For foreigners living and working in Vietnam, Tet holiday is a special occasion because they have the chance to experience traditional customs and the beauty of Vietnamese culture.
Mr. Steven Groff, an editor, has welcomed 14 Lunar New Year Festivals (Tet) in Vietnam. He shared that on Tet, he and his Vietnamese wife usually go back to his wife’s hometown and stay there with their family.
Mr. Steven Groff
“There is always a lot of food and feasting,” he said.
During the Tet holiday, he and his wife visit their relatives and everyone in the family enjoys the Tet holiday together.
For him, the strongest impression is that all Vietnamese people return to their ancestral hometowns and reconnect with relatives and with the place of their family's origin. In the US, where he is from people move often and, while of course most people stay connected with their family members, maintaining a connection to the actual place that your family came from is not considered as important.
Before he married a Vietnamese girl, during Tet he would just go out with friends or enjoy a few days of quietness in Hanoi Old Quarter - the only days of quiet there all year. Now Tet is spent together with family and reconnecting with relatives, and a few days after the New Year begins the celebrations continue with friends.
Mr. Jon Anderholm has experienced 16 consecutive Tet holidays in Vietnam. On this occasion, he is very pleased to enjoy the vast array of flowers, kumkwat trees, peach and apricot blossoms, which are displayed to sell along streets and in flower markets, especially, flower vendors usually arrange their flowers on bicycles, creating huge bunches of flower moving on streets. Apart from that, beautiful and colorful decorations are also displayed.
The most interesting thing for him is the gathering of people in family to prepare and boil “Chung” cake. He said that Tet holiday is a nice event to join together family and friends.
Each country has its own traditional cultural aspects. Vietnamese Tet holiday has left deep impressions in the heart of foreigners about reunion and special traditional customs of Vietnamese people./.