Day 91: November 19, 2014

Mornings have a pretty basic routine here of getting up, eating breakfast, and heading to class. For some reason I woke up this morning at 7:30am after not going to bed until 2, so today was very exhausting. We watched a horrible movie in history class, and afterwards I had an hour break before my next class. I bought some banana cake and walked to the Vietnam Center for theology class, where we talked about our upcoming final paper because there are only 2.5 weeks left (let's not talk about the whirlwind of emotions that I descend into even thinking about this). Afterwards, Alex and I met OU Alex at an alleyway known for it's cheap food and tons of options. I ended up getting some rice with a wide variety of meats on top for 15,000d. There was also a woman selling fried bananas, so I walked up to her with a 20,000d note in my hand and pointed to the bananas, expecting to get 4 or 5. Instead, I got about 15 slices of fried banana, which was more than enough to share with Alex and Alex.

We had a makeup environmental science class today, and then it was back to the dorm for the evening. I saw Sa, a girl from English club, while I was waiting for the elevator so I had a chance to catch up with her for a little bit. I hung out with Cate for awhile, doing nothing productive as usual, until Binh asked me if I wanted to go to the arcade at Co-Op with him. Of course I said yes, and we played two rounds of foosball. Each round went to 5 points, and the deal was that the loser had to buy fruit for us to split. I somehow came out victorious, and we spent the last token on a basketball game before going to get some fruit. We split a container of watermelon and a container of pineapple while sitting on the front steps of the dormitory, basically laughing at everything that had just happened.

When we had finished our fruit, a guy from English club came over to talk to us and we sent him on a mission to find us some mango. Unsuccessful, he came back and invited us to come hang out at the street vendor 100 feet away with him and his friend. The four of us just sat on little plastic stools in the dark while eating some delicious street food, laughing and having a good time, while Binh and Tho (the guy from English club) argued about who was the most handsome and tried to teach me some Vietnamese. Around 10:30pm we headed back to the dormitory, and Binh and I played a few games of PIG before switching over to soccer. When the dreaded 11pm hit, we were of course told to leave the courtyard. Instead, however (because we're such bad students), we went to the canteen to get some ice cream. It was a mixture of frozen banana with ice cream and peanuts and was so delicious, and we left the canteen to go eat them in the courtyard. We spent the next two hours talking about all kinds of things (differences between the States and Vietnam, frustrations with people we meet on the street, etc.), spent a ton of time laughing, and even tried to impress each other with some magic tricks. Just like last night, time went by super fast, and suddenly a guard was telling us we needed to go back to our rooms because it was 1am. I am most definitely sleep deprived at this point, because it feels like I've been running off of 5 to 7 hours of sleep a night for the past two weeks, but it's totally worth all of the memories I'm making. If only there was a way to keep me awake for class!