Day 57: October 16, 2014

This morning I almost didn't go to class. I always set two alarms, 15 minutes apart from each other. My first alarm went off at 6:30am, so I turned it off and went back to sleep. My second alarm never went off, though. I somehow woke up at 7am to realize that I had to get ready and go to class! Turns out that I set my alarm for 6:45PM. Close call, but I made it to Vietnamese. Our professor was asking us about our upcoming trips, and so we told him about how everybody (except for me) is going to Thailand. I assumed that he would declare class cancelled, but instead he said that we could still have class. In fact, he wants to go get breakfast for class. For two classes. Not exactly sure how I feel about this, but we'll see as it gets closer.

Our Vietnamese professor was also drinking this very delicious looking drink today in class, so I asked him what it was. Turns out it was just orange juice, and he told me how to order it. So after class I went down to the street vendor in the alley and said the magic Vietnamese words for orange juice, which I already forgot. The vendor understood me, though, and he proceeded to take some very dark green oranges and cut them. They looked unripe from the outside, but the inside was a brilliant orange color. He squeezed two oranges into a glass and put some sugar and ice in it before I paid him 10,000d. It was SO GOOD. It was much sweeter than orange juice you buy and tasted like clementines. I was so impressed that I am considering getting it more often now.

After I had my orange juice, I got back on the bus to come to the dormitory where I tried to get as much done as possible before we leave for this weekend. I did some homework, caught up on some other stuff, and looked for jobs and internships for the spring. It started to rain, which is nothing new, but today was the latest it has ever started to rain. It used to rain around 11 or noon but today it didn't rain until about 3:30. Maybe the rainy season really is almost over!

When I had quite a bit of homework accomplished, I decided that I should probably go eat before we headed to service learning. Bot chien sounded good, so I put on my rain coat and headed out. I'm not sure if the guy remembered me from two weeks ago or not, but I got the exact same thing I had last time. He didn't even motion to ask if I wanted chili sauce with my soy sauce! When I first arrived I was the only one there, but soon the place was filling up. Just as I left at 5:15 all of the seats were taken.

The last event for the night was DRD, where we had to come up with a skit to present in everybody else with our groups. I hate things like this, and none of the people I was working with were really into it either, so ours was pretty bad. Some other groups came up with some funny stuff, though, and the whole room was laughing pretty hard. After DRD, it was back to the dormitory to finish packing for our trip this weekend. We leave for Dalat tonight at 11pm and will return very early Monday morning, so no more blog posts until then.