One of the many amazing things about traveling was the opportunity to meet new people on the road. During my trip to Hanoi, I met Hoang, a cheerful woman who worked at one of the many Sihn Tourist offices in the city. Recommended by another traveler friend, Jerik, I sought her out after I arrived to avail of a Halong Bay and Sapa tour. We met and conducted business, but by the end of our transaction, she unexpectedly extended an invitation for me to join her and some friends for dinner at her place. Shy and feeling a bit paranoid, brought on by a number of Asian gore movies, a series of images involving hacksaws, chains, and giant hammers flashed before me. "Hello Mark, you want to come, yes?" Hoang tapped me on my arm with a glistening smile, and I was back in the real world. "Sure, what time? I would love to go," I told her.
Hanoi Spring Roll and a Conversation through Google Translation
It was winter in Hanoi, and the next day Hoang picked me up in front of the Thang Long theater after I watched the city's popular cultural show, 'the water puppet.' I sat almost frozen at the back of her motorbike as we crisscrossed the busy Hanoi streets, barely avoiding mishaps only by inches; I felt the coldness blowing fiercely on my face. It was a smooth ride going out of Hanoi's boundary into the outer city, giving me an opportunity for extra sightseeing riding in tandem with Hoang. I felt my hands almost going numb while losing my grip on the back handle; fortunately, Hoang would slow down once in a while, enough for me to tighten my hold once again.
We arrived at her apartment after forty-five minutes, and one by one, her friends started arriving. My introversion at being a stranger vanished as soon as they stepped inside flashing their widest grins. Hoang introduced them to me; I heard Vietnamese names that I soon completely forgot. I sensed that they were not fluent in English, so the language barrier became the biggest elephant in the room as we just nodded at each other. Later on, their curiosity over their guest took a foothold in the situation, as one of them struggled to ask me questions in English.
Bridging the Gap
Noticing the strange situation of mixing verbal mismatches and weird hand gestures from both of us, one of them brought a laptop and browsed the internet. After a while, he handed me the laptop showing a Google translation page with his question typed in a box while another box showed its English translation. The result was not perfect, but through that virtual translation program, I was able to share some information about myself by answering Google's translated questions such as: "Your Brother Sister aren't here, how old them?", "You here sightseeing or marrying?", "Your parents alcoholic or alive?" There was this one ridiculous Google-translated question that was hilarious, but somehow I had forgotten about it already.
So you get the drift about how our conversations through Google translation occurred. I learned from them how they admired Hoang and me for speaking good English; I told them I wished I could speak Vietnamese fluently as well. They kidded me that I should stay in Hanoi for long. I thought about it and in fact had entertained the idea of working there since another friend I had met there, Kach—a Filipina—and her boyfriend Jon (from the UK) had been living and working there for several months and were earning good money teaching English.
While Hoang finished cooking the spring rolls and the fish and vegetable dish, her friends and I exchanged 'cheers' over a small cup of tea, which somehow helped warm me up while seated on the cold flooring. During the course of the dinner, I downed a handful of spring rolls as they egged me on by saying, "Eat more good food." I stayed there up until around ten o'clock in the evening after I joined them for a few rounds of Vietnamese wine, which had the effect of a Ginebra and Emperador combined. Good thing I did not fall off Hoang's motorbike on the way back to my hostel.
Riding at the back of Hoang's motorbike as she took me back to the Old French Quarter in Hanoi, the cold intensified, but I could not be bothered. Hoang was talking to me, but I could not hear her clearly, but I was sure she was doing so with a smile on her face as I could hear giggles trailing her voice. That night's dinner with new friends definitely made me more at ease with the city—as the next few days I ended up exploring Hanoi with a feeling that I never went anywhere but home, and I learned that the battering rams of communication could easily breach any kind of language barrier.
