Sunday

This is pretty much the last you're going to hear about Tết from me. Later this morning, still early, we'll hop on a plane to Bangkok and a connection to New Delhi. We're going to visit with dear friends from Monterrey. We will return home late on February thirteenth after a ten-day vacation. I'll probably have the lights off here at the Update Column until Valentine's Day. What we will be missing here in Vietnam: whatever happens as the festivities increase heading toward Tết, which is celebrated all next week but actually lands on Thursday, February seventh. Why have we picked now to go to India, where they do not celebrate the lunar new year? Well, much of Saigon will be closed next week, for one thing. While the tourist industry is seeing record sales (many packages were sold out by mid-January*), actually living here can be difficult when the local amenities disappear over the six-day holiday period next week. Many of our friends are also traveling, as much due to the week off work as anything else. Lastly, most small town Vietnamese will be traveling home for the holiday, sometimes a long trip in a country with only two really large cities, meaning that a good, traditional Tết, historically a family-reunion holiday, might be difficult to experience from the sidelines here. That said, I'm getting really interested in what we'll be missing: the pretty potted apricot trees everywhere, lush with yellow flowers; lime trees littered with lucky money; intermittent eruptions of incense, fireworks, and lion dancing, red-and-gold ornamental rat lanterns (and the gentler, copyright-infringed Disney mouse on things for kids)—these are all making me want to see what more will come between now and next week. It'll have to wait until Year of the Ox, though. [Cavin]