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.