Cake might give you a spare tire, but...

Remember those plastic nets my students were making for their costumes? Check out the final results.

The conference started with academic presentations, one from me and one from another teacher. My main message was to encourage them to stop citing a lack of foreigners as an inconvenience in their English development, and to start using each other as resources. Then the conference got fun. The four classes (2 1st year groups, 2nd years, and 3rd years) all presented a 'cultural performance,' of which I was one of the judges. The performances consisted of a Korean coming of age ceremony, a Japanese tea ceremony, an Egyptian embalming ceremony, and a scene from Brazilian carnaval, seen above. The carnaval was the most exciting, but the first years' embalming was the best in my opinion.

Then we moved on to plays. I starred as a wise woman in the seniors' play. At the end of the night, prizes were given out for the cultural performances and for the plays. To be honest, I was disappointed that the prizes ended up getting distributed in accordance with class (seniors got first, second years got second, and so on). The second years did a spectacular job with their play. It was well-acted, hilarious, and well-pronounced.

Earlier in the day, I had my last. ever. monthly schedule meeting. I almost wish I had one more right before leaving, because it is probably my least favorite thing on my schedule. There's nothing terribly awful about it; it's just unpleasant to be in a meeting that is entirely about you, your future, your performance, but to be unable to understand anything that is being said in the meeting. After that Trang and I had an early pre-conference dinner. I took her to the banh cuon place I went to with Thy last week. Even though Trang said it didn't measure up to some good places in HCMC, she was glad we went because it is a dish she likes that she hadn't found in Ben Tre, so it hit the spot.

bánh cứơn

I learned that bánh, the word for cake, which doesn't really mean anything like cake in the English/American sense (note that the dish we had also contains this word), is also used for tires (bánh xe) and rudders (bánh lái). If I needed any further indication that Vietnamese is crazy, I think that's it.

Gearing up

Even though this has been an uneventful weekend, I thought I should blog tonight because I don't know whether I will have time to write anything tomorrow, and then I'm leaving for Cambodia first thing in the morning (seriously, at 330am) on Tuesday. As hard as it is to believe that I'm less than 48 hours away from being in another country, it is even harder to believe that by the time I make it back to Ben Tre it'll be my last month as an ETA.

Yesterday, the main event was more play rehearsal. During rehearsal, the students kept giving each other directions in Vietnamese, and pausing to discuss directorial decisions. I tried to pay attention, and every now and then it felt like I understood the majority of what was going on. After a while they noticed me actually paying attention when they were speaking Vietnamese, and they started debating whether I understood. Finally one of them turned to me and asked, in Vietnamese, if I understood. I said yes. I definitely didn't understand everything, but I think they were all surprised and impressed that I understood anything.

I am very curious to see how the play will go tomorrow. Actually, I am generally curious about how tomorrow night's conference will go. While we were rehearsing our play, other seniors were working on costumes for the play and for the 'cultural contest,' which for the seniors entails learning the Brazilian samba and doing a mock up of carnaval.

They made a net out of plastic twine as the foundation

And then cover it in more plastic twine to fill it out and make samba skirts

My student's was in Spanish, sort of

In the evening, I composed my speech/presentation for the conference. It's not finished, but I have the advantage of having English as my native language and being good at winging it.

We were supposed to rehearse again this morning, but I didn't find out until tonight that for some reason their calls weren't getting through to my phone so I missed out on rehearsal. (The time hadn't been decided in advance.) The good news was that I had a really productive day, the main fruit of which was two job applications. I was planning on doing laundry, but it started pouring outside and, irony of ironies, I had no more running water until the rain stopped several hours later.

I feel like I have a mountain to climb tomorrow. I have to teach in the morning, probably rehearse in the afternoon, go to the bank to change dong to dollars, pack for my trip, and spend several hours sweating and jumping through hoops at the conference until late into the night. Luckily I'll have twelve hours on the bus to Siem Reap to sleep it all off on Tuesday. Wish me luck!

New roles

My internet has been on vacation for the last few days. On Tuesday night, Mr. Luan presented me with a fruit called the Uncle Ho (as in Ho Chi Minh). It is a very large citrus. I thought that, since it was named after him, it might resemble him somehow, but aside from being the size of a human head, it bore no particular resemblance to the noted figure. It turns out that it is named after him because -- allegedly -- all of these fruits are grown from the seeds of a tree that originally grew in Ho Chi Minh's garden. Mr. Luan has one such tree in his back yard, and often bragged to me about it, though I had never understood the significance. I can now report that Uncle Ho tastes more or less like any other pink-fleshed citrus, and that its size is mainly due to the incredibly thick peel, as the fruit itself is more or less large grapefruit sized.

That's a full-sized plate

Thursday night I went out to dinner with Thuy, one of my seniors. She told me once that she has wanted to go out with me but she has a job and is too busy, so it was a pleasant surprise to get her text message inviting me out. We had pho, just the two of us, and then we went to milk tea, where Nhu joined us. Since my senior classes ended several weeks ago, I haven't really gotten to see or spend time with most of them, so it was particularly nice to just hang out. Even though it was partly a social call, it was also a bit of a business meeting. This coming Monday, the English department will be holding it's annual conference/workshop/seminar, and the seniors are currently going through finals and simultaneously having to prepare for the conference. Originally, I was supposed to make a presentation, be an MC, be a judge for a competition, and participate in a play. Then it was decided that I should just present and judge, and now it has been decided that I will be in the play, too. So, Nhu and Thuy and I discussed the script over our milk tea.

Vanessa Hudgens smiled at us from the dental clinic across the street

On Friday morning, I was not in the mood to teach. I briefly but seriously considered calling in sick, but the voices of reason (one of whom is named Elliot) prevailed, and I stepped up to the plate. I'm glad I did, because the lesson plan I had prepared went quite well. I'm still struggling with the level-inappropriate textbook I've been given. I appreciate the relative freedom a useless textbook provides, but I'm still bound to teaching the same topic for three weeks, and that's the tricky part. We started the new unit, childhood, and I decided to use milestones as a jumping off point. I introduced the word and concept to my students, and asked all of them to prepare to share a memory relating to one of the following milestones:

• First day of school
• Learning to ride a bike
• Learning to swim
• Losing their first tooth
• Birth of a younger sibling
• First family vacation
• First Tet they can remember

Most of them chose to share the story of their first day of school, and most of those stories followed the same general outline of feeling scared, making friends/getting candy from the teacher, getting used to a new environment, and eventually loving school. However, I also got some very unique stories. One student shared the sad story of her grandmother dying on Tet. Some shared fun and detailed memories of their first family vacation. One student shared his story of (sort of) learning to swim. He taught himself in a shallow pool, then was hanging out with his friends who decided to swim across a big river, and about halfway across he realized he wasn't going to make it. If his friends hadn't turned to look at him he would have drowned, because he was too weak to call for help. As a result of this, he decided (illogically, in my opinion) that he would never swim again.

Thuy (Trang's sister) and I went out for lunch. We went to a place in My Tho, the city in the province across the bridge, that is famous for its fried chicken. The chicken was indeed worth the drive. I also had a mysterious but delicious marinated beef dish, bò lúc lắc. It is the first time I've had beef in Vietnam other than in meatball/patty form or thinly stir fried form. These were tender, flavorful, melt in your mouth chunks. 

The two of us at a lakeside cafe after lunch

In the late afternoon, I had play rehearsal. In the early evening, I went out with Thy and Tuc. We started with shopping, because they think I need a new dress for the conference on Monday. However, they failed to notice or account for the fact that I need clothing of a very different size than they do. They kept encouraging me to try on dresses that I knew wouldn't fit. I would sausage myself into them only to confirm the fact that they were in fact too short and wouldn't zip. Eventually they got the picture and started only suggesting dresses with a lot of stretch and elastic. After a couple of shops and no purchases on my part, we decided it was time for dinner. However, Tuc's motorbike suddenly wouldn't start. We went to the mechanic together, and then she insisted that Thy and I go on without her. Thy had told me we were going to have hu tieu chay, vegetarian noodle soup, and I wasn't too excited about it but I was going to go along with it. She must have changed her mind, though, because she took me to a place that sells banh cuon. I was very excited by this change of events. Banh cuon is a northern dish so it's harder to find in the South. I had tried it once before and liked it, and wished I could have it again, but even Trang didn't know where to find it in Ben Tre. Success! It was a satisfying end to a sweaty evening of shopping.

Sewn onto an otherwise perfectly normal and wearable shirt

Lately, it seems like nature has been trying to restake its claim on my living space. A creeping vine has started winding itself onto the grid that postures as a bathroom wall, and it is growing at the impressive rate of at least a foot per day. Over these last few months I have shared with you stories and pictures of the many creepy crawlies I have played host to. This week, an unexpected breed of visitors has finally caused me to draw the line. I allow spiders the size of my hand to watch me when I use the bathroom. Cockroaches wave their antennae at me while I brush my teeth. Wasps built a nest on my bathroom door. Frogs lurk in corners. Millipedes creep along on the wall above my bed. Geckos emit demonic cackles while I try to sleep. All of these I have borne with patience and minimal slaying. But now I am waging war. Crickets. Crickets I will not abide. A few nights ago I woke up to what I thought was a fire alarm. I waited to hear screams or at least hurried footsteps from upstairs, but there was nothing. It was only then that I realized that if this place had fire alarms they'd go off every afternoon during the trash burnings. It was a cricket. And in case you think crickets are charming, soothing hallmarks of the peaceful countryside life, let me correct you. They are not. Having a cricket in my room is like having a whistle-happy referee who has perfected circular breathing as my house guest. Not ideal for watching TV, sleeping, or generally keeping my sanity after sunset. So, last night, I went to war. Using my built-in audio tracking devices (ears) and state of the art cricket trap (cup) I rounded up all of the crickets trying to maximize their mating calls with my bathroom's acoustics and threw them out the window. It was amazing how much of a difference it made. Best of all, I finally got a good night's sleep.

Cravings

Speaking of what's become normal, last night I dreamed that I walked into a bank asking for dollars. The thing was that I was speaking Vietnamese but none of the people there were Vietnamese and so no one understood me.

This morning I had my Vietnamese lesson. Trang met me and told me that she had a surprise for me, and that she hoped it wasn't terrible. Then she asked me where I wanted to go to breakfast, because she wanted me to be in a good mood before my surprise. That did not bode well for this surprise. Over breakfast we discussed the food cravings of pregnant women. Trang told me that many pregnant women in Vietnam eat clay pots. Clay pots. They crave them so intensely that they usually finish eating the lid by the time they get home from buying one at the market. She also told me that people think that if a woman craves sour food, she will have a daughter.

After breakfast we went to get bubble tea. Trang said it was time for my surprise, and again said she hoped it would be ok. I was going to say that the only surprise that would be a bad surprise would be a test, but just as I was about to say it I saw her reaching into her briefcase and I realized that that was exactly what my surprise would be. Vietnamese pop quiz! The first page was pretty rough. I had to label pictures of objects that I should know but for some reason don't (pen, chair, that sort of thing). If I had been asked to label pictures of fruit I would have rocked it. I also had ten questions with four words each, and I had to circle the word that didn't fit in each set. This was challenging if I didn't know more than two words in a set. Next, I had a short answer section. This one was much easier. I felt pretty clever when I confronted "What do you do at [time of day]?" I recognized that the word stood for a time of day, but couldn't remember what time of day it was. My answer? I eat pho. Perfectly suitable at any time of day. On the back I had to answer some multiple choice questions and read a short passage and then answer some reading comprehension questions. This side was a breeze. I scored 23 out of 40. Not stellar, but not totally abysmal.

After that I had a regular lesson, and I've gotten pretty comfortable telling stories in Vienglish. Too bad I can't get away with that on my final exam. I learned the word for 'dimples'. At first I misunderstood Trang's English explanation and thought that she was saying that it was the same word as corn, but it turns out that it is the same word as coin, dòng tiền. Neither makes too much sense to me. I also learned that if you don't look good in a photo, people say that you didn't eat the photo. Bạn không ăn ảnh. In other turns of conversation Trang told me that her senior students now email her in English, and she credits me for this change. I figured out how I ended up with a bug in my previous milk tea. It turns out it was a bee, not a fly. Forgive me for misidentifying it; I had already chewed on it. The place where they prepare the drinks is outside, and they line up glasses full of the tapioca to have them ready for whenever customers place their orders. Meanwhile, bees buzz in and out of the glasses. I guess they don't always make it out before the drink makes it in.

English club was in the evening. For the last several weeks, only first years have come, so I was pleasantly surprised to see three seniors, especially since this is their finals week. We talked about family. First I asked each of the students to describe their families in detail. Names, ages, occupations, et cetera. Then I made a big elaborate family tree on the board. Then the students asked me a ton of hypothetical questions. If I could choose between having an older brother or an older sister, which would I choose? What would I do if one of my children was a bad student? Would I like to have twins? It was nice to have the seniors there to make the club less of a lecture and more of an exchange, but looking at the first years' faces it sometimes looked like they were feeling left out.

From your great grandparents to your grandchildren, and in-laws too

Trang and I went out to dinner. It's been a long time! We got there and she sprung another test on me. Really? But thankfully it was a take home test, not a dinner test.

Normal for now

"Just when you think you know something, you have to look at it in another way." - John Keating in Dead Poets Society

Time is wrapping up. Six weeks left. When I got here, it seemed like almost every story about an experience could start with the words "this was the first time I ever...". Now, things are in a different light. Many times I wonder, will this story be "it was the last time I ..."? It's  not over yet, but time is slipping through my fingers. I already finished teaching the third years several weeks ago, and I recently found out I only have two weeks left teaching the second years. It seems like by May my schedule will have simmered down to first years on Friday and the two English clubs. Anyway, the impending end has made me very reflective about how I, and my view of normal, has changed over these last several months. Some of these changes stem from prolonged exposure to cultural differences, and some are just lifestyle changes.

• Wearing pajamas in public, during the day
• Not understanding most of the conversation around me at any given moment, and treating human voices like white noise
• Being woken up by roosters (but that doesn't make this any less annoying)
• Riding a motorbike - while carrying a hamster in a plastic shopping bag, while using a toothpick, with more than one person
• Living in a home easily and frequently accessed by an assortment of critters
• Living alone
• Eating with chopsticks
• Relying more on body language than ever before/practically becoming a mime
• Shouting at waitstaff to get their attention
• Only using cash and knowing that $10 or $15 will should last me into the next week
• Mentally narrating my day in anticipation of blogging
• Gnawing on bones and eating skins
• Throwing my trash on the floor in public establishments
• Not expecting events to happen until they are in fact already underway - generally not having any expectations at all
• Identifying my students by their eyes (or handbags) when I see them outside of class and that is the only part of them that is not shielded from the sun 
• Greeting people by nodding at them

That list isn't even close to complete. But the thing that strikes me is that, six weeks from now, this won't be normal anymore. This has become my life and, abruptly, it won't be anymore. Despite the eagerness to go home that the countdown wiki on my laptop dash might suggest, I'm feeling a little anxious about the change. The thought of leaving, of never coming back, is hard. There is a small but dense pit of sadness that I feel somewhere between my heart and my stomach every time I think about leaving. Even if I ever come back, I can't come back to this moment, to this life, to this feeling of normalcy I have acquired over so many months of total abnormality. What now? Allison, fellow ETA, has adopted a mantra of making the days count instead of counting the days, and I think it is both clever and sage. So maybe instead of watching Dead Poets Society in the afternoon and getting a good blog quote, I'll be getting out of my room a little more.

Yesterday I rescheduled my morning class to the late afternoon because I was coming back from Tra Vinh in the morning. Since I finished teaching at five, I decided to go ahead and get dinner. Eating at that time is perhaps one of the few Vietnamese 'normals' that I have continued to resist. Getting food at that time means dealing with rush hour traffic, but more importantly it means feeling hungry again before I go to bed. However, yesterday showed me it might be worth it to make adjustments. By the time I usually go looking for dinner, usually between seven and eight, there aren't many appealing options left. But yesterday I discovered the plethora of options available at 5pm. I hadn't seen good spring rolls in months, and yesterday they were everywhere. I went to buy more gas canisters for my stove and the woman I buy them from asked me what I've done with my empty ones. I told her I still have them. She told me I should bring them to her because she refills them. The reason I still have them is because I knew they could be refilled, but I could never figure out where. Finally, I have an answer. I bought some corn next, and then I went to get some spring rolls. The place is across the street from the school, and on Friday I noticed a sign advertising the rolls. In Vietnamese, I had asked if she had any, but upon seeing me she immediately turned around and asked if any of her clientele spoke English. "Spring. Rolls." I said, in Vietnamese. "Oh, spring rolls. No, I'm out." I guess she remembered our interaction on Friday, because as soon as I came up to her yesterday she offered me spring rolls. She asked me how many and whether I wanted chili in my sauce and it felt good to not have her miming at me like most of the vendors I started frequenting earlier on. A student from another department stood there and gaped at me as I spoke to the woman in Vietnamese. "You speak Vietnamese?" "You're the American teacher, right?" Yes and yes. Just as satisfying as having several successful Vietnamese interactions were the scrumptious spring rolls, with a sauce so delicious I almost wanted to eat it with a spoon.

Third new year of the year

This weekend was the Khmer new year. I went to Tra Vinh, which has a significant Khmer population, to visit Violet and take part in festivities. Unlike the last time I traveled on a Friday the 13th, I was met with no bad luck or undue stress. I caught the bus to the ferry on Friday afternoon. An elderly man across the aisle tried to chat with me. No matter how many times I said I didn't hiễu, it turned out that I did actually kind of understand. After asking me where I was going (to the ferry), why I was going there (to go to Tra Vinh), and what I'd be doing there (visiting a friend), he jumped to a strange conclusion. He suddenly proclaimed that I spoke not only Vietnamese and 'American', but also Lao and Cambodian. After that I really didn't hiễu anymore, and he started chatting with someone who took the seat next to him. I really enjoyed the ride. Even if the weather never changes here, it's obvious that it's spring. We passed ponds full of blooming water hyacinths and lotuses and water lilies. It's not the same as Texas wildflowers, but it was beautiful nonetheless.

I took the ferry across the river; Violet met me on her side, and she drove me into Tra Vinh city. Naturally, our first order of business was to go shopping. I bought my first pseudo English shirt, and it even had some pseudo Italian to boot! Violet and I had dinner at a banh uot place I've been wanting to revisit ever since my first time in Tra Vinh, and it did not disappoint. We bought a kite and then went home for a bit to relax before our second dinner. At around nine we left for a bia hoi (fresh beer place) with Vincent and were met by some of Vincent's students. Sadly, the grill was broken, so I didn't get any of the grilled beef I'd heard so much about, but we had some great corn, fried chicken, and fried calamari.

In our new shirts

Saturday morning, Violet and I had the choice between going to the beach or going to a going away party for a foreign employee at her university. We chose the beach. It was more or less a 90-minute drive and, again, it was incredibly enjoyable. As much as I love new sights and new experiences, I love it when I can find something familiar in it. The wide blue sky full of cumulus clouds and the many, seemingly stray, cows reminded me of Texas. Some of the towns reminded me of Guatemala. The old churches had notes of Italy. By the time we got to the beach, I was feeling really good.

Getting onto a ferry

We were the only people at the beach. We set up under a thatched roof that shaded us from the sun above and the blistering sand below it, and we had a well-earned brunch that I bought before we left the city while Violet was having her clanking bike checked for our trip. The beach was not the blue water white sand paradise that destination beaches tout, but I hadn't been expecting it to be. It was covered in the most amazing shells, a surprising amount of lightbulbs, and the usual Vietnamese debris (assorted sandals, empty bottles of fish sauce, etc.). After eating and setting my inner child free to collect an absurd number of these shells, we went for a swim. We let ourselves get pruny before we emerged again to fly our kite. Though the kite was pretty, it came with a very short string. The wind carried it easily, but it couldn't get high enough to really glide.

Some of the shells were encrusted with barnacles

Mollusk-mohawked light bulb

Flying our butterfly kite

And then Violet found a dead puffer fish on the beach

While we were scampering around discovering the beach's trash treasures, a group of young Vietnamese guys arrived, with a big hoe in tow. They started digging in the sand and shouted at us to join them, but we declined. They came to us. It turned out that they were digging for crabs, and they brought one to show us. They might have accidentally-on-purpose released it at us. They caught it again, but one of them had to literally pounce on it to keep it from getting away. Crabs are fast! After a while of rocky conversation, they conscripted us to help them dig for crabs. A second crab was unearthed and somehow, in attempting to get it into the bag with the first crab, both crabs ended up springing free and swiftly scuttled in opposite directions. Unluckily for the crabs, they were recaptured. At this point, one of the guys thought it would be funny to try and drag Violet into the ocean, at which point I decided it was probably time for us to go.

That night we went to Ratana's home. He is one of Vincent's students, and he had invited us and several others to come celebrate his birthday. It was a striking treat to watch a group of young guys cooking for and serving the guests. They made a green mango and dried fish salad, fried chicken, and a fish soup that tasted like it was equal parts fish and peppers. It was a good mix of students and foreigners, as four of Vincent's friends teaching in other cities came in for the new year and came for Ratana's birthday. When the food was gone we decided to move on to karaoke. Unfortunately, we had only made it through one song when the power went out in the whole city. On the upside, the pitch black outside made it easy to see all of the stars.

Sunday was Khmer festivity day. We started out by going to Trà Cú, a Khmer town in Tra Vinh province. We went to the home of Mr. Hai, a teacher at the university. So began a day of culturally mandated debauchery. Mr. Hai plied us with Heineken, 333 beer, brandy, and three different batches of homemade rice wine. He told us that while the Vietnamese only drink until they are drunk, Khmer people keep going long after that. The alcohol was accompanied by a feast that included beef jerky that he brought home from Cambodia after a recent trip. He wanted to take us to observe some religious rituals, but social obligations summoned us to another house.

Our host is on the far right

The bacchanalia continued at a Khmer student's house. When we got there, we were greeted by a band of performers that included a king and queen, an old man, a 'ladyboy' (man in drag), a monkey warrior, and some demons. They and most of the town children paraded into the yard of the house we were staying at and gave a special performance. In the video below you can see the monkey warrior dancing and most of the other performers.

With the king

Ladyboy in the foreground, queen in the background

After they left we had dinner. It started off with curried duck, then a squid and greens dish, and then the main course came out. Drum roll please. It was dog meat stew. I had started to think I might leave Vietnam without trying it, but I should have known Vietnam would not disappoint me. Despite all of the negative opinions I had heard, I actually found dog meat to be perfectly palatable. It was certainly chewy, but it just resembled overcooked beef, which isn't so bad as far as bad meat goes.

It was only slightly awkward to have dogs lounging at our feet while we ate

We took a break from eating and drinking to go to the family tomb for a special ceremony. From what I understand, each family has a stupa-like structure where the ashes of all ancestors are kept. Families go pay their respects and monks lead each family in prayer. They also fling a lot of (holy?) water during the praying. After this, we went to what felt like a big neighborhood party. Musicians played Khmer rock and we spent the rest of the night dancing in circles around a table laden with fruits and flowers.

Having recently celebrated Easter and having now participated in three different kinds of new year celebrations, I have been reflecting about tradition. Last Sunday I was acutely aware of the importance of tradition. Without ritual or tradition, it's hard to sense the specialness you may expect a day to have. Most American holidays, even the ones I was able to celebrate with friends or family, just didn't feel quite right. They were missing the people or foods or activities that make them different from every other day. That, and most of my holidays are irrelevant and meaningless to everyone around me. Before Tet, I wondered if it would somehow feel more special than my own new year, even though it had no meaning to me, because it would be actively celebrated by everyone else around me. It didn't. Yesterday, though, got close. There was a large gathering of new friends, there was feasting, there was some ceremony, and there was a lot of celebration. I don't know that it felt as meaningful as 'my' holidays, but it felt like the right kind of special.

Let's hit the road

I need a pair of passport photos for my visa for when I go to Cambodia in two weeks. In order to accomplish this mission, Kim Long took me to a bridal photo studio yesterday. It was a pretty straightforward experience, but it was kind of thrilling to walk into one of these establishments. The thing you have to understand is that bridal photography in Vietnam is an art form unto itself. It takes the Vietnamese love for having their photo taken, bedazzled clothes, and general campiness, and turns it into an extravagant post-processing skin-whitened montage. Photos are taken before the wedding -- an advantage to not being superstitious about the groom seeing the bride in the dress before the wedding. There are several costume changes and location changes (and usually several hair pieces) and the whole thing could be called an ordeal or an experience. If you want more details, you can read this western blogger's account of her own wedding photography experience.

As far as they go, it was a very modest establishment.

Still, it was like walking into a life-size Barbie closet.

I got lassoed into going out for coffee with a man I've met before but whose name I can't remember but didn't want to ask. At first I wasn't in a good mood, given the semi-sneak attack that lead up to us having coffee, but I tried to stop counting the minutes and enjoy the time I would be spending with him. He started off by telling me that he would soon be teaching English, and pulled out a workbook, asking what I thought of it. I thought he was going to ask me to 'help him with' (do) his lesson plan, but he didn't. He is a tour guide, and he speaks some of the fastest English I've encountered in Vietnam. That isn't necessarily a good thing, though. With that speedy delivery come the same grammatical errors and pronunciation problems that everyone else has, so it just meant that I had less time to figure out what he was saying. As a tour guide, he is one of the few people in Ben Tre who gets to speak English to native speakers almost every day. He told me that he loves learning idioms, and then quizzed me on whether I'd heard of all of the ones he's learned. I'm not sure why, but he seemed surprised that I knew all of his idioms. He told me that he particularly loves 'hit the road'. He also talked to me a lot about coconut mice. Apparently there are mice that only eat coconut, and they make a hole in the fruit while it is still on the tree, and then they eat all of the meat out of it. This negatively affects crops, and when you've got a towering coconut palm you can't really tell whether your coconuts have been pillaged until you've already gone to the trouble of getting them down. On the upside, he claimed, coconut mice are absolutely delicious.

He decided to crash the student English club, but he didn't really participate. We talked about jobs, and brainstormed a huge list of jobs, talked about childhood dream jobs, and the jobs students plan on getting after they graduate. At the end, I told each of them to imagine that they had a certain job, and think about what their daily life would be like. Each of them came to the front of the class, talked about their hypothetical job and life, and answered questions from the rest of us. One girl, a first year, made my jaw drop when she said "If I were a pilot, I would...". This is a structure that I rarely hear even from my third years, even when I remind them to use it. Our hypothetical chef said he would have a world famous restaurant serving fried chicken in HCMC, but that it would be reasonable priced so even poor people could enjoy his food. Now he's been conscripted to bring snacks for next week.

After getting through my classes tomorrow morning, I'll be catching a bus, ferry, and motorbike to spend the weekend visiting Violet in Tra Vinh. 

Cats and unexpected crunch

Sunday night, I was awoken by a very strange sound. At first it sounded like a baby, but that's not a sound I'm used to hearing on campus. But there were two sources of the sound. Was it two babies? It kind of sounded like a cat. Was it a baby and a cat? Two cats? I tried to close my ears and go to sleep but the mysterious duet was persistent and insistent. I untucked my mosquito net, got out of bed, and went to peer outside. This is what I found.

The end of the video sounds more like what I was hearing at the beginning. It went on and on and on. I had to use my iPod to drown out the two cats who managed to sound like babies crossed with cats crossed with Donald Duck. This second video is harder to hear, but it has more of the weird sounds.

Monday morning I taught Speaking. The day's topic was learning styles, and the students took a quiz to find out what their learning style was. I took it with them and was surprised when the results revealed that I was not just a visual learner but also a haptic (kinesthetic) learner. To be fair, my scores in each category were within five points of each other, but auditory was the lowest. As we tallied the class's results, I wished that this chapter in the textbook had been one of the first. It would have been an ideal exercise at the beginning of the year. It would have helped me teach better, and students could have put the relevant study tips to good use earlier on. Seeing that most of my students were auditory learners, I wondered whether they'd become this way after a lifetime of lecture-heavy education, or if it just happened to be that way.

Today I had my Vietnamese lesson. It got off to a rough start, mostly because Trang kept trying to just talk to me and I had no idea what she was saying. However, it ended up being a very interesting conversation (mostly in English), even if it wasn't the best lesson. We talked about our favorite Greek myths, and I corrected her pronunciation of Zeus, whom she was calling Juice. Eventually we got back to the whole Vietnamese lesson part of it. Tidbits include the fun to say "bóng bóng" (bubble) and "đạo tin lành" (Protestantism, literally religion of good news). We discussed the many terms for family members, and when we got to mợ, an uncle-in-law on your mom's side, it became the fourth item of the multi-toned 'mơ's I have gathered, so I decided to finish the set. Behold the perils of tone:

• mỡ - greasy
• mở - open
• mơ - dream
• mợ - uncle-in-law
• mờ - dim
• mớ - sleep talking

Additionally, I learned that there is no distinction between cousins and siblings. If you want to be specific your siblings are your anh/em ruột, literally meaning intestinal brother or sister, and your cousin is your anh/em họ (brother or sister of the same family name). When the people around us reacted to Trang saying the words for 'great grandmother', she explained that it is often uttered to insult someone. This segued into me telling Trang about 'yo momma' and yo momma jokes. That's definitely not something I ever expected to be teaching in Vietnam.

Trang and I went to the milk tea place for our lesson. The first time I went, I made it my goal to try as many flavors as possible. I certainly haven't tried all of the options yet, but I think I will have soon tried enough to confidently settle into a couple of favorites. The milk tea comes with an assortment of tapioca balls. My favorite kind is filled with passion fruit juice and bursts when you bite it. Today, I experienced a kind of tapioca I had not previously experienced in any of my visits. It was crunchy. Some sage or perhaps just curious part of my faculties decided to take it out of my mouth and look at it. It was not tapioca. It was a big, dead fly. I have intentionally eaten larvae here in Vietnam, and they were delicious, but it is another thing entirely to find an unexpected protein additive in your tea. I can't decide if this makes it better or worse, but I was actually enjoying the flavor of the impostor tapioca before I took it out of my mouth and found out what it was.

And on that note, let me close by telling you that there are only 50 days left until the official end of my term as a Fulbrighter. Whoa.

Easter coconut

“If you want to make God laugh, tell him about your plans.” - Woody Allen

It was such an eventful weekend I had to split it into more than one post. In anticipation for my several visitors, I had grand plans of where I would take them to eat, where we would relax, and so on. Of course, I forgot that I was in Vietnam, the country that laughs at your plans even more than God does. Originally, Lam (ETA) and Vincent (non-Fulbright ETA in Tra Vinh with Violet) were supposed to arrive in Ben Tre on Saturday and leave at their convenience on Sunday. On Friday night, in the midst of poring over youtube videos of Nguyễn Hoàng Nam, Vincent informed us that he'd actually be coming with one of his students, Thu, and that his program director and his wife would be coming in from HCMC to join us. Suddenly, instead of having two motorbikes and four people, we'd be juggling seven people on those two motorbikes. But it got worked out.

On Saturday morning, Violet got a message from Vincent informing her that his motorbike was suddenly out of commission, so they'd be late and using Thu's bike. Lam informed me that he'd be arriving at two, give or take a couple of hours. Violet and I got a decently early start and had bun bo hue for breakfast before hitting up the lake stage. The road closures for the festival rerouted everyone onto a usually quiet side street, and I was intrigued but not at all surprised by the clots of sidewalk fruit sellers and the number of vendors that suddenly inhabited previously empty storefronts. There was happening on the stage, but it was open to the public so we clambered around and hoped we wouldn't suddenly plummet into the water of dubious cleanliness.

Dragons frolic among coconut palms

I frolic on a my-size Rach Mieu Bridge

A posse of teens goaded each other into working up the courage to talk to us in English, and one of them finally asked us if we could take a picture of their group. We did so and then, after briefly consulting together, they decided that we were beautiful and they asked if they could get a group picture with us in it. We complied. The next order of business was shopping. Violet and I have both been dreaming of acquiring a Vietnamese-style blazer (colorful or polka-dotted and perhaps adorned with an assortment of buttons and zippers). I'd seen a few shops that looked promising, so Violet drove us there to commence the hunt. Alas, it was a futile search, and I had my dreams crushed by a red and black blazer that was perfect except for the fact that it was about two sizes too small. No success on the blazer front, but we both made other purchases. A tank top for me and a romper for Violet.

At this point, Violet and I were feeling hot and thirsty, so we headed back to campus to get sugarcane juice at a place just outside the gate. Right as we sat down, we saw Vincent, Thu, and Patrick and Jessica (Vincent's program director) arriving at the college. Perfect timing! We ordered four more nuoc mias and did some getting to know each other. It was right around lunch time, so our next stop was my preferred not-quite-upscale restaurant. It's not street food, but it's not nearly as fancy or expensive as restaurants. I ordered the Ben Tre specialty, canh chua (sour soup), fish cooked in fish sauce, and we also got a plate of fried squid. We chowed down with vigor, and Patrick and Jessica declared it the best meal they'd had in Vietnam. Score! 

Seeing as how this is my home turf and all, it was up to me to figure out what everyone should do. There isn't much to see in Ben Tre other than taking a river tour, but that's not even in the city. My main knowledge of Ben Tre is it's food offerings, so despite the fact that we'd all just stuffed ourselves we went to have some milk tea. It was just two blocks away, so it was easy to get to despite our limited vehicles. Since we arrived with two blatant foreigners in tow, the owners closed the doors and turned on the air conditioning for us. We hung out for quite a while, long enough for Lam to meet us around three. We decided to order a plate of fried fertilized quail eggs to perhaps not so gently encourage Patrick and Jessica to give them a try. They acquiesced, content with having tried them, but not eager to have any more. After all of this, Patrick, Jessica, Vincent, and Thu went to the coconut festival while Violet, Lam, and I decompressed and tried to decide where we would all meet up for dinner. Lam wanted to go somewhere where we could grill at our table and have some beers, but I have never been somewhere like that. I texted Mr. Hoang, whom I know to be an avid social drinker, asking him for a recommendation. I should have seen it coming. He was out drinking, and recommended that we join him. 

All of us met at the place that Mr. Hoang recommended, and though we did not sit with him we made sure to visit his table and clink our glasses. Service was slow, and Patrick and Jessica actually had to leave before our main course arrived. The rest of us were going to meet my students, Thy, Nhu, and Di, and go to the coconut festival, and we never ended up getting the roast chicken we ordered. Instead, we dove into the festival traffic. It was more packed than any traffic I have ever been in in Saigon or Hanoi, and I have done some rush hour xe om-ing. We were inching along, and I was getting grazed by passengers on other motorbikes.

Not bumper to bumper, elbow to elbow

The festival was even more crowded than it was on Friday night. Since most of us had seen it already, we didn't spend as much time there. I did, however, get a better look at the coconut handcrafts, and discovered the rather out of place trinket below.

Is Ben Tre exporting coconut crafts to Hawai'i?

The students went home, Vincent and Thu went back to Tra Vinh, and Lam and Violet and I headed back to campus. We ended up staying up and chatting until 4:30am. Sunday morning made it abundantly clear that our bed time was not a well thought out idea.

Lam was supposed to catch a 7am bus back to Ca Mau. Remember when I mentioned God laughing? His alarm didn't go off. Luckily, sort of, mine did. I don't remember hearing it, but some part of my subconscious heard it and I turned it off in my sleep. Violet heard it and woke us up at 715. Lam decided to join us for 730 mass. However, we were three people with one motorbike. Instead of piling on and risking getting pulled over, Lam got a head start on my bike and Violet and I set out on her motorbike soon after. We caught up to him and I tried to push him along with us, as I've seen many Vietnamese youths do for their unmotorized friends. It was not nearly as easy as they make it seem. It should be a straight shot from campus to church, but road closures made us take a pretty wide detour, and we didn't actually make it to church until around eight. We sat, sweated, and bemoaned the fact that we'd had less than three hours of sleep. I was glad we made it to mass, but it certainly wasn't the jubilant Easter Sunday morning I had pictured. We grabbed some food after mass, again, not the sumptuous Ben Tre Easter feast I had envisioned earlier in the week, and then Lam had to rush to catch his backup plan. He biked to the city center and asked a surprisingly smart-mouthed taxi driver into taking him and the bike back to campus, where the bus would pick him up. 

We all reconvened briefly at the college before the bus came for Lam. Violet and I promptly returned to bed and caught an extra three hours of z's before continuing our day. We had pho and then decided to go back to milk tea - for the third day in a row. We'd been there for half an hour when, who should arrive but Nhu and another one of my students. They joined us and ordered a kipu tea for us. It was the first time in a long time that I had to grin and bear it. Whatever the tea itself was, it was mixed with ground up peanut. There are very few situations in which I find peanuts tolerable, and this was definitely not one of those situations. Flavor aside, needing to chew grit in my beverage is not really something I enjoy. The tea also had some sort of jello/flan made from eggs, which was surprisingly the best part of the glass's contents.

Then it was time for Violet to get on the road to Tra Vinh, and for me to join my trusty coconut festival ambassadors once more and visit the third site of the festival. While the scale and popularity of the fair was quite impressive, the Coconut Street next to the river was what really outshone my modest expectations for the whole festival. It was in the same place as the flower market from Tet, but a million times better than just a bunch of people selling (beautiful) potted plant after potted plant. On top of the very wide riverside sidewalk, in twenty days, people installed a rice field, planted coconut palms, made ponds with bridges over them, and more. Not only was it an admirable feat, it was designed with an extremely western-compatible aesthetic. It wasn't campy, glittery, or styrofoamy.

Mini rice field

A fish turning into a dragon, over a coconut inlaid with the contours
of the continents: a symbol for Ben Tre's aspirations

Di, Nhu, and Thy on a monkey bridge

There really are orange coconuts, though they are kind of brownish but they're called red

Yes, believe it or not, under all of that there is normally nothing but a big old riverside sidewalk. Because I am the Foreign Princess of Ben Tre, I was given the royal treatment by my loyal subjects on coconut street. One man I vaguely remember meeting several months ago was working for the festival, and he joined our group (me, the students, and a teacher) and made himself our guide. He showed me a clever mousetrap made out of bamboo, traditionally used to catch a coconut mouse. Naturally, you don't use cheese as bait; you use a sliver of coconut. I tasted what I can only describe as a coconut fruit roll-up, though it is much more traditional and much less artificial than that. We went to a booth where people were making crafts out of palm fronds. It was kind of like Palm Sunday meets balloon animals. Roses, birds, centipedes, fish, dragons, and vuvuzuelas took shape amidst the skillful hands of the people working the booth. One of those people was a former attendee of the English club for teachers, and he immediately presented me with a rose. Then he asked if I wanted to learn how to make one. I got a personal tutorial on how to make a rose (it turned out pretty pathetic) and then how to make a bird (this one turned out pretty good). All the while, a professional photographer was snapping shots.

After exploring all of Coconut Street's offerings, we went to get a drink at a cafe before going home. I found out that the local government spent 2 billion VND (about $1 million) on the coconut festival. I can't say whether it was worth it, but I certainly enjoyed it.

Famous on Friday

Friday's classes were an invigorating experience after Thursday's struggles. I had no desire to try to wring another lesson relevant to our current unit, Traditional and Modern, so I just did something else. I made a survey for students to use to interview their classmates. There were eighteen questions, and they had to find a different person who fit each question (e.g. someone who doesn't know how to swim, someone who has eaten pizza, etc.). We worked on structuring the different necessary questions: have you ever...?, do you...?, and are you...?, and then we went outside and let the surveying commence. The students took on the task with great enthusiasm, and I only had to remind them to use English a few times. Funnily enough, the hardest task was to find someone who wanted three children. One girl, in playful frustration, started running through the group shouting, "Do you want three children?" and everyone else shouted back, "No!"

When we got back inside I started to poll them, to find out which of their classmates fit each criteria. After a while of struggling to figure out what names were being shouted at me and how to spell them correctly, I decided to appoint a scribe to write down people's names on the board. Then I used this list to ask for the backstories from students who had broken a bone and students who had met a famous person. One of the students said that the famous person she has met was me. I smiled and replied that I think I'm only famous in Ben Tre. But it was a sweet moment. The students asked me if I had ever met a famous person. I guess I have, but no one who would be famous to them came to mind.

Violet arrived in the evening and we went out for milk tea with Thy and Nhu. After about an hour of hanging out and breaking the ice, the four of us went to the coconut festival. I was glad we were going with them, because unbeknownst to me there were three different locations. We tried to go to see the performances on the stage on the lake in the city center, but when we got close we discovered that they had closed off the street and weren't letting people in anymore. This was the first sign that this festival might be an even bigger deal than I had imagined. We headed to the outskirts of town to see the fair.

Not this way

This way!

Considering that up until about two weeks ago, no one had been able to tell me the dates of the festival, it was hard to imagine that this would really be a big deal. I imagined something along the lines of flower street during Tet -- lots of coconuts laid out on a closed-off street, and people insisting that it was magnificent -- plus that stage in the lake for performances. Well. Well, well, well. I was wrong. When we got to the fairgrounds I saw more people than I have ever seen at once in Ben Tre. It took about ten minutes just to park. The fair reminded me a lot of the livestock show and rodeo back home, except that it was about coconuts instead of cows. There was one big tent full of coconuts, coconut crafts, coconut products, coconut candy, free samples of coconut wine, and informative exhibits.

People waiting to get in

Inside the coconut tent

Me, Nhu, and Thy with a tiger made of coconut

Coconut candy girls

Coconut packing machine

Pyramid of coconut varieties, plus coconut flowers on top

Outside of the coconut tent there was a food court, where some of my students were working. There was another tent full of merchants selling everything from mattresses to pots and pans to electric fans (which provided a nice, breezy break from the heat). We passed a stage with people pretending to be statues and, naturally, a karaoke stage.

Cow mascot inviting people to try free samples of juice.
Our photo-op spared him from a horde of toddler boys
pommeling him in the udders.

Living statues

Musicians in rainbow sombreros

And now let me tell you about the most magical and memorable moment of the evening. Our wanderings led us to the main stage. We had passed it earlier and seen people competing in a blindfolded feed-your-partner-hot-dogs contest, but now someone was singing. I used my crowd navigating skills to bring us closer to the stage, and we had a great view of Nguyễn Hoàng Nam's  stellar moves and deep dimples. Violet, my students, and I were all rather smitten. He had clearly mastered the smoldering eyes required for a pop ballad and the pelvic wiggles necessary for an upbeat song. In addition to his vocal styling, his styling styling was of note. Not many people could accessorize with sheriff's badge, a single glove, a leather cuff, a wallet chain, and pirate boots and still look attractive. Here are a couple of his more popular music videos: 1, 2.

Just look at that stage presence!

Just look at those accessories!

For some reason, I wished I could go on stage and dance. (If you clicked on the video links you'll note that they're ballads, but he mostly performed upbeat songs at the concert.) I quickly dismissed that wish -- never gonna happen. But then I had a second thought. If it would happen anywhere, it would happen in Vietnam. Before his next song, Nam called out to the audience, asking for people who wanted to join him on stage (which I understood courtesy of my students' translations). Violet, fearless soul that she is, seized my hand and raised it high into the air. We, along with about four other people, were chosen.

On stage, no big deal

We got on stage and suddenly realized that from now on we would have no idea what was being said, or what we might be expected to do. Was it a contest? Were we supposed to copy his moves? Who knew. He started singing, and everyone seemed to be doing their own thing, and so we all just let loose and danced around on stage. Nam came over to dance with me. I had given my students my camera, but sadly they did not see fit to photograph my one-on-one time with him. Nevertheless, I assure you that it happened, and it was unforgettable. When the song ended, an MC came out to ask Violet and I if we were foreigners visiting the coconut festival. Despite the fact that this exchange occurred in English, we somehow ended up telling him that we were from Tra Vinh. All of us who went on stage received a gift for participating and got to shake hands with Nam before we left. We all received hanging clocks in boxes that looked deceitfully like pizza boxes, and for some reason I also received a six pack of bottled green tea soda. Off stage we reunited with my gleeful students and worked our way back through the crowd, who looked upon us with a mix of envy and admiration.

Part of me wished I had saved my Friday morning survey for next week. If I had, I would have a famous person that is actually famous to my students, and had a great story to go with it.