The best day of my life essay

Artist Bùi Hoàng Dương. Photo courtesy of the artist

HÀ NỘI  The secrets of spiritual culture and life of the Mường ethnic minority in the north-central province of Thanh Hóa will be revealed at an exhibition titled Mo Mường to be held this week.

The exhibition will display 35 paintings and two installations by Bùi Hoàng Dương, a Mường artist from Thanh Hóa.

It features the Mo Mường – a popular ritual ceremony which has become the unique cultural heritage of the Mường ethnic community in Thanh Hóa and many other provinces in the northern mountainous region.

Mo Mường is a job and also a performance practiced at funerals, religious festivals, and life cycle rituals by the ethnic Mường sorcerers.

“Ah…. Today I clasp my hands together to pray to you here.” That is the opening words of a sorcerer in most of the praying practice that Dương had been very familiar with since he was a little child living in his native village in Thạch Thành District.

Dương said he was born in a family with generations of practicing the  Mường prayers. His great-grandfather recited the prayers but since he passed away in 1954, the practice no longer remained in the family. However, many of his followers tried to preserve it.

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An oii and canvas painting features part of the Mo Mường practice. — Photo courtesy of the artist

​The artist said his exhibition was aimed to help promote and preserve the unique cultural value of the Mường.

“About 10 years ago, many people did not understand Mường prayer, so considered it a kind of superstition due to the wrong methods of some local shamans. Actually, Mường prayers are all about morality, ethics and doctrines of humanity and life that teach people about good personality, social behaviour and filial piety. Many practitioners now understand they have a responsibility to lead the nation in the best spiritual direction, maintain and protect the cultural foundations,” said Dương.

Dương, who has travelled extensively throughout the country and abroad since 2000, has a deep and endless affection for social life, humans and animals particularly dogs which appear in many of his works displayed in this exhibition.

Commenting on his works, writer Nguyễn Đình Chính said: “It is not unusual that when people see paintings, they often ignore what is ‘right or wrong, ugly or beautiful’. If they like, they will stop to look at them but If they don’t, they will walk away.”

“It is not like that for Dương’s paintings. Even if you don’t like them, you can’t walk away,” he said.

“Be patient and wait until the colour and lines in the paintings disappear. The paintings are slowly emanating and erupting a very strange but familiar energy. It is not the energy that pushes people to drown and become corrupted in hatred, greed and confusion but a clean spirit that inspires people to slowly find the deep, pure, true dimension hidden in their souls, helping us know who we are, where we come from and where we will go. Strangely, we also understand deeply about the natural world, which we are exposed to every day by our five senses. That real world, actually is not real,” Chính said.

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A painting shows one Mo performing the Mo Mường – a spiritual activity of the Mường people in Thanh Hóa Province. — Photo courtesy of the artist

​This is Dương’s fourth solo exhibitions since 2007. His latest group exhibition was XOM, which took place in Hà Nội last August.

He chose this time to open the display as it was safer since COVID-19 impacted the whole art and culture sector. The artist said he spent almost a year preparing for it and hoped he would help preserve the Mường epic poem “Land and Water”.

Through the generations, Mường prayers have been passed down verbally in the community. When they’re collected, translated, and published in books, however, they begin to exist separately from people.

These days, most Mường prayers are called “Mo Mường”. They are a collection of verses recited at traditional Mường funerals.

Each Mường community has its own version of prayers, but they are all fairly similar. The existence of various versions of “Mo Mường” has helped expand the heritage and spiritual life of the Mường people.

The Mo Mường exhibition will open between April 24-28 at the Việt Nam National Fine Arts Museum at 66 Nguyễn Thái Học Street, Hà Nội. — VNS

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Diệp Phan

Sausage salad includes tré, sausage chunks, local herbs and other ingredients, giving it different flavours and textures. VNS Photo Diệp Phan

In recent years, the sour and savory sausage salad featuring tré , a Central Việt Nam sour sausage, has become popular among streetside-food fanatics.

This simple dish is a stunning array of tré , sausage chunks tossed with cucumber, Vietnamese coriander and garlic.

Depending on the vendor, boiled quail egg, ambarella or guava can be added to the jumble. Sausage choices also vary from beef paste to sour sausage to pork paste.

The salad is bound with a mixture of pepper, chili, sugar and salt or fish sauce and a squeeze of kumquat for a refreshing punch.

Lê Thị Loan, owner of a vendor in District 1, adds a special homemade sauce made from fish sauce to her sausage salad, which keeps her customers coming back for more.

“Customers love the sour and savory taste of my sausage salad. I stir all the ingredients gently to make sure every bite is flavourful,” she told Việt Nam News .

A serving of sausage salad typically includes bread, prawn cracker or grilled rice paper, and a simple dipping sauce of salt, pepper and chili.

Sausage salad is a symphony of many different flavours and textures. The tangy tré , the soft and savory sausages, the freshness of local herbs and the crunchiness of crackers.

Tré is the dish’s defining ingredient, made by julienning boiled pork and pork ears, then flavouring with powdered grilled rice, galangal, ginger, sesame seed and other seasonings. The mixture is wrapped in layers of guava leaves and banana leaves and fermented for around 3-4 days.

Cao Dương Quỳnh Thơ, a student in HCM City, said that her family in the central city of Đà Nẵng always makes tré on Tết (Lunar New Year) so sausage salad is her comfort food every time homesickness hits.

“For many people, tré can taste rather strong, but when mixed with other ingredients, it becomes a delight for people of all ages. My friends from other regions now love it too,” Thơ added.

Tré, the soul of the sausage salad, is a Central Vietnam speciality made from pork ears. – VNS Photo Diệp Phan

Popular with youth

Sausage salad attracts both the after-school and after-midnight crowd with its flavour and reasonable price, ranging from VNĐ40,000-60,000 (US$1.74-2.60).

“Many young people enjoy this snack. We eat this while chatting with friends,” Trần Võ Thảo Nhi, a frequent customer of Loan’s, said.

Many young people in HCM City love having sausage salad as an evening snack. VNS Photo Việt Dũng

Customers can adjust the level of spiciness and even the choice of sausage.

Lê Thị Nguyệt, who has been a street vendor in District 3 for 40 years, said that many foreign tourists visited her stall before the pandemic. Some even ordered tré to take with them as the Central Vietnam speciality can be kept refrigerated for a long time.

To those who have grown tired of greasy fast food or are just craving a sour and savory delight, sausage salad is a great street-side snack worth trying. VNS

Sausage salad is best enjoyed with prawn cracker. VNS Photo Việt Dũng

HAGL’s young Vietnamese stars are in fine form and enjoying their football. Photo thethaovanhoa.vn

Peter Cowan

For a long time, the huge support Hoàng Anh Gia Lai (HAGL) have here in Việt Nam baffled me.

Since I arrived in the country, they haven’t finished any higher than seventh place in the V.League 1 and play in the Central Highlands city of Pleiku, not exactly one of the country’s biggest or most bustling cities.

Sure, I understood many of the national team’s top youngsters have been moulded at the club, but still, this is the country’s second-best supported team? A team made up of prodigious talents who always seem to fall short of their potential? Playing for a team literally named after a large corporation?

This season though, it’s finally starting to make sense to me.

Those talents are finally living up to the hype and HAGL sit atop the V.League 1 table, three points clear of second-placed Viettel after defeating Hà Nội FC 1-0 in Pleiku on Sunday.

Yes, Hà Nội are languishing in eighth place and barring a miracle are out of the title race, but the match was still seen as an important yardstick for HAGL due to the capital side’s dominance of domestic football in recent years.

Tickets were in such hot demand that some fans reportedly queued up from Saturday night just to get theirs, while some tickets reportedly sold on the black market for VNĐ1.5 million, a huge markup and frankly something the league shouldn’t let happen, but still an indicator of how big this game was.

As is so often the way with much-hyped matches, the actual product on the pitch failed to live up to expectations to a degree and we weren’t treated to the free-scoring spectacle many had hoped for.

That being said though, HAGL’s ability to grind out the goal to nil victory shows how this season they can actually go all the way.

Part of why HAGL are so loved is the brand of football they have played over the years or at least the brand they have espoused.

While they have never tried to walk it in like Arsenal circa mid 2000s, the Pleiku based side have been renowned for being sticklers for style and aesthetics over everything, sometimes to the cost of winning.

At the start of the 2020 season, South Korean coach Lee Tae-hoon proclaimed that his HAGL team would put aside this focus on beauty in favour of playing “like warriors” and with a “stronger spirit”.

Things didn’t quite work out for Lee, who was shown the door last November, but his replacement has shown that you don’t have to follow the Sam Allardyce school of management to produce a winning team.

Kiatisuk ‘Zico’ Senamuang has moulded essentially the same group of players Lee and several of his predecessors struggled to do anything with into a cohesive, exciting and, most importantly, winning team.

HAGL may still ship more goals than they would like, but under Senamuang they can outscore anyone and have just enough nous to hold onto leads.

Best of all, the attacking success is being driven by Vietnamese players Nguyễn Công Phượng, Nguyễn Văn Toàn, Vũ Văn Thanh and Lương Xuân Trường, who scored an absolute peach of a winner on Sunday.

While Brazilian forward Washington Brandao has had a great season so far for HAGL, it’s those Vietnamese stars who have been at the heart of the team’s attacking verve, with Toàn, in particular, showing huge strides in his development from a mere speed merchant to a canny forward.

While personally, I’ll never be able to cheer too loudly for a team named after a company, this season has finally shown me what all the fuss about HAGL is. Now they just have to go on and win the whole thing. VNS

Bùi Minh Tuân believes that hydrometeorology sector is an interesting discipline and offers many opportunities for young people to be truly passionate about natural sciences. — Photo kienthuc.net.vn

HÀ NỘI — Bùi Minh Tuân, lecturer at the Meteorology and Oceanography Faculty under the Hà Nội University of Natural Sciences, has been nominated for the Tạ Quang Bửu Award this year for his research on weather forecasting.

Tuân, 33, specialised in research on rain forecast over a period of 10 – 90 days during his studies for a master’s degree at the Hà Nội University of Natural Sciences.

“Rain is an extremely important factor for the development of most countries in the world including Việt Nam. If rainfall is too heavy, it can lead to flooding, causing serious damage to people and materials. But too little rainfall can cause drought, a lack of water for drinking and can destroy crops. Therefore, rain forecasting is always the top concern of meteorologists around the world,” said Tuân.

The meteorological sector in recent years has seen strong development. Weather forecasts for five days have the same accuracy as one-day forecasts of 30 years ago. But, Tuân said, this does not mean that in the next 30 years, the forecasts will be five times more accurate.

“There are big obstacles that the meteorological industry has not been able to overcome. Technically, a computer can help to make forecast bulletins that cover a month or longer, however, the reliability of the forecast will drop very quickly after five or seven days,” Tuân told vietnamnet.vn .

Currently, theoretical foundations for short-term forecasting, from one to five days, have been gradually finalised. Therefore, weather forecasts for this time period are relatively good. However, atmospheric changes on a longer time scale, from 10 to 90 days, are not fully understood. This is also one of the main reasons why the forecast is not reliable at this time.

Those concerns have prompted Tuân to study changes in rainfall patterns from 10 to 90 days, towards expanding the accuracy of forecasts.

From 2013 to 2019, Tuân tackled a number of issues, including the cyclical fluctuations of rainfall in Việt Nam and how these relate to climatic regions.

Tuân said it took him a year to read and understand the algorithms and build computation programmes for large atmospheric data sets over the course of 30 years, in the 1980-2010 period.

“These are complex algorithms, requiring high programming skills. But due to the lack of support from information technology specialists, I have had many difficulties in dealing with this problem,” said Tuân.

After the computational results have been obtained, analysing the physical process based on those results is also a challenge.

The reason is that Việt Nam’s climate is very complicated, affected by many large circulation systems and has strong differentiation between regions. The characteristics of rain and the mechanism of precipitation in the country still causes a lot of controversy in the meteorological community. Therefore, selection of important aspects for analysis also requires a lot of time.

Tuân took another year to analyse the results. What he collected during this time helped uncover the oscillation pattern of rain. The physical mechanisms involved in this volatility have also been shown.

He found a relationship of this oscillation with the occurrence of heavy rain in Việt Nam. This brings a lot of value, because heavy rain is considered anomalous and difficult to predict. Tuân’s research is an important theoretical basis to expand the ability to predict rain and heavy rain from 10-25 days.

Thanks to these results, by early 2019, his article was published in the Journal of Climate – a climate magazine of the American Meteorological Association.

But, Tuân still says there is loneliness in science.

“The computer system was there, but to improve, the human factor is a prerequisite. In Việt Nam today, the number of people who choose to follow the research path in this field is very small,” he said.

The meteorology industry still seems to be “out of the general trajectory of development”, when after nearly 10 years, despite some changes, it is still slow and only motivated by a few individuals. There are not many people doing research in the same field, so it is very difficult to find an academic exchange.

Part of the reason, Tuân thinks, is that the support for young researchers is still relatively low compared to the general level of society. This will likely lead to a crisis in high-quality human resources in the future.

Currently, each training course in his faculty recruits only about 30-40 students. While majors require people who are good at math, physics or programming, very few people choose meteorology.

The young lecturer said that the industry was still not respected because people think this sector is mostly theoretical. But in fact, it has a huge impact on the life, economy and society, such as planning production activities, forecasting diseases and preventing natural disasters.

“I hope in the future, society will know more about the hydrometeorology sector. This is an interesting discipline and offers many opportunities for young people to be truly passionate about natural sciences,” said Tuân.

The Tạ Quang Bửu Award, started in 2015, is the award of the Ministry of Science and Technology, annually held to encourage and honour scientists with outstanding achievements in basic research in the fields of natural sciences and engineering, contributing to promoting Việt Nam’s science and technology integration and development. — VNS

From left to right: PhD Dương Thị Hồng, deputy director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, Australian Ambassador to Việt Nam Robyn Mudie, and Rana Flowers, UNICEF Representative in Việt Nam pose at the launching ceremony of the supportive package to help support COVID-19 vaccine delivery in Việt Nam. — Photo courtesy of the Australian Embassy

HÀ NỘI — Australia, in co-operation with UNICEF, on Monday launched a support package worth AU$13.5 million (VNĐ241 billion) to aid COVID-19 vaccine delivery in Việt Nam.

Speaking at the launching ceremony, Australian Ambassador to Việt Nam Robyn Mudie said the first shipment of COVID-19 vaccines via COVAX Facility has arrived in the country , so it was necessary to ensure Việt Nam was fully prepared to administer the mass immunisation programme against COVID-19.

The package will assist Việt Nam in a range of areas to ensure successful vaccine delivery, focusing on helping the country purchase cold chain equipment to store and transport vaccine doses.

It will also provide training courses and materials for Việt Nam’s health workers and officials, and assist with the development of immunisation plans in remote localities.

The funding will support technical assistance for immunisation planning, assessments of vaccine safety and quality, capacity building for health workforces and developing information and communications campaigns.

“Over the coming months, we will be liaising with the Ministry of Health to plan how we can best complement Việt Nam’s vaccination roll-out,” she said.

Rana Flowers, UNICEF Representative in Việt Nam, said introducing a new vaccine for COVID-19 was a colossal task for any government with many important steps.

UNICEF, in co-operation with the government of Australia, will work with the Ministry of Health of Việt Nam and other partners to support the introduction and rollout of COVID-19 vaccines in Việt Nam.

“No one is safe until everyone is safe, so mass vaccination against COVID-19 is an important step to contain the pandemic, protect frontline workers who serve children and for the country to reopen to the rest of the world,” she said.

PhD Dương Thị Hồng, deputy director of the National Institute of Hygiene and Epidemiology, which has been assigned to receive the support, said the institute would take advantage of the support for the delivery of vaccines to ensure a successful mass immunisation programme.

The package aims to help Việt Nam inoculate the prioritised 20 per cent of the population by the end of 2022 and set the foundation for immunising the remainder of the population as vaccines are rolled out nationwide.

Funding for the programme is drawn from Australia’s A$523.2 million regional Vaccine Access and Health Security Initiative, as well as from Australia’s bilateral development co-operation programme with Việt Nam.

In total, Australia has committed A$40 million over three years to support Việt Nam’s vaccine procurement and delivery efforts. Of that, A$34 million comes from Australia’s Vaccine Access and Health Security Initiative, and A$6 million from Australia’s bilateral development co-operation programme. — VNS

Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport has been struggling with overcrowding in recent days, with passengers having to wait in queues for hours and running the risk of missing their flights. — Photo nld.com.vn

HCM CITY — Tân Sơn Nhất International Airport in HCM City, the country’s largest, has been crowded in the last few days and people have had to queue up for hours.

Despite there being no evident reason for the congestion since there have been no holidays like Tết , there seem to be more and more passengers as domestic travel is returning to normal due to Việt Nam’s success in containing the COVID-19 pandemic.

People almost missed flights due to the long queues and airline staff needed to use microphones and placards to find passengers requiring to board soon.

Nguyễn Thanh, who flew to Hà Nội on a 10am flight on Friday, told VnExpress online newspaper that even though she and her family arrived at the airport at 8am, they were still waiting at the security checkpoint at 9.40am and had to seek help from airline staff to catch their flight.

Some travellers struggled with the medical declaration or forgot to do it, which made the wait longer.

The airport has also tightened security checks ahead of the April 30-May 1 holidays.

The crowding was worse before weekends, with the number of passengers rising from 64,000 on Wednesday to 77,000 the next day.

The airport has instructed airlines to station more personnel to support their customers with procedures to speed up things, and has increased the number of its staff and scanners at security checkpoints.

A Vietnam Airlines spokesperson said the carrier has increased the number of staff to support customers.

The airport was designed to serve 25 million passengers a year by 2020, but has been handling nearly 40 million since 2017.

Construction of its third terminal is slated to begin in October, which will increase its capacity to 50 million passengers a year. — VNS