On Saturday my friend Chi took me to a festival outside of Hanoi. It took over an hour to get there on the back of a motorbike through deadly traffic. People would apparently rather risk their lives driving madly through the traffic then wait for a minute or two for the danger to pass.

The festival itself was very strange. There were a bunch of stalls selling a random selection of things and then were was a parade of sorts through a field. The temple was very popular and there was a sea of people trying to get there throughout the day. There was also a selection of strange entertainment. One game involved being blindfolded in a pen with a goat and having to walk around trying to find the goat. Another involved being blindfolded and walking in a straight line towards a piece of pottery suspended from a post that you had to hit with a stick. There was also an incredibly dangerous looking swing thing. It was made out of wood and the aim of it was that two people stood on the bar at the bottom and used their weight to get the swing moving. As far as I could understand the aim seemed to be to get the swing as high as possible. It looked incredibly dangerous! The whole structure creaked and wobbled and on a couple of occasions the bar was hammered back into place at the bottom but that didn't seem to stop people from swarming around trying to get a go at killing themselves!


A lot of Chi's friends from uni were there so I was a source of fascination. They all wanted to talk to me and have their photo taken with me! They were all lovely people though so it was cool. We ate some random snacks (everything seemed to be made from rice!) drank beer and then went for some pho. I'm still not great with chopsticks so everyone was hugely entertained by my efforts to eat my lunch! As weird as the festival was it was good fun in a strange stepping back to the past kinda way.


Getting out of the festival was another adventure. We had to walk along the main road to get to Chi's bike but this was made pretty much impossible by the number of people jamming up the road. Unlike back home where people will sit in a relatively orderly fashion here everyone tries to push their way forward. It's evident in the country as a whole - for example getting on a bus is a scramble with people pushing and shoving their way on - but was even more extreme at this festival than usual. The road was surrounded by flooded fields and so there was nowhere to go except along the road. People were pushing through the crowds on their bikes and trying to get ahead of everyone else even though there wasn't really anywhere to go. Pedestrians were relegated to the very edges of the road and sometimes we had to walk right on the edge in the slimy mud.


Once back at the bike we had to drive along dusty mud paths between the fields to get back to the main road. It was insane!


Never again will I complain about getting out of festivals back home. At least there is some semblance of order there!