Day 54: October 13, 2014

After basically being on vacation for a week, it was very hard to wake up this morning and start classes again. As usual, music began blasting from the courtyard at 6:45am to wake students up and have them come down to partake in the national anthem. I did make it to class on time, but only two of us showed up. We didn't really do a whole lot in Vietnamese, but we did learn some new stuff.

When class was over, I walked to the post office to mail out some more postcards. I got back around 10am, and it was already 85 degrees outside. Nothing felt quite as good as getting on the air-conditioned bus to come back to the dormitory. Once back, I did a little homework before going with Alex and her partner student Thinh to get lunch. We walked around for a little bit before deciding on a family street vendor/restaurant. Thinh said that he prefers the restaurant street vendors from the street carts because they cook the food there and you make sure it is prepared properly. I ended up having pork and rice with some salty cucumber soup for 25,000d. On our way back to the dormitory we stopped at the Co-Op Mart to have Coke floats. It was happy hour, so the float was half off, but root beer floats are better.

After coming back to the dormitory I booked a hotel room for our trip to Dalat this weekend, which I am super excited for! The rest of the afternoon before class was spent doing basically nothing but getting some homework done. I took the bus back to environmental science class, where we learned about animal trafficking and had a quick meeting about our research projects. Then it was back to the dormitory, where I grabbed some corn and called it a night.

Some things learned today: there are air compressors and oil shops on the side of the road for motorbikes to drive up to and refill their tires with air or get more oil. Very interesting.