Valentet

On Saturday night, my roommate and I participated in a show called “Valentet,” put on at Chuong Vuong secondary school (where he and I both do a bit of teaching). The school’s director, Miss Thuy, is a bubbly woman whose English is fantastic and who seems to be connected to just about everyone in Hanoi. She and a few of the other teachers organize the Valentet show every year right before the Tet holiday. The show runs for about two hours, and all of the students perform. Acts range from hip hop dancing to singing to the most adorable performances by the younger students. It’s fairly famous and has appeared on Vietnamese television before, which added an extra touch of excitement to the whole thing.

Miss Thuy made sure that I was able to dress up in “ao gai,” the traditional dress for Vietnamese women (http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Aodai). The funniest part of the night for me was when I was in the dressing room with a group of women and four or five ao gais, where we all frantically tried to find one that would fit (as all the women who were lending me their dresses are about a foot shorter than me). When we finally succeeded, I emerged from the dressing room to find my roommate dressed up like this:

Then, we went outside to watch the performance and do some dancing ourselves. My participation in the show was a total surprise to Chaz – during the act he was performing in, I ran up on stage mid-song and started dancing along with him. Things got a liiiitle awkward because my dance only lasted for like 15 seconds and I had no idea what the rest of the song's dance routine consisted of, but I managed to make it work. Then, at the end of the show, the two of us and the two other foreign English teachers at the school took tons of pictures with both our students and other children. Here are a few pictures of the stage: