Hoi An City in the central coastal province of Quang Nam has been named among the world’s 25 best honeymoon destinations for 2024 by TripAdvisor.
“Already a common stop for backpackers, it is becoming better known to tourists. On the 14th day of each lunar month, the town trades its electric lights for traditional colored lanterns,” TripAdvisor wrote about Hoi An on its website.
The city is Vietnam’s sole representative on the list, holding the second position after Bali, Indonesia. Other destinations on the list are Maldives, Dominican Republic, Mauritius, Venice, and Khao Lak, according to the VnExpress news site.
A girl gets life-saving lung transplant on New Year’s Eve
On the eve of the Lunar New Year, around 100 doctors and medical personnel at the National Lung Hospital in Hanoi conducted a lung transplant to save a 21-year-old woman with a rare lung disease.
The female patient began her hospital visits for health checkups in 2020 and underwent surgery there once due to various conditions, including a rare lung disease. Nonetheless, her disease remained posing a severe threat to her life until recent months, when a lung transplant became imperative for her survival.
On the 29th day of the preceding lunar month, the National Lung Hospital received news regarding lung donation from the 108 Military Central Hospital. The donor was a 26-year-old man who suffered brain death following a traffic accident.
The hospital had only a single day to prepare for the procedure. By around 6 p.m. on the final day of the lunar year, the lung transplant began. The procedure was successfully done thanks to the collaboration of doctors and medical staff from both hospitals and others. The patient’s health gradually improved after the surgery, reported the Tuoi Tre news site.
Leaving the coconut garden for wild birds
Over the past 10 years, Danh Tinh and his wife have set aside their garden with hundreds of coconut palm trees in Dong Thanh Commune, An Minh District, Kien Giang Province, as a habitat for thousands of wild birds.
Tinh told tuoitre.vn that he began to grow about 700 young coconut trees in his one-hectare garden in 2014. A few years later, storks flocked to his coconut garden to stay overnight there. The number of storks increased day after day.
In 2019, when the coconut fruits were ready to be harvested, Tinh then found that his garden had been home to thousands of wild birds, mostly storks and great cormorants. Tinh and his wife decided to let the wild birds build nests and lay eggs in their garden. The couple did not pick coconut fruits for fear of disturbing the birds, and tried their best to protect the birds from poachers. They opened a small coffee shop to make a living.
Estimating that the number of storks and cormorants living in his garden might be around 10,000 individuals, Tinh expanded the garden to 1.5 hectares and grew more trees for the birds. “I’m glad to let wild birds live in my garden. I hope to live with them until the end of my life,” he said.
A big family with 120 members
Bui Phuong, a young woman living in the northern province of Thai Binh, posted a photo depicting most of the many members of her big family getting together at Tet, the Lunar New Year holiday, on social media, which went viral these days.
Phuong told dantri.com.vn that her mother have 11 sisters and brothers. Together with their spouses, children and grandchildren, the total number of this big family now amounts to 120 persons. On the fourth day of Tet every year, all members get together at the house of Phuong’s grandparents, who passed away two decades ago, in Thai Binh’s Kien Xuong District as a tradition of the family.
Phuong said happily that she is now a grandmother of many children of her cousins, adding that these children had to queue up in a long line in the front yard to receive li xi, the lucky money presented to children at Tet.
