Day 89: November 17, 2014

This morning started off as a typical Monday morning, although I got very poor sleep last night. The national music started to be played at 6:45am and I was on my way to class by 7:15am. Today was our first day of Vietnamese with the new teacher, and honestly we did learn quite a bit more today than most of the other days combined. As soon as class was over, though, I headed back to the dormitory to get some homework done.

After officially unpacking and getting my work done for tomorrow, I had plans to meet Binh at 3:30 to head to University Village, a 45 minute drive from the dormitory. He forgot where he had parked his motorbike in the parking garage, so it wasn't until 4pm that we were finally off on our journey. We cruised through the streets of HCMC, going faster than I have ever gone before on a motorbike in this city. We passed through some strange parts of the city, and there were definitely times that I wish I had a mask on to protect my throat from the strange air I was breathing. We eventually made it to University Village, though, and it turns out it is exactly what it sounds like. There are about eight universities that have classes and dormitories in this small area, and everybody that lives there is a student.

Binh gave me a tour of the village and showed me all of the different universities. Turns out that he spent his first year at university here, so he knows quite a bit about it. We got a snack at a street vendor and then headed for ice cream, where we split a chocolate ice cream and a coconut ice cream. Each had rice in it, and the texture of the chocolate ice cream with rice reminded me of Dippin' Dots while the texture of the coconut reminded me of cereal. Afterwards we cruised around the village some more, stopping by the lake and heading down some pretty poorly lit roads. At one point we parked and started to walk, going through the night market and walking until we decided we were hungry. We had sua cua, or crab soup, which was pretty delicious, as well as some sugarcane drink and two types of fruit. One of the fruits we tried literally translates to English as "breast milk" so that was fun.

University Village is so different from the rest of the city because it's only students that live there and everything is so cheap. A meal of rice was no more than 16,000d and our meal tonight was only 7,000d each. After we had toured the whole place a few times we got back on Binh's motorbike and headed back to the dormitory. We went to the canteen to get some drinks and ended up trying a water coconut drink as well as a lemon tea. They were both good, but the water coconut was strange because there were chunks of water coconut you had to eat while drinking it. We ended up just sitting and talking in the courtyard, as well as watching some soccer, until the guards told us to go back to our rooms at 11pm.