Tet

Tet is the celebration of the lunar new year in Vietnam. It is their most important holiday and preparation begins weeks in advance. We were able to spend Tet with a local family that has kind of taken me in. We ate traditional foods and shared a few drinks. Tet is celebrated like our Thanksgiving or Christmas in America in that everyone goes home to visit their families. So in Dalat all the students went home for about three weeks starting at the beginning of February. Which means Dalat was basically a ghost town. So much so that almost every business including the large corporate ones were shut down and locked up. Somehow a really relaxed city turned into a even more eerily quiet hill station. Some of the traditional foods we had included some sort of sticky rice cake, candied coconut, candied ginger, and pig head cheese. The cherry trees blossom, people go home, they have large parties, and eat sweets. It's probably the most wonderful time of the year in Vietnam.