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'