too much silence can be misleading

I'm back in good ol' Hanoi, in the polluted air, constantly honking traffic, and my old room at the guesthouse where the water pressure never really makes it to the top floor, where there is no elevator (or shower curtain, for that matter), where the only two breakfast options are bread or pho, and honestly it feels great.

Not that I didn't have a complete and absolute blast on the tour of Central Viet Nam that we took this past week. Because I absolutely did, even though I've never been so scarred by bathrooms in my life (you are my hero, inventor of Purell) and I don't think I've woken up before 7 am for that many days in a row since... high school. During the week, we trekked through the mountains and rice paddies; got caught in the rain; slept in a communal house in a village for one night (and got woken up at about 5 am by roosters); saw the My Son temples; and rented cyclos in Hue (not just to ride, but also to drive and race around the city in oncoming traffic -- with a quick stop to get sugar cane juice, freshly squeezed, of course). I also got 2 dresses and a complete suit fitted and made for me in Hoi An (known as the tailoring capital of the nation); almost hit a motorbike while riding a bike at night in Hoi An (which really is quite pathetic because traffic there is absolutely tame in comparison to traffic in Hanoi); got my fortune told (twice); took about 500 pictures; and spent what feels like a lifetime's worth of time on a bus, bumping along from Hue to Hoi An to Da Nang to Kon Tum.

(And I don't even want to think about how many grammatical errors, run-on sentences, and comma splices just happened in that above paragraph.)

But of all the family-style dinners we had (and we had them every night), the one that stands out in my mind does so because of a reason more somber than our divide-and-conquer eating style or our ongoing game of anywhere-anytime charades.

To be brief (because I hate writing about things I wish had never happened): we were just finishing up our dinner at Banana Leaves in Hoi An, when Professor Harms stood up to say that he had just received a phone call telling us that one of our program coordinators, Hiliary, had been killed in a car accident in Portland, Oregon.

I remember thinking as he was talking that he must be joking. But then Alex just looked at me and said, "Why would he joke about this?" And it really sunk in.

I'll never forget the looks on everyone's faces, the silence that followed, the untouched fruit that came to the table, Jack Johnson's "No Other Way" playing in the background.

Thanks, Hiliary, for sharing with us your love for Viet Nam, for making Hanoi feel a little more like home, and for always being a smiling face.