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!