The first day of the next nine months of my life

This morning I was scheduled to start at eight, but at 715 there was a sharp knock at the door. Thinking I had overslept I threw on pants and went to see who it was. It was Trang, looking for breakfast company. Apparently people think that eating alone is so sad that they would rather not eat than eat alone. Luckily for her I was awake and she got to have breakfast rather than just coffee.

At eight it was time to find out how exactly I would be spending the ambiguously described next two hours of my Tuesday schedule. It looks like I will be proof-reading automated English translations of texts for a local bird sanctuary. I took a paper full of sentences like this:

In this context, as the host organization of the small scale project promulgated over the past six months: “Maintenance handbook for the protection of Vam Ho’s bird ground,” I have the pleasure to express my gratitude to the organizations and individuals that have taken interest and provided the Youth Creative Group, the project’s host, with valuable help, so that they could reach the aims set out for the project.

and do my best to turn it into something comprehensible. This is what I came up with:

In this context, as the director of the Youth Creative Group’s small-scale project, “Maintenance handbook for the protection of Vam Ho’s bird ground,” I have the pleasure to express my gratitude to the organizations and individuals who have helped us reach our project goals.

In the afternoon I finally buckled down and wrote my first lesson. Hooray! Then, my armoire arrived. This prompted me to rearrange all of my furniture for the second time this week. I may or may not be becoming my mother. Some time later, the curtains arrived, though sans curtain rod or any other device to put them up. Along with the curtains came Ms. My and a delegation of about five women, all wearing a purple or a pink suit. They poked around and discussed and re-rearranged and told me to sit. I still don't really know what happened. 

After that it was my office hours. I wasn't really expecting anyone to come, but two groups of students came to get some preemptive corrections for upcoming presentations, and that took up most of the 90 minutes. The first group was shy but eventually warmed up to me and stayed a while to chat and ask me questions. The second group pretty much managed to conduct our entire meeting with mime. Even though both groups were here about presentations, neither group actually did a spoken run-through; they just showed me their slides. The hardest thing is that I can't always tell whether they can't understand what I'm saying or whether they just don't feel comfortable speaking. 

Remember my lesson plan? It is for tomorrow's Speaking Skills class. All of the students that visited me are in tomorrow's class, and their silence is making me seriously question my lesson plan. When I emailed the teacher my lesson plan earlier today, he told me, "students are rather passive and want their identity not to be uncovered, be flexible with them." (Teachers here constantly describe their students as passive, which I have taken to mean that they don't participate much in class.) I was ready to have to coax students into speaking, but I didn't realize just how serious the problem might be.  
Side note: if there were ever a TV show called Pimp my PowerPoint, my students should be on it. They embed instrumental audio clips and downloaded fancy backgrounds and use pretty much every effect possible. 

When my office hours drew to a close I scampered across the street to get dinner before my next engagement: English Club (aka classes) for teachers. We have a coursebook so I hadn't prepared anything, but the coursebook seemed pretty advanced despite being introductory, and I had a feeling I might be expected to provide supplementary materials. In the fifteen minutes I had between scarfing down dinner and rushing to the classroom I put on my teacher shoes (read: heels) and came up with a couple of activities. I admit, though, I was expecting a stilted disaster. When I got to class, it turned out that no one had the book. So, we would be relying on my largely nonexistent plans. Whether by some miracle or by inherent teacher skills heretofore untapped, I managed to fill two hours with learning. We ended by practicing proper American handshakes and then going out for dinner (dinner #2, in my case).

Dinner was báhn ướt, and after that we had 'fruit salad' again. This fruit salad was one part fruit, one part snow cone, and one part Russian roulette. The fruit included avocado, papaya, watermelon, dragon fruit, jackfruit, heart of palm, peanuts, a mystery vegetable, and ... durian. The durian gets an ellipsis because it has quite a reputation. It has a very strong, distinctive smell, and a very strong flavor that is very polarizing. I had never tried it and I, unfortunately, really don't like it. This is especially unfortunate because the minimal but powerful durian flesh was kind of interspersed into the whole thing, and contaminated the rest of the dish, if you will. So, from the durian and the unpleasantly textured mystery vegetable, the roulette. Next week we are supposed to go out to karaoke after class.

Avocado on top, unknown perils within

Tomorrow I teach my first class! And then another one! And then two English clubs! Eeek!