Will be back in Hanoi for just a week to do some intensive teaching at the national maternity hospital.
I was there last year for a longer period and this was the resulting thread:
Changes this time: I’m taking my teenage son, who has just finished his high school final exams and will be acting as a gofer for the course admin team. We are staying at a mandated hotel; the teaching schedule means we will have to do the hotel breakfast buffet every morning as we need to be leaving for the hospital at 7:30am. Teaching finishes around 6pm every day but we will be part of a group of UK faculty and I think there might be some pressure to go out as a group in the evenings. The drawback to this is (in my experience), a lot of UK faculty want to eat European style food or in sit-down restaurants which are (1) boring (2) expensive. Hmmmm. Watch this space.
Can’t you use your son as an excuse for not joining the group every evening? “It’s his first time here, I want to give him a real flavor of the culture, so we will go off on our own to explore several times during our stay.” You could even add “And anyone who wants to come along for the food stall experience is welcome to join us.”
Just announce to them that you are taking your son to explore the town and ask if anyone wants to join. Who knows, maybe its not just you who are the intrepid traveler. But then again, you have to sleep and wake up early, hopefully you will both get some time to venture out.
The weather may end up literally dampening our plans. At the online briefing over Zoom yesterday we were warned to expect very changeable weather. Apparently at this time of year can swing between sunny in 104 degrees to torrential constant rain in 83 degrees! We are packing umbrellas.
Last time I worked in Hanoi was in October and the weather was perfect.
