thereof. In short, an unmarried woman over 30 years old is widely viewed as a failure. Such a perception isn’t unique to Vietnamese culture, but it’s much more pronounced here.

After the Great Wall (and the outlying Not-So-Great Wall, aka the Mediocre Wall) we decided we’d sleep in the next morning and catch the Forbidden City. The Forbidden City wasn’t so forbidden—they all let us in as long as we bought tickets. In fact, the only thing that was forbidden was going back in after you went out the back door. Attached is a photo of the brilliant commentary on the signage at the North Gate (tours go from south to north). All in all, we were amazed at how huge, er, how extreme the place was in all respects. We had a little game of “guess whether there’s another palace past this one”. I always lost, all the way to the end. The palaces kept on becoming more and more beautiful the further we went north—that is, the further we came to the emperor’s private dwelling—yet somehow, more and more lonely as well. You really get the feeling of being locked away in the proverbial ivory tower in there. I’m pretty sure there was an ivory tower somewhere, too.

After we finished walking through the Not-So-Forbidden City, we walked northwest of the grounds and ended up walking through Beihai Park (no, not Baha’i Park) at sunset, then making our way back to our hotel/hostel via Yoshinoya, a fast food restaurant with chicken-and-rice bowls, and Three Trees Coffee (see below). We found a pho restaurant not far from where we’re staying; we took a picture for the novelty, but we didn’t go in. We can get all the pho we need when we get back to Vietnam, we figure.  Today, we’re waking up early to see the Temple of Heaven and the Summer Palace. That means more excitement for us and more photos for you, when you wake up tomorrow.

Miss you all, and, as the postcards say, wish you were here.

from emails sent on march 15th.

we are in our nice and simple accommodations at the hutong inn in beijing. it’s not very fancy but it is very interesting. needless to say it is enough for the time being. it’s cold here – there’s even snow covering the ground, and the roofs. Quynh is not impressed because we also have “white sand” in Da Nang. :P

the train ride up from Guangzhou was long, but comfortable; we both managed to get a good sleep, despite our doorless, six-up bunk bed accommodations. the landscape was bleak and industrial for most of the time—not quite the China we’ve been accustomed to seeing in pictures.

[... later ...]

First day in Beijing is done; we went out to a hot pot restaurant, which Quynh recognized from having been to one in Malacca. It was pretty amazing. I thought it was filling, but Quynh insisted on going to pick up instant noodles afterwards. She jokes that she’s pregnant but I think she’s just Malaysian. [...]

We spent some time walking around through the hutongs (alleys) in the area of our hotel; it really is a neat place. We walked down one that was much like a pedestrian mall, lined with chic, eclectic cafés and shops, and they weren’t (all) pretentious. [...we explored] a Tibet-themed shop, much like the “3 Trees” shop on Main St. back in Ottawa. In a strange coincidence, we stopped in a place called Three Trees Coffee—we found out from their wifi. Most people can’t speak much English here, but we end up communicating well enough with our few words of broken Mandarin and the new Chinese-English dictionary on my iPhone.

We signed up for a trip to the Great Wall at Simatai tomorrow, so we’ll be gone the whole day. Simatai is the “Old West” of the Great Wall, although it’s to the northeast of Beijing. It’s billed as one of the most “unspoiled” parts of the Wall, probably because next to none of it has been restored or reconstructed. I don’t think “unspoiled” means “free from hawkers selling overpriced goods” though, since we were warned by our tour guide to stock up on cheap water and snacks here in Beijing before going. It’ll be a whole day trip, with a three-hour bus ride there and back. We leave at 6:20 AM from our hotel and return at around 5:30 PM. Phew. The rest of our stay here we’ll probably be visiting on our own, via the subway—which goes just about everywhere, except, oddly enough, for the train station we arrived from…

Quynh and I checked in to Hotel Elan in Guangzhou around an hour ago, after paying a quick visit to a friend at work. We’ll be going out for dinner soon—supposedly to a nice noodle place (“yellow noodles”, to be precise) somewhere. The hotel is nice, small, and cute. A bit salty around the edges, but for the (low) price we’re paying, it’s actually quite a good place. We left Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) at 8:20 in the morning and got in to Guangzhou’s Baiyun airport at around 12:00 local time, for roughly 2h30 worth of flight time. Arriving was a bit confusing, what with very little English posted anywhere, but thanks to my previous experience coming to Guangzhou, we boarded a shuttle bus to the Guangzhou West railway station for only 16 yuan apiece and walked (with only light luggage) the rest of the way to our destination, saving us about 70-80 yuan over taking a taxi from the airport.

China’s cold, compared to Ho Chi Minh City. And it’ll only get colder in Beijing. Quynh is complaining about this but she’s very happy to be in a city with so many shoes. More on that later, of course. Now we’re off to dinner. 回头见。

When Quynh and I broadcasted our engagement ceremony over the internet, we neglected to provide an explanation (or translation!) of what was happening, and most people felt a little lost watching the ceremony take place. “What are they doing? They’ve got rings… is this a wedding? I thought it was an engagement.” “There’s a lot of talking, and I can’t understand what they’re saying… when are they married?” To avoid that this time, here’s a brief overview of what we expect to happen during the wedding ceremony, that’ll be broadcast live as it happens, right here on doberman pizza (be sure to find your local time for the event so you don’t miss it—it’ll be 9 PM Eastern Time on March 5th, which is 9 AM on March 6th in Vietnam time).

Wedding programme

1. Introduction of the wedding ceremony’s program.

“Cultural” Vietnamese ceremony

2. Introduction of the two families.
3. A representative from the groom’s family presents gifts to the bride’s family.—These gifts, colloquially referred to as “red boxes”, contain traditional items—such as candles, tea, betel nuts, and so on—given to the bride’s family as a bride price, a long-standing custom in many Asian cultures.
4. A representative from the bride’s family receives and accepts the red boxes.—A running joke during our engagement was that the bride’s family had the option to refuse the gifts, meaning the groom would have to leave and come back another time with better gifts before he could receive his future bride.
5. The groom and bride present their two families.
6. The groom gives the bride the wedding bouquet.
7. Praying for ancestors.—Ancestor worship is a strongly rooted custom in many Asian cultures. In the Vietnamese custom, this includes burning candles and incense, offering fruit and flowers, and displays of veneration and respect such as bowing towards the altar, which is decorated with photos of the deceased. In a Baha’i ceremony, prayers are also offered.

Baha’i ceremony

8. Reading the opening prayer.
9. The groom offers a prayer and recites the Baha’i wedding vow.
10. The bride offers a prayer and recites the Baha’i wedding vow.—The Baha’i wedding vow is a verse revealed by Baha’u'llah: “We will all, verily, abide by the Will of God.”
11. The bride and groom exchange wedding rings.
12. An excerpt from the guidance of ‘Abdu’l-Baha on marriage is read.
13. A representative from the groom’s family confirms their acceptance of the bride as their daughter-in-law.
14. A representative from the bride’s family confirms their acceptance of the groom as their son-in-law.
15. The Chairman of the Spiritual Assembly of the Baha’is of Hải Châu, Da Nang, confirms the marriage.—A Baha’i marriage must be accepted as valid by the local Spiritual Assembly.
16. Gifts from the two families, relatives and friends are offered.—Gifts (usually red envelopes) are given to the new couple at this point by those assembled.
17. Either the bride or groom thanks those assembled.
18. Reading the closing prayer.
19. Break; the bride’s family gets ready to send the bride off.