Eight beautiful legs

[Warning: don't scroll past the second paragraph if you are afraid of eight-legged creatures and are hoping to go to sleep any time soon.]

Clearly I am a poor judge of Vietnamese standards for attractive dressing. On Fridays I teach the FCE class, the class for high school teachers, and unlike my student classes, these classes are about equally divided between men and women. I try to make a point of dressing conservatively on Fridays. There are three male students/teachers in particular who somehow find a way to work my looks into their answer for almost every prompt. You may recall the story about the 'beautiful foreigner,' aka me, from last week. It was not an isolated event. Today, when I asked the class, "if you could invent something to help people, what would it be?" One of them said he would make a magic wand so he could make himself a handsome man because I am a beautiful woman. I thought I had succeeded in putting together an excellently frumpy but professional outfit, but I was told repeatedly throughout the day, by men and women and students alike, how beautiful I looked today in particular. One of the male teachers asked if he could take a picture with me, because I looked especially beautiful today. Later a female teacher told him that his wife was going to hit him when she saw the picture. After I left the class I thought I had left my keys in the classroom, and when I came back the male teachers were in the midst of talking to the teacher about how beautiful I looked today. Clearly, nobody finds this running commentary objectionable, and I try to roll with it, but it can make my Friday classes feel like an hour of culturally-sanctioned (mild) sexual harassment.

Almost every time I am with Trang, she asks me for the English term for a very specific action or situation, and almost every time she asks it is something that, as far as I know, we have no single word for. Today she asked me how we say 'to salute the flag' in English. I proposed 'saying the pledge of allegiance,' but that was deemed inadequate. In Vietnam, at the start of every major meeting or conference or event, everyone stands and silently faces the flag while the national anthem is sung. She wanted a word that encompassed that, and I couldn't offer one. But her insistence that we must have a word for it ties in to a theme that was particularly salient this week: nationalism. As part of the warm-up for yesterday's listening activity on air travel, I asked the students where they would go if they could go anywhere in the world for free. At least 10 of my 40 students said they wanted to see a particular place in or all of Vietnam. This may stem from the fact that most of them have never left the province, but I wonder how many underprivileged kids in the US would choose to travel their own country over going anywhere else in the world. As we discussed after the question about saluting, Vietnam's battles for autonomy are not in the distant past. People remember the struggles. People lived those struggles and sacrifices. Trang told us about the symbolism of the flag, which I had previously read about, repeatedly emphasizing that the red field behind the yellow star represents blood, the blood lost in battle. The star is a guiding star, like the North star. If you want a better taste of the ideals under Vietnamese patriotism, check out the lyrics of the national anthem.

It's been a while since I had creepy-crawly visitors, don't you think? Well, today I had more than a visitor, I had a house guest. [Warning: don't scroll down if you are afraid of eight-legged creatures and are hoping to go to sleep any time soon.] I decided that I needed to do some cleaning, and when I was done sweeping I went to go get the dust pan. Guess who I found on the side of the dustpan? A spider who either wanted to help or wanted to discourage me from any future attempts at housekeeping. I didn't want to poke it because I didn't want to antagonize it, but I also certainly wasn't going to use the dustpan with the spider along for the ride. With some cautious wiggling of the dustpan I managed to coax the spider onto the wall. The spider stayed in that same spot for the next several hours.

This evening after dinner I went to the bathroom and of course automatically checked for the spider. It was no longer there. Good. Then I noticed that it was on the door, not too far from where my hand still was. Me being me I ran away -- to get my camera. No longer lethargic, the spider bordered on hyperactive, scampering all over the back of my door. Then I saw another bug on my curtain and went over to take pictures of it. When I turned back, I saw that the spider was making its way through the space between the door and the door frame, and would soon be outside of the bathroom and in my hallway. Not ok. If I closed the door really fast I could crush it, but my reluctance to kill it slowed my reaction and the spider made it through to the other side. Now what? I managed to startle it back where it came from by whacking the wall near it. I closed the bathroom door and closed it out of my room. My bathroom is more or less closed off from the rest of my space, but I can't close the door when I'm inside, so I have been reluctant to go back in there lest I release the spider back into my room.

On my bathroom door. I had scarier photos but I decided to be nice to my
faithful readers.

Were you in cahoots with the spider? I'll never know.