More Family Outings Part 1

Man, it has been an exhausting week.  This week I took a couple days off from work to go with my host father to his hometown in Nghe An province. We boarded a sleeper bus at 11:00pm on Monday and got off around 6:00am in Vinh city in Nghe An province.  Besides the fact that my bed was perhaps a foot too short for me, the bus ride wasn't too bad.  We took a taxi to my father's hometown in the countryside.  This area beat Hoa Binh as being the most rural part of Vietnam I had been to so far.

We arrived at my host dad's father's house around 7:00am and I began meeting my host dad's extended family.  My host dad is one of eight children, so his extended family was very large. They had all gathered here because my host dad's grandmother's grave was being moved from Ha Noi to the countryside.  Apparently the previous grave site of the grandmother was going to have a road built over it so they decided to rebury her near her hometown.  I've also heard that it is a tradition to bury the dead nearby the place they died and then around four years later dig their body up and rebury their bones in smaller coffin in their home village.  My host mother, who had stayed in Hoa Binh, arrived later in the morning.

The casket arrived around 11:00am. They gathered around the casket and burned incense.  Two women began crying loudly.  While this was happening, primary school students who were riding by on bicycles stopped on the side of the road.  There was soon a crowd of at least twenty of them.  I got the feeling that they were stopping to look at me instead of the ceremony.  My host father motioned me to go back to the house.  I happily complied and, on arriving, took a much needed nap. I woke up in time for lunch which was amazingly good and then took another nap.  When I awoke, I found that it was time to move the casket to where it was to be buried.  A procession moved up the nearby hill with about eight or nine people carrying the casket.

We reached the top and another ceremony was conducted.  At first I felt a little awkward about taking pictures and asked a couple times if it was ok.  However, both my host dad and his cousins were very incessant on me taking pictures and kept pressuring to take more.  So I took a lot of pictures and some videos:

I'm not sure how long we were up there, but the whole ordeal seemed to last quite a while.  When we got back to the house, my host father took me on a motorbike ride.

All of a sudden we stopped.  A car came up carrying some family members and we all walked out into a field to another ancestor's grave/altar.  This was apparently the grave of the father of the ancestor they worshiped in Hoa Binh. I stood off to the side with the girlfriend of one of the cousins and a family friend and watched the priest, my host father, host mother, and a couple other relatives go through the rituals.

That night we had a huge feast. Several tables were spread out around the home. Different cousins, uncles, and neighbors made the rounds to around each table toasting each other with rice wine (which is more the equivalent of vodka than wine).  Man, a lot of rice wine was drunk those two days.  People had begun toasting at 7:00 that morning and it didn't stop until 7:00 the next morning.  Actually, scratch that, it kept going until lunch the next day and probably kept going until dinner but by then my host parents and I had left.  All in all, it was a fun night with lots of laughs.