At 10am this morning Yen and I met up and walked to her campus, where there was a fair going on nearby. Not a fair as in a carnival, but a place where people come to sell clothes, housewares, food, and other such items. We walked around for a bit before grabbing some snow cones and sitting down to eat them. Then we continued to walk around, and Yen bought some clothes for her boyfriend. Some people made some comments to me, which Yen kindly translated, my favorite one being that the owner of the shop wished she had models as tall as me. Yen said everyone was staring (yes, they do that everyday), and jokingly said that it's like love at first sight.. except they can't speak to me.
When we finished walking around, we headed to get lunch nearby. I had pork and rice while she got fish and rice, and I'm pretty sure she ended up giving half of her fish to me. I bent a spoon in the process of trying to cut up my pork and rendered it unusable. It has been four months since I've used a knife and it will most definitely be weird using one again back in the States!
She then took me to her favorite sweet soup place because she knows how much I love that stuff. We sat on the little plastic stools and ate it, her getting something that is supposedly good for you and me getting corn sweet soup. I still can't get over the fact that dessert here is made with vegetables. I bought Yens, and she turned right around and bought me two more to eat later. I try to be nice and treat her, yet she treats me!
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| Enjoying our snow cones at the fair. |
We walked back to the dorm, and man what a walk that was. It has felt so HOT here lately. We were so hot and exhausted this morning that Yen even took the elevator up to her room. I've never seen her do that before--she always takes the stairs! I spent the afternoon studying for my Vietnamese test before Cong, one of the partners, came by and asked me for help on the meetings for English club. We went to the community room and I basically just made things a little more professional sounding and fixed his small grammatical errors.
We were working in the lounge, and there was a student there who was finishing building a project for his class. He had built this airplane type thing with four propellers and had a remote control hooked up to it so that he could send it flying into the sky. It was actually quite amazing. Sometimes I forget that engineers actually have to build things and don't just learn from textbooks like most of us do.
I met Thao for supper, and we headed off to McDonald's. It was such a classy experience. All the Vietnamese were dressed up and the place was absolutely crowded. We walked in, and I told Thao that I would be ordering for both of us. I ordered a Big Mac meal supersized, a deluxe cheeseburger, a McChicken, and a McRoyal. It was 255,000d ($12.75) for all of it. Thao wanted to get chili sauce for the food, as there was a chili sauce dispenser, but I steered her away from it and said that we only use ketchup in the United States. The food came and I started her off with the McChicken, which turned out to be her overall favorite. The deluxe cheeseburger tasted just as boring as they do in the States, and the Big Mac was actually a huge disappointment. The McRoyal, however, tasted more like a Whopper from Burger King than anything. Thao thought that the fries were super salty (I actually thought they were pretty good) and couldn't understand why there were cucumbers on the sandwiches. I explained to her that they were pickles, and pulled one off for her to try. She bit into and made the funniest face because it was way too salty for her. We finished our meal with the sweet soup that Yen had bought me this morning and headed off on our next adventure.
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| Introducing Thao to McDonald's! |
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| ...and she took a picture of me. |
We made our way to Diamond Plaza, where we walked around the stores for a little while looking at Black Friday sales and taking pictures with the Christmas decorations. Thao had said that she was stuffed at McDonald's, but around 9pm she was hungry again. She asked me if I wanted Dairy Queen, her treat, and so we drove to the nearest one. This time I made her order a small Snickers Blizzard and I got a small Pineapple Cookie Crunch Blizzard. Let's just say that I'm really good at picking out weird flavors. Around 10pm she dropped me back off at the dorm and I called it a night after experiencing a very Western evening.
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| Waiting for her presents under the tree. |
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| Celebrating the Christmastime! |
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| Dairy Queen round two! |
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