Day 29: September 18, 2014

This morning's breakfast consisted of leftover pizza from last night. With class starting at 8am, we met at 7:15 to walk to the bus stop.

 My only class on Thursday is Vietnamese, and today was a "student-led" lesson. Basically, he taught us whatever we wanted to know. We worked with the Vietnamese assistants to practice what we had learned at Survival Vietnamese last night, mainly how to give directions to a taxi driver and the proper way to ask how much something is. We also began a lesson on how to barter, and it was actually pretty fun because we set up different "booths" in the classroom with items. The Vietnamese assistants were the shopkeepers, and we had to go from booth to booth and barter with them in order to get the best price possible.

Something I've noticed about the teachers here is that they are much more hands on. I don't mean that there lessons are more hands on, but that they touch the students a lot more. Our professor refers to us and all of the Vietnamese assistants as his "lovely students". Today, he even used a napkin to wipe off Tori's face! I guess I'm not sure if this is true of all professors since I have only seen these behaviors in our Vietnamese professor.

After class I headed back to the dormitory by myself. I took the bus and wasn't necessarily nervous but did pay extra attention to where I was at. Compared to the bus system in Chicago, the bus system here is very undeveloped. For example, they don't announce what the next stop is so you basically have to pay attention to your surroundings to know where to get off. I also mentioned this yesterday, but it still seems weird to me that you sit down and then pay instead of paying as soon as you get on. Also, the bus drivers don't make full stops. They slow down just enough for you to either hop on or off the bus and then they're off again. As I was walking back to the dormitory, I also had three xe oms come up and ask me if I needed a ride. It's uncommon to see a Caucasian person walking alone around here, so I think they all thought I was lost!

The afternoon was spent doing homework and eating some more pizza. Seriously, though, I'll probably have pizza for the next few meals. Free food is rather hard to come by in this country, and in Chicago I probably have free food at least every other week. I did go to the supermarket to buy some fruit. I noticed today that they had a selection of grapes from the United States and a woman was sampling them. They were so good! Or maybe it was nice to not have to worry about the seeds in the middle, I'm not sure. I decided to buy some, and of course they were the most expensive grapes in the store. I also ended up buying some of the cheap apples.

I also noticed that they sell Driscoll's strawberries here. They did not look nearly ripe enough, but it's interesting to me that the United States sends strawberries here. Maybe they can't actually grow them in Vietnam. I also had some really good mangoes, and I'm afraid that when I go back to the states none of the tropical fruit will be good enough. The fruit tastes so much better here, probably because it's so much fresher!

After doing a few hours of homework and getting a little bit accomplished, we headed to service learning at DRD. Tonight was based on family, so we played a few games where they could practice their English and incorporate words like cousin, niece, nephew, etc. It was a lot of fun and the hour and a half went by really quickly.

Something I noticed while walking around the other day: there was a group of people sitting on the street corner with a pile of cell phones beneath them. They were taking the cell phones apart and (I believe) separating out the different pieces. I knew that a lot of our electronic waste got sent to countries in Asia, but it was very weird to actually see it happening. Stay tuned for some videos of our trip to the Mekong Delta.. hopefully tomorrow!