Once upon a time

I awoke with a bang on my door. Dreading that I had overslept and was late to the class I was supposed to teach, I jolted awake. Then I looked at my clock. It was 630. Class wasn't until eight. What? Then it dawned on me. Last week I had agreed to join some of my students for breakfast today. I don't think I have ever gotten dressed and out the door so fast in my life. We were going to a cơm tấm place. It is literally across the street from school, and quite good. Maybe I'll start making myself get up early enough to go out for breakfast at a Vietnamese time. Afterward, we walked back to campus and enjoyed a drink at the canteen. I finally got to try the sweetened milk and carrot drink. It wasn't a standout among the drinks I've had, but it was refreshing. My students told me that they and their peers had really enjoyed the interview activity from yesterday's class, and that afterward they had all been talking about what a great class it was. It felt really great to get unprompted positive feedback directly from my students.

Cơm tấm, or dare I say, yum tấm

Sweet and carroty

Later in the day I taught the two classes for local teachers. The first one was in the morning and, maybe 10 minutes before I was supposed to go to the class, it started pouring. Luckily, I now have an umbrella, so it was no big deal. Still, when I arrived at the classroom, the teacher asked me if I was ok, with great concern. I tried not to laugh. With the afternoon class, we played the game where you tell a story by having each person say only one sentence. We made three original stories and I also asked them to tell me some Vietnamese folktales. Below is one of the original stories. I think you can see why I chose to share that one in particular. One guess at who the implied protagonist is. Thank goodness for the female teachers who steered it in the right direction.

Once upon a time… there was a beautiful girl who came to Vietnam. At first she came to Ben Tre College for teaching. She lived in the dormitories. She taught the Speaking FCE class. Every student wanted to see her everyday. Everyone was very happy to speak English with her. I used to be the student in her class; I like her voice very much because it is very sweet. She looked very lovely. One day, there was a handsome man who appeared in the class. When she saw the handsome man she felt very happy. He fell in love with her and proposed to her. Unfortunately, she refused because she had a boyfriend. She said, “I am too young to get married.” The man looked very disappointed. The young man was very sad, and he didn’t want to do anything. He loved her very much, and he always dreamed about her, so he slept every day and every night, so that when he slept he could meet her. At that time, the girl came to visit him and give him a lot of advice. He realized that she was right, and he lived happily again. They have been good friends since then, but the man still loved her, and hoped that in the future she would fall in love with him. He decided he would wait for her forever. One day her younger sister came to Vietnam to visit her, and this girl looked just like her. She introduced her sister to this man. He realized that both of them are very intelligent. He wanted to have an occasion to meet the younger sister, and then the man took the younger sister around the city and showed her some special places in the city. And then he fell in love with her sister. To avoid hurting her, he invited her to a restaurant to explain. Poor young man, he loved the beautiful girl but he couldn’t say any words to her; he only dreamed of her; he only had nice feelings in his dream. He was lovesick. But it was only his dream, and he woke up. THE END 

Immediately following the second class, I had a meeting regarding my schedule for the coming month. Yesterday I received a copy of the proposed schedule so that I could review it and, as far as I could tell, there were a lot of things that were flat-out wrong. For starters, even though all of the classes I teach will now be in the afternoon, the schedule still claimed that they would be in the morning. I went in all ready with my list of questions and corrections and a firm resolve, and things ended up not being nearly as big a battle as I anticipated. Furthermore, my two days that start at 8am, which used to be the days I considered sleeping in days, are now by far my earliest starts.

After our meeting, Morena and I decided to take a bus trip into the city center. Well. Anyone who knows about my Italy experiences knows how buses and I get along. Buses are supposed to come by every 20 minutes or so. We stood at the stop outside the school for almost an hour, and not a single bus passed by. At first I entertained myself by trying to catch some good pictures of the daily hilarity of Vietnamese motorists. After a while some of my students came by and decided to chat with us and keep us company while we waited. Eventually, we just gave in and asked them to call a cab for us.

Truck bed not necessary

Sidecar not necessary
Who says motorcycles aren't family friendly?

Trunk also not necessary

Cute picture just for good measure

Three dollars and five minutes later, we were in the city center. Morena and I both let out a deep exhale. After all this time of being babysat, it felt quite liberating to be doing something on our own. Strolling among the shops, there was a scale on the sidewalk. Morena stepped on and when she got off I followed suit. We were promptly approached by a woman demanding money. We had thought that the scale was for sale, but it turned out it was just there for you pay to check your weight. We felt quite foolish; luckily our foolishness only cost us 1000VND, or half of a cent. We caught the last few minutes of the sunset over the river, and got some bánh mì for a dinner on the go.

Bánh mì in progress

I realized that I didn't exactly know how to get to the night market, our ultimate destination, from the city center. Emboldened by my recent successes, I asked a woman where it was (with the backup of an index card with the words 'night market'). I may not be great at Vietnamese, but I can understand pointing, and we found it quickly. At first the night market seemed like a goldmine of hilarity, but I didn't see anything worth buying. I saw so many shirts with absurdly incomprehensible "English." Perhaps the best was one with a picture of a bicycle and the words:

It takes two to stupid. I like voice performa ait mean singer weather was sugar notice drive. Who in door. I had this old truer that we need in his freshman outdoor.

Another shirt also stood out to me:

Also available in red.

The English on it is perfectly acceptable, but that image might give me nightmares. As happy as I am whenever I see Texas somewhere foreign, this is definitely not my favorite shout out. Usually I would complain about the fact that the majority of the clothes were too small, but I didn't even get that far. To say that they were eyesores would be an understatement. I entertained myself by trying to come up with similes to describe just how hideous they were, but nothing I came up with did them justice. There were bizarre color and pattern combinations, incomprehensible embellishments, and rampant layering. Near the end, though, we saw the light. I got a cute shirt at one shop, and the last place was a shoe vendor. Rifling through the piles of shoes, I discovered a pair of black heels that didn't have any glitter or bows. They fit perfectly, and I decided to go for it. How much did they cost? Only the giddiness-inducing sum of $2. While waiting for our taxi home, I finally got some pictures of the city center at night.

Statue in the temple courtyard

Statue by the roundabout

Playing the part

So far, all of the activities that I've planned for my 3rd year speaking class have been group activities. While reshuffling the class has brought out some of the wallflowers, the fact that they were in groups had let some people fly under the radar. Today, half of the class members received a character, and the other half were interviewers. Instead of letting them prep a script or a story, this activity made students think on their feet and speak spontaneously and casually. Moreover, I got to hear every single student speak. I discovered some students that I'd never noticed were in my class, and I discovered some more talented students who hadn't previously stepped into the limelight. I was happy to see the more advanced students draw out their less confident peers during the interviews.

I had literally never heard this guy speak until today.

I've noticed that my students often have a hard time with activities that require them to be imaginative or creative. It's not that they don't want to do them; they just can't come up with much. I wonder whether this is because of language limitation or because it's not something that is usually asked of them. Probably a combination of both. While most of the pairs stuck with the basics in the interviews, some of them really impressed my by getting into character and even sharing invented childhood stories. One of them, who was supposed to be a famous singer, even burst into song on demand.

Như, the class's singing sensation

In the afternoon, Morena and I went to a new place for lunch. It was nothing special, but after four weeks of cycling through the same food stands except when Trang takes me elsewhere, it was nice to have a change. On the way back, emboldened by our first foray off the beaten path, I stopped at another new place for an after lunch refreshment: sinh tố bơ, an avocado smoothie. I didn't even know if they served it at this cafe, but I successfully inquired and ordered.

Back to basics: rice, pork, and green beans

Avocado smoothie, an acquired taste

Last night, after English club, I asked some students if they would like to join me and Morena for dinner tonight. We met up today at five, and they took us to a nearby place for phơ chay, vegetarian phơ. It was tasty, but I wasn't a big fan of the crouton-esque tofu squiggles.

Last time I went out to dinner with these students I expressed curiosity in bò lá lốp, and we had agreed that next time we would try it, so after our phơ we crossed the street for round two. Bò lá lốp is beef wrapped in leaves and then grilled. I'd walked past the bò lá lốp place several times and whenever the guy was grilling it always smelled really good.  The bò lá lốp itself is pretty small, so I thought it was just a small snack, but I discovered that there was much more to the dish. It ended up being a full meal in it's own right and we had a fair bit of leftovers.

Bad picture, good food

Take a sheet of rice paper, add some greens, some vermicelli, some cucumber and carrot and starfruit, then the bò lá lốp, and then you roll it up like a spring roll and dip it in brown sauce. Repeat. I'm definitely adding this to the circulation of dinner options.

A coconut for your thoughts

I opened the previous post with a picture of a beetle. I was happy to have my gestalt confirmed in the comments: it is a longhorn beetle. This morning I stumbled upon this guy, flailing in slow motion. He was about the size of my big toe. I righted him, but about a minute later he was back on his back. Alas. 

Do you recognize my shirt? When I bought my pajama set I intended to use the top as a blouse. This morning I put that to the test. I was slightly worried that someone would recognize it, but if anyone did at least no one said anything. And I felt cute.
When I first arrived in Ben Tre I was warned that my students would be like teddy bears: cute but silent. The teachers often refer to them that way, though hopefully not to their faces. Thus far this had been shown to be a largely inaccurate description, but today both of my classes seemed to have been repopulated by teddy bears. Maybe that's to be expected when you wear pajamas to class.

Trang and her sister took me out to lunch. We went to a place she had taken me on one of my first days, but back then my camera was on the fritz. We had the sour soup again, as well as cá hú, which literally means screaming fish, and a pork womb stir fry. The screaming fish was prepared in a sort of cast iron pot and it was probably my favorite of the three. When the pork womb came out I thought it was octopus, as the pieces looked more like chopped up tentacles with suckers, and it actually had a similar consistency. Despite the potentially off-putting organ identity and its rubberiness, it was really good. It had what I would describe as a Chinese-y brown sauce and was prepared with ginger.

Sour soup

Cá Hú   Maybe not the most visually appealing dish, but really really good

Stir-fried womb with pickled cabbage(?) and ginger

In the evening Morena and I went out for phở at a place that is closer than but not as good as the usual place. Other than when my friends visited for my birthday, it is the first time I have eaten at a sit-down restaurant without being in the company of a Vietnamese person since coming to Ben Tre. Moreover, it is the first time I have really had to do all the leg work myself: ordering food, drinks, and asking for the bill. To my pleasant surprise, everyone seemed to understand all of my requests without much need for miming or repetition. It was empowering.

On the way back to campus I decided to stop to buy a coconut. In Hanoi coconuts cost around 20,000 VND (just under $1). Here in Ben Tre, where they are locally produced, I had been buying them for 8,000 VND. Yesterday I stopped at a different place and was charged 3,000 VND. That's about 1¢. While some of my readers might prefer the penny, I'll happily start taking a coconut for my thoughts.

Prepping the coconut: another life skill I hope to acquire while I'm here

After dinner it was time for the student English club. I recently learned that Morena will be taking over this once October starts. This makes me a little sad, as it is one of my favorite activities, but I will probably keep participating at least occasionally. I had already started planning a Halloween party for the students, and intend to follow through on that. Tonight was as fun as always, and we reviewed past songs and learned new ones. I taught them "I'm a Little Teapot" and an abridged version of "You Are My Sunshine." Did you know that the latter is one of Louisiana's state songs? The full lyrics were certainly a surprise to me.

"When I get all steamed up, hear me shout: tip me over and pour me out!"

Something's gotten into me (finally!)

My favorite bugs visitors are the ones that don't actually
come inside my room

This morning Trang showed up at my door unexpectedly to take me out for breakfast. She took me to a cơm tấm place within reasonable walking distance, which is awesome, since it is one of my favorite foods but I did not know of any good places for it nearby. The thing is, even though it is a plate of rice and meat, it is only a breakfast food. So, if I ever want to eat it, I have to drag myself out of bed early enough to get it.

When we returned from breakfast it was time for me to spend two hours proofing translations, definitely my least favorite activity every week. I don't dislike the activity itself, just the fact that I never know quite what I'm doing or why, and I am always given new tasks before I can complete the previous ones. Today I was asked to design postcards using images randomly lifted from the internet, but I was still working on last week's translation. However, today was made much easier by the fact that Morena will also be working in the same office at the same time. Now I can at least catch her eye when something absurd or incomprehensible is afoot.

On the way back from breakfast Trang had stopped to buy some snacks for me from a lady just outside the school. At lunch I investigated the contents of some of the little baggies. One contained what as far as I could tell was just fried pieces of dough, except they were spicy. It was almost like having puffy jalapeño chips. Another bag contained bananas in fried dough. That was definitely my favorite. I still have some banana bread for tomorrow and this green bean cake thing. Whenever I am given sweets involving beans, it is always a battle of will to make myself try it. It has yet to be really bad, but for some reason I really have an aversion to it. Morena joined me for lunch and we hung out for a while, watching TV and relaxing. I think I am getting used to being social again. I am looking forward to when she moves in next to me so I can just walk over to say hi and hang out. Also I'll be happy for the construction sounds to cease.

1. Top left: bananas 2. Lower left: spicy dough 3. Center: banana bread
4. Right: green bean cake

Trang is a very busy woman: she is a full-time teacher, my fulll/part-time big sister, a private tutor, and my mother. She usually gets about five hours a sleep a night. Where I'm going with this is that more often than not my Vietnamese lesson often gets dropped in the shuffle, but I don't hold it against her. Today I had Vietnamese lesson for the first time in over a week. However, as it often ends up happening, at least half of the class was spent with us talking about other school-related issues that need discussing. I keep telling myself that it is ultimately my job, not hers, to teach my Vietnamese, but I haven't been very good at making time for self-study. I didn't have an 'aha moment' or a sudden surge of dedication, but somehow this finally changed today.

Ms. My invited me, Morena, and Mr. Luan (my Tuesday morning supervisor) over for dinner tonight. There were many possible outcomes for the event. We might have sat in peaceful silence because of Ms. My's extremely limited English. We might have fractured into one pair speaking English and another speaking Vietnamese. I might have internally lost patience with Mr. Luan's characteristic combination of high-energy and limited English proficiency. None of these things happened. I made it a learning experience. I tried to learn the names of the ingredients of the food we were eating. I tried to form a few sentences with my slowly growing vocabulary. I understood enough key words in a few sentences that weren't even being spoken to me to understand what was being talked about. It was energizing. Food-wise I was a little apprehensive when I was handed a bowl of noodles, broth, bamboo slices, and cuts of pork that looked like they were mostly skin and fat. I was anticipating one of those meals where you can eat it all only through sheer conviction of courtesy. I wouldn't rush to order it or ask her to make it again, but it was flavorful and it wasn't chewy and went down easy. When I finished my first bowl she started to serve me more vermicelli and I worried that my ambivalent reaction would be polarized by the second bowl. Instead, she piled leaves (always those mystery leaves) and shrimp that might have been pickled with garlic. It was really fresh and tasty and certainly a pleasure. Dinner was topped off with fresh guava before I had to run to teach tonight's English class for teachers.

Course 1: vermicelli, bamboo, and pork

Course 2: yumminess

The shrimp in isolation

Course 3: guava

Last but not least, the famous Ms. Mỹ

We always have a break after an hour or so of class. Usually I end up sitting quietly at my desk unless some of the more advanced teachers come to talk to me to practice their conversational English. I had just finished a segment on colors and I still had my color samples taped to the board. I asked one of the teachers to teach me their names in Vietnamese. I discovered that, just like in English, the word for orange (cam) is used for both the color and the fruit.

Notes from my break-time Vietnamese mini-lesson

All along I've known that everyone I meet is a language resource. Today, I finally started acting on this knowledge.

Shake your tail feathers

Despite the utter lack of lesson planning that took place this weekend, I was able to make up for it today. Two lesson plans down, two more to go. I'd say I'm in better shape than I've been most weeks thus far.

The only real thing of note that took place today was my dinner with Trang, her son, and her sister. They took me out for cháo gỏi vịt, or porridge and duck salad. The porridge is made in duck broth. I'd had another porridge in Hanoi that was much thicker. Tonight's was almost more like rice soup. Both were good, just different. The duck salad was duck on a bed of banana flowers, onions, and other things. The salad part was really good; the duck was ok. I think one thing that interferes with my enjoyment of many meats here is that they are almost always attached to the bone, and it's not just a femur or a wing. It's vertebrae and ribs and who knows what all kind of bones that even an anatomy buff like me has a hard time figuring out once they've been cut into bite-size (but still bone-bearing) pieces of meat. In short, I have to work hard for every piece of meat, and usually it is significantly smaller than the frankensteinian thing that I start with. Trang's sister offered me the duck's tail in a giggly way -- I think she could barely even bring herself to say what it was, but it was pretty evident -- and told me that many people prefer this part. Why is it that the parts Americans are most likely to be afraid of tend to be the most highly prized morsels here? Surprisingly, it was indeed the best part. I told them about a time when it was a national scandal that a chicken head had been found in chicken McNuggets and they thought it was hi-larious. In addition to all of this, we had sticky rice with congealed duck and chicken blood (I'm sorrry, I know that saying 'congealed' just makes this sound even less appetizing). It was neither objectionable nor remarkable.

Duck salad. Literally half of a duck cut into strips with kitchen scissors.

Rice porridge in duck broth

Sticky rice with duck and chicken blood

Trang had to leave early to take her son home, so I stayed to chat with her sister (whose name I unfortunately do not remember/know how to spell). While we talked we had a coconut jello made inside the coconut. Despite my fears regarding the clash between the fact that coconut is Ben Tre's specialty and the fact that I hate(d) coconut, I have yet to confront a form of coconut here that I find unpleasant. The nicest part of our chat was when I came to the realization that the fact that I am living in a place with no pre-existing friendships means that I see everyone I spend any time with as a (potential) new friend. It makes me put in the effort to get to know new people, and I like that.

Lazy Sunday

This morning Trang took me to the seamstress to have my aó dài taken in. I was measured for it when I first arrived, and it seems that in these last four weeks I have changed size enough for it to no longer fit properly. I also discovered that I have been wearing the pants backwards every time I have worn them.

After that Trang and I went to her home for lunch. On the way she paused to pick up a snack for me for later. I also needed to add minutes to my cell phone balance. Trang taught me the necessary phrase on the way and made me approach the shopkeeper by myself. I had to say it twice but she understood. By then Trang had come over to make sure it was working, and instead of helping me the shopkeeper started talking to Trang about my Vietnamese. She was very impressed, Trang later informed me, and started telling her family, further inside the shop, about my perfectly clear Vietnamese. Sometimes I think that people get so excited by the fact that I have spoken Vietnamese that they forget to do whatever it is that I asked them to do, leading me to think that they did not understand me in the first place.

I thought we were getting those waffle-looking things,

but we got these tiny bánh bao that I hadn't seen.

When we got to her house her sister and I started frying spring rolls while Trang went to pick up Morena so she could join us. The spring rolls were prepackaged and frozen and I will absolutely be buying them in the future. They were so good I lost count of how many I ate. We also had a meatball and dumpling soup with corn, carrots, and broccoli. Trang's son encouraged us to "make yourself," by which he meant "help yourself." I hear it quite often, and I think it is a confused combination of "help yourself" and "make yourself at home."

Trang's sister and I, master defrosters

Soup's on

When we finished eating Trang invited us to sit in some hammocks and take a rest. I warned Morena that it is impossible to sit in a hammock after lunch and not fall asleep. True enough, about three hours later, we woke up. Trang had told us that she would wake us up and take us back at 1, but it was now 3pm. Like a true mother, her reasoning was, "you looked so peaceful!"

Trang's sister told me she saw me on the news last night. I tried to ask whether it was just a photo or video but she misunderstood. She told me that it was a report about the fact that I was here through the Fulbright program and about how I will be helping so many people improve their English skills.

Snack time

This morning I put my foot down and took a big step. Thus far, my fear of unintentionally committing a grievous social offense has made me a bit of a pushover. I say yes and ok to almost everything, or do my best to exercise socially appropriate circuitousness when saying no. This morning there was incessant banging on my door at 930 am. By Vietnamese standards it is quite late and reasonable to expect someone to be up and at it. By my standards, I was glad that I was indeed awake. But, I was busy skyping and still in my pjs. By the time I got dressed and opened the door, the people had moved on to inspect the neighboring room that is under construction. There were about eight of them, including an American professor who now lives elsewhere in Vietnam, and when they saw me emerge they seemed to decide that it would be nice to come into my room to sit and chat. But I was busy and I said so. I was not willing to cut short my valuable contact with home to play hostess to a horde of people who couldn't even fit comfortably in my room. I politely but firmly said no. We agreed to meet an hour later so I could finish skyping.

Maybe ten minutes later there was another knock at my door. I was being invited to tour Campus II and Campus III with some of the administrators and the American. Now. I explained that I was still busy and politely declined.

Maybe 20 minutes later I got a call inviting me to lunch 30 minutes later. Since that would place it at the end of the hour we had agreed upon and food is something I do my best never to turn down, I agreed. We went to a fancy restaurant on the street where all the fancy restaurants live (e.g. where we went for my birthday celebration with my teacher/students). It was an open-air place, and they had tanks full of fish, frogs, eels, prawns, lizards, and softshell turtles. I wasn't too happy to see the latter. I was even less happy to see a whole turtle in slices in a picture on the menu. The only good that came of it is that I will always remember that the word for turtle is baba. Luckily, we had a very tame meal with pork and chicken. During lunch I also had the misfortune to discover my new least favorite place to have a mosquito bite: in my ear.

None of these made an appearance in my lunch, thankfully.
And yeah, that's a big frog.

Not really sure, but good.

Pork, shrimp, coconut trunk, onions, carrot, ...

The ever-popular whole-chicken-soup

When we left I spied some beautiful orchids. The orchids in Vietnam are in such full bloom I almost always think they are fake. They almost always are not.

Pensando en ti

A few days ago Trang commented to me that she thought I slowed down my English speech too much. I asked another teacher if he agreed and he said that because listening is very difficult for him, he thought that it was an appropriate speed. Today at lunch I listened as Trang and the American professor spoke. He spoke at a completely natural pace, not slowed down at all. Tonight Trang and I went out to a cafe and then to dinner with Morena and her Trang-equivalent, Ms. Nga. I asked Trang if she had understood the American when they spoke, and she said yes, about 80%. Hearing that, I realized that, at least with Trang, I can and should speak much more naturally. Though I did not anticipate it, making that conscious shift in my speaking habits with her helped me to feel much more natural and comfortable around her, in general. We had a great time, and even shared a few belly laughs at some language discoveries we made. Are you ready for the jewel of my evening? As you may already know, a letter like ô is said to wear a hat. It turns out that in Vietnamese, the letters ơ and ư are said to have mustaches. I love it.

To carry on with the hilarious pitfalls of wrong tones and mispronunciation, I learned that I have to be very careful when it comes to the name of the head of the English department, Ms. Thu. As it is, her name means autumn. If I say it uncertainly, consequently adding a rising tone, she becomes Ms. Animal. If I nervously overcompensate and give it a falling tone, she becomes Ms. Hatred.

I'm not one to make fun of my students, but given my sense of humor regarding my infinite folly in the land of tones, I think it is fair to (internally) laugh at their mis-steps every once in a while. I received an email with a tidbit I thought you might find amusing. This week some students in my 2nd year listening class are presenting on the topic of fears and phobias, and they sent me their powerpoint in advance for me to look over it. All in all it was very well written and probably one of the best presentations I've seen, as far as grammaticality and complexity goes. Maybe because of this, their one major mistake stuck out like a hilarious sore thumb.

If you can't tell, 'snack' should be 'snake'

Don't let the geckos fool you

Among the many tangled threads of last night's dream, I was riding my bike through the grass while wearing a conical hat. What do you think it means?

Today was another mostly uneventful day. I was teaching teachers and in the first class I had been asked to prepare images of works of art to have them compare and discuss. Before I started showing them the pictures I asked if any of them liked art. "Oh yes!" I got an enthusiastic reply from the front row. When I asked him what kind of art he liked, his reply was: "I like martial arts, like kung fu and tai kwon do." ... Not the reply I was expecting.

I teach another class in the afternoon, but by noon I still didn't know what teacher I was teaching with or what, if anything, I was expected to prepare. The thing about my Friday classes is that there are three different groups but I only teach two groups each Friday, so I rotate groups every week. I think the other teachers must rotate, too, because I am have yet to teach with the same teacher. Anyway, this meant that I didn't even know who to ask about what was expected of me. Luckily, I taught with Trang in the morning (after earlier in the week being told that I would teach with her, then being told that I wouldn't, and yesterday being told that in fact I would), and when I told her about my concerns regarding the afternoon class, she started making phone calls. At about 1:15 I got a phone call from the teacher I would be working with saying that she wanted to meet at two. To discuss the activities for the class that I was supposed to start teaching at two. Oookay. Two o'clock rolled around and when we met she had one activity sheet for me. Oh boy. By the teacher magic that lives up my metaphorical sleeves, I was able to extend the sheet into an hour-long lesson. Cue sigh of relief.

I have a confession to make: I watched more TV today. The other day I was looking for slow, easy songs to use for listening activities in my English class and I recalled the Whitney Houston song, 'I Will Always Love You,' from the movie 'The Bodyguard.' I was too young to see the movie when it came out, but not too young to play that song over and over on my tape player. Today, by some cosmic coincidence, the movie was showing on HBO, though I only caught the last 20 minutes or so. Later, 'The Truman Show' was on. I caught most of this one. Maybe I'll end up watching all of those movies that I should have seen at some point or another but never got around to. I am currently justifying my movie-watching with the fact that reading the Vietnamese subtitles is actually really helpful. It reinforces vocabulary and grammatical structures, and it is very exciting when I can identify how the individual Vietnamese words translate back into the English that I heard.

In the evening I took a walk for bánh ướt. The woman sells a few different things, but I only ever buy the bánh ướt (I'm pretty sure everything else is some variant on the evil fruit salad). By now she recognizes me, and waves me on if she's out of bánh ướt, as was the case a few nights ago, or smilingly greets me, as was the case tonight.

Auntie bánh ướt

On the way back I was keeping one eye on the traffic zooming past me in the dark and another on the signage around me, attempting to mentally practice pronunciation. Suddenly, to my surprise, a tone marker moved. It turned out it was a gecko.

Not xoá, just xoa+gecko

The spice of life

I've had a game in my back pocket for last week's class and last night's English club, but the first time I ran out of time and last night it just didn't quite fit. Today, I decided I couldn't run out of time if we did it first. To review last week's lesson on different vehicles, we went outside. I would say the name of a vehicle (e.g. sports car) and students had to scramble to get in groups of how many passengers fit in the car (in the case of the sports car, 2). I always feel a little guilty when I'm teaching a listening class because I feel like they're way less fun than speaking classes, but this game got our listening class off to an energetic start.

I mentioned previously that during break the campus loudspeakers blast an assortment of Vietnamese songs for fifteen minutes. Well, today, I heard a song start with some strangely familiar notes. The next thing I knew "As Long As You Love Me," by the Backstreet Boys, was reverberating all over campus. To call it surreal is an understatement.

For speaking class I showed clips from various sci-fi films and had them choose a city and imagine what it would be like in the future. Much to my (not) surprise, most of them chose Ben Tre. While they brainstormed, I tried to redeem myself for yesterday's troll. What do you think?

A nice backdrop for their presentations?

In the afternoon the power went out. It almost made me laugh because just yesterday I had been thinking about how many times the power went out in Hanoi and that it had yet to go out here. I decided it was the perfect time to take a nap. When the power came back on I decided to explore the offerings of my recently set up cable TV. To add to the surreality of the day, I discovered the 1937 film, The Good Earth, on the Turner Classic Movies channel. Here I am in Asia, surrounded by Asians, and on TV I find a movie set in China with every main character played by a white actor in yellowface. Even knowing that it was filmed over 70 years ago didn't make it any easier to stomach. Instead, I watched The Incredibles. Spending my afternoon watching TV might make me feel a little bit guilty, but I have to say, watching something that didn't require me to wait for it to load felt like a luxury. I'll try not to indulge too often.

Tonight I was planning on going out to dinner with Morena, the new ETA. She had yet to try phở and I figured it was as good an excuse as any to go to the phở place I've been haunting. But, when the time came for us to meet up, it had been pouring for at least an hour and showed no signs of letting up. We tried to wait it out but after half an hour decided to brave the tempest. To mix things up I was going to have cà ri bò, beef curry (not caribou). I had heard that it is quite spicy and I was fully prepared to set my mouth on fire, but when we got there they were out of it. Luckily, phở is by no means a bad second choice. To not disappoint my cravings for pain, I upped the amount of hot sauce I use and even took the next step: I added fresh sliced chilis to my phở. I don't think I can claim as high a spicy tolerance as most of my friends, but I think I have passed some kind of threshold. Dare I say I like spicy food? Life skill goal #1: check. On the way back we got corn on the cob and it hit the spot.

I was all ready to veg out for the rest of the evening, and had already begun doing so, when I heard a knock at my door. I had forgotten that yesterday some students had told me they wanted to visit me around eight pm. It was a lovely hour spent with company, and I am really starting to (try to) learn people's names. It is so hard having about 80 students and maybe another 40 teachers/teacher-students whose names I don't know or am afraid to mispronounce.