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.