1. If it has ice in it, make sure you pump your straw and long spoon up and down repeatedly before drinking it. Sometimes this has the discernible purpose of mixing things better, and sometimes it has no apparent purpose, but you should do it anyway.
2. When you are ready to drink, make sure you hold your glass off to the side of your body. Otherwise, the high condensation on the outside of your glass will dribble all over your lap and make you look incontinent.
3. Embrace the pace of life. You may only have twelve ounces of liquid in your glass, but you should make it last at least 30 minutes. If you chug it thirstily in the first thirty seconds you will have nothing to do with your hands for the next twenty-nine and a half minutes while everyone else drinks and chats. If you fail at this step, you can repeat step one, though this time it will be absolutely pointless. If you succeed at this step, you'll find that the slowly melting ice increases the amount of beverage at your disposal, facilitating your slow imbibing.
3b. If you really fail at step three, don't worry. Most places bring you complimentary cups of iced tea to help you compensate, and you can try again.
Today was largely uneventful. I stayed in until the afternoon, whereupon I discovered that the weather was breezy and cool and perfect. Morena and I went to get a sinh tố. As a part of my new, active approach to language learning, when I got that avocado smoothie a few days ago, I took a picture of the sign so that I could later translate it to find out what the other options were. Armed with that knowledge, today I requested a jackfruit (mít) smoothie. So good! I am committing to trying all of the flavors before I let myself pick a favorite and stop trying new ones.
Tonight I had plans with the same students that I had breakfast with yesterday: Hông, Tho, An, and Lei. We went out for my favorite fried goodies and I finally know their names in Vietnamese: bánh bào chiên and bánh tiêu, the meat-filled bread and sesame bread, respectively. I also had bắp nấu, corn on the cob. Because of my corn purchasing, I ended up learning the Vietnamese words for corn on the cob, kernel corn, and popcorn, and sharing the English words. These students are really helping me jump into language exchange. Originally we were in a hurry because I was supposed to meet Trang less than an hour after I met the girls, but Trang called to cancel so we sat down at a sidewalk cafe to consume our food purchases and wash them down with some ice cold nước mía (sugar cane juice).
After dinner I invited them over to my room, and we chatted, listened to American music, and we wrote down the evening's vocabulary for each other.
Cada noche logras hacerme sonreir antes de dormir :-)
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