Round two

Sorry for the slightly sporadic updating of late; my internet access has been rather spotty lately.

2.8.12
Yesterday was time to test the reinvention of my USA class. Yielding to the evidence (quiz performance) and student requests, I moved the quiz to the end of class. I divided the students into groups, and assigned each group one section of the reading, with reading questions. They had 20 minutes to pore over their sections and answer the questions, and then they shared their findings with the class. I told them ahead of time that I would be using some of those same reading questions on the quiz.

Twenty minutes ended up being way too much time for most of the groups, but fortunately students chose to use that extra time to start working on questions from other sections, and be better prepared for the quiz. The quizzes looked much better in that far fewer questions were left blank and the answers were generally longer than before, but I haven't had a chance to look over all of them yet. As my dad says, the proof is in the pudding. Still from the looks of things, I'm expecting the average score to increase from 4 to around 7. The students were almost entirely perfect angels while taking the quiz. The silence was heavenly. However, I noticed that there are prime cheating circumstances when the students are handing in their quizzes, and they can see other papers and whisper corrections to each other in the general post-quiz din. I'll have to find a way to keep that from happening next time.

Not pictured: pure silence

We had the student's English club last night, and my co-teacher, Ms. Chau Anh, had prepared some handouts with readings and discussion questions. When students arrive they always self-segregate by class, but this actually worked out very advantageously. When I had them count off into groups, it resulted in each group having one third year, one second year, and one first year, more or less. I was very happy to see the more advanced students helping their peers, drawing them out, and encourage them to represent their group when it came time to share opinions. Our first discussion was on the importance of eating meals together with your family, and the second was about fashion. I wasn't really a fan of the second reading, which was clearly written by a Vietnamese person with a high English proficiency. It was a little thesaurus-happy, which just made things harder for the students, and several of the sentences were just not quite right. For a handful of examples among many:

• "At present, with the development of science and technology, the textile industry has made a long stride of progress that makes clothes-making easier..."
• "No one can deny the fact that Vietnamese ladies with their slender status are very beautiful and charming in the Ao Dai."
• "I think these kinds of fashion are just suitable on the stage or in films because they look very ridiculous in the real life." (suitable, very, and ridiculous are hallmarks of Vietnamese English)

One of my post-Tet goals is to organize at least one social activity each week with someone other than Trang. I tried to invite Kim Long out to eat yesterday, but unfortunately she was busy. I guess it was for the best because Trang needed to meet with me and discuss preparations for an upcoming academic conference. I taught her the expressions 'to kick the bucket' and the concept of a bucket list, and she taught me my new favorite Vietnamese phrase: xí xô xí xào, which is means something between 'gibberish' and 'blah blah blah.' It is derived from the word to describe the sound of leaves in the wind, but is used when describing people, especially foreigners, who are speaking quickly or otherwise unintelligibly. In exchange, I taught Trang the word 'barbarian' and its origins.

"The Ancient Greek word βάρβαρος (barbaros), "barbarian", was an antonym for civis "citizen" and polis "city-state." The sound of barbaros onomatopoetically evokes the image of babbling (a person speaking a non-Greek language). ... The Greeks used the term as they encountered scores of different foreign cultures, including the Egyptians, Persians, Medes, Celts, Germanic peoples, Phoenicians, Etruscans and Carthaginians. In fact, it became a common term to refer to all foreigners. ...  The verb βαρβαρίζειν (barbarízein) in ancient Greek meant imitating the linguistic sounds non-Greeks made or making grammatical errors in Greek."

2.9.12
In my dream I was in an American grocery store. I was staring at the hundreds of cereal options when I was baffled by the 30 different kinds of rice krispies in front of me (ones with strawberry flakes, pink ones, ones ideal for making rice krispie treats, ...) in boxes of varying size and unrelated price. I realized that my time in Vietnam was officially over and I felt a pang. Then I felt relief when I remembered that I was just visiting home for a few weeks, and I'd be back in Vietnam soon. But, I realized that it won't be easy re-adjusting to life in the States. Given that I was in the States for now, I gave up on the cereal and decided to go look for a good dark beer instead. Instead of walking, I was laying down on a low, wheeled platform and pushing myself along with one foot. (Awake, I realized that this is exactly how the extremely poor and limbless get around on the streets in Vietnam.)

Needless to say, it was a weird dream, and that's just part of it. I think weirdest is the fact that the dream ties together so many things about life in Vietnam, but at the time seemed not really Vietnam-related at all.

Last night I misremembered what time I had to teach this morning, so a few minutes after getting up I realized that I only had five minutes to get to class, rather than forty. I rushed over and was only a couple of minutes late. For reasons that I have never understood, I often see teacherless classrooms filled with students when I am looking for my class. Today, during the second half of my class, one such class full of rowdy boys started hooting and hollering and creating a general hullabaloo that interfered with my attempts to conduct a listening class. Then, the listless boys decided to start running around, and started peering into my classroom window and making faces at me and my students. Because my co-teacher wasn't there and I don't speak Vietnamese, I was completely incapable of chastising them, asking them to stop, or doing anything useful other than ignoring them. I found myself wanting to yell at them in Italian, a great language for telling people to cut it out.

Counting down

Trang and Kim Long and I went to breakfast today and I learned that the texting code Trang taught me actually goes way back. It is called the Telex code, and was used back when people still sent telegrams. Not much else to report for today. I had a pretty uneventful day, just trying to get lesson planning out of the way in preparation for next week. Yesterday Trang told me that in Vietnamese they have a saying when you get a cold:
If you see the doctor you will get well in one week; if you don't see a doctor, you'll have to wait seven days. Here's hoping I don't have to wait that long.

Elliot arrives in about 12 hours!

Master Chef

Does serving as a sous chef count as cooking? When I first arrived on campus I was often invited out by English teachers. After a week or two, that completely tapered off. Last week it struck me that I didn't have to sit around waiting for an invitation; I could do the inviting. I talked to Ms. Hoang, a tiny spunky writing teacher whose company I enjoy, and asked if we could have lunch together this week. After a few rounds of planning, it was decided that Trang and I would go to her house and we would all cook lunch together. I have often heard that Ms. Hoang is rich and has a huge house, so I was curious to see how that would manifest itself. She lives in a decidedly residential area, while most other houses I have seen are on larger streets and have shops nearby. It was, in some ways, hard to see what made her house so different, aside from the fact that it was multi-storied but narrow. I did notice that her house seemed to have more 'stuff', in the American sense of the word, than other houses.

At first I was told to sit in front of the TV while others cooked. Then I was moved to the kitchen, which contained a large bed frame with a bamboo mat instead of a mattress. Ms. Hoang asked if I wanted a soft drink and I said yes. I was expecting something like 7Up, but I received a can of Winter Melon Tea. It tasted like liquid brown sugar. After my time in Vietnam thus far I have come to the conclusion that most beverages are designed to become drinkable after the first heap of ice in it has melted. Instead of sitting there idly, I asked if there was anything I could help with. I fully expected the usual, no no don't worry, but instead I was given a task. "You can wash this," Trang told me, handing me a grocery bag with something inside. I assumed there would be some fruits or vegetables inside. Much to my surprise, I discovered a whole chicken. Feet, tail, body, head, beak, eyes; the body cavity had been cut open and the edible organs had been removed but were also in the bag. Next I was asked to prepare the pineapple. This may sound simple, but it was a very daunting task. There is a very specific way that people cut pineapples here, and I was fully expecting to ruin the aesthetic of the outcome by clumsily, accidentally excising ungainly chunks of fruit (or perhaps my fingers). By some miracle, neither of those things happened. Instead, I was praised for my beautiful and skillful knife work. I was very pleased. Next, I had to thinly slice cabbage or some other similar leafy thing. I earned myself more praise and the prize of chopping all of it, which was quite a lot.

Presenting the pro pineapple prepper

So, technically, I didn't cook anything. But I contributed. And I did kitchen work. And it was fun. And the food was really good. We ended up with a veritable feast of braised pork, rice porridge, chicken with cabbage and greens, and a soup with shrimp and kumquat juice. As often happens, I was fed beyond capacity, and still urged to have more. The food was so good I wanted to oblige, but there was no more room left. I even had to loosen my skirt.
 

Shrimp soup

Pork

Duck

The spread, also featuring rice cooked with bananas and rice porridge

I might have capitulated a breakthrough for my students today. Pronunciation is an uphill battle that I don't often fight, or at least try not to dwell on.  One word I do place an emphasis on is 'because,' which more often than not becomes 'becau.' When I emphatically point at the 's' students are perfectly capable of pronouncing it; they just have the bad habit of not doing so. Today I stepped things up. Another major pronunciation issue is that 'is' often becomes 'i,' and 'it is' becomes 'is i' or 'is is' if I'm lucky. I asked my students to say 'it is,' emphasizing the final consonants. Then I asked them to say 'is is.' then I asked them to say both, one after the other. The class erupted in giggles as they suddenly realized that they sounded exactly the same, but shouldn't. With that new awareness, we practiced some more. There wasn't really any discernible improvement in pronunciation, but their knowing that they are saying it wrong is the first step towards their saying it right.

This evening, the place where we hold English club was unavailable for the first hour, so we started out with an hour of playground games. In addition to playing red light/green light and Simon Says, I got my workout and foot exfoliation in the form of a highly competitive game of duck-duck-goose, barefoot and on cement. Once we got inside we sang the Hokey Pokey and Old MacDonald. After a few rounds of the latter, I asked the students to tell me the Vietnamese words for the same animal sounds, and we sang it again with those sounds. My favorite sound is the rooster's call, which in Vietnamese is òóo. Sometimes I worry that the English club is not as (academically) educational as people might like, but I think it is important for students to see that English isn't just about sitting in a classroom listening to the same recording five times. Tonight, a high schooler who also comes to the club came up to me and told me how much she enjoys it, and that she finds the subject matter more interesting than what they cover in her classes at school. It's always nice to get affirmation directly from my students.

After English club we went out for snacks and smoothies, and this time I tried the 'everything' smoothie. It was so good I think next time I might have to get one of each.

Leave it to Trang

I thought I would have almost nothing to blog about today, but my night out with Trang provided more than enough blogging material. But let me start from the beginning.

It was a lazy day at the start. It seems like a miracle that I managed to sleep in both yesterday and today without anyone knocking on my door or any ambient noise disrupting my slumber. Late in the morning, Morena asked if I wanted to cook together today. I have been trying to get myself to cook for quite some time; I'd even bought some instant noodles (not the epitome of cooking, I know, but I thought if I broke the ice by boiling some water it would get me started) to no avail. Our cooking wasn't that big a deal, I ended up just frying some frozen spring rolls while Morena made the noodles with some carrots and eggs, but now that the ball is rolling I think maybe I'll cooking more. I can't cook less than I have been, anyway.

A beginner's feast

Nothing of note happened for the rest of the day until Trang took me out for dinner. We had bò lá lốp, grilled beef wrapped in leaves, wrapped in rice paper with more leaves and vermicelli and fruits like pineapple, starfruit, cucumber, and/or banana, and then dipped in fermented fish sauce. I think it is one of my favorite dishes. I learned that your skill in rolling the rice paper is used to evaluate you as a prospective daughter-in-law. I started the meal as unmarriageable and finished it as worthy bride material. After that we went for ché, the Vietnamese dessert that is not one of my favorite dishes. Today's variation was floating cake ché, ché with two balls of glutinous rice dough filled with green bean powder that float to the top when they're done cooking.

Bò lá lốp

Ché

Better than the second round of food was the second round of conversation. On the way there we passed a place called Café 666, and I explained to Trang that that number has a negative connotation in America. She explained to me that the Chinese word for 6 sounds like the Vietnamese word for luck, so it is a very good number here. We checked whether Trang had won anything with her lottery ticket, and then we bought two more. The roving lotto salespeople are extremely poor, as the tickets are their only source of income, so it is rude to flag them over to check your numbers and then not buy a new ticket. Trang told me that people often wait to check their numbers from the most miserable looking person. Trang told me that a few years ago one of the teachers bought six tickets and ended up getting the equivalent of about $35,000. I think my past posts suffice to explain how much money that is here. She told me that the night before he won he had a dream that he was bitten by a large dog and began bleeding heavily. I then discovered that this foretells very good luck. So does dreaming that you get something really dirty on you. So does dreaming that you are drowning. Dreaming that your tooth falls out foretells losing someone close to you. Talking about teeth turned conversation to the Tooth Fairy. Vietnam does not have a Tooth Fairy, but if you lose a tooth from your top jaw you put it under your bed so the new one will grow in straight, and if you lose one from your lower jaw you throw it on the roof so it will grow in straight. I love cultural exchange.

Welcoming committee member outside of my room.

Gray skies, pink, blue

"Clouds come floating into my life, no longer to carry rain or usher storm, but to add color to my sunset sky." - Rabindranath Tagore

There are a few things I forgot to mention about my trip home from HCMC. First, my xe om ride from the hotel to the bus departure point. When I got on the motorbike the driver asked me if I liked music. Assuming it was a generic question, I said yes. Once we got going, though, he burst into a hodgepodge rendition of the song 'We are the world.' I think he knew the first line and a handful of other words, but he certainly knew the tune. After cycling through that song a few times, he asked if I liked ABBA. This time I knew what the question portended, but I said yes anyway. I would assume that what came next was an ABBA song, but to be honest I wouldn't know. The whole serenaded ride was a surreal experience, and it reminded me of when our gondolier in Venice spontaneously serenaded us with 'Under the Bridge' by the Red Hot Chili Peppers.

When I was on the bus home, I thought I saw two men on a motorbike with about six naked women between them. I was only half right. They were carrying the lower halves of several naked mannequins. My first impression might have qualified for strangest motorbike cargo thus far but the reality isn't too unworthy of that title. I only wish I could have gotten a picture.

Today got off to a bustling start. Somehow my office hours are now at 8:30am, so luckily I was awake and dressed at 8:25 when I got a knock on my door. I was receiving a printer and it needed to be installed. Ok. At about 8:27 I got a phone call from home. At 8:29 my students arrived. Too much at once. I had to cut the phone call short and my students' presentation practice was frequently interrupted by queries from the printer people. An hour later the students were gone but the printer still wasn't working. Thirty minutes after that I found a polite way to express the fact that having a working printer was not a top priority at the moment; I had work to do, and regained access to my computer.

In the afternoon I spent 90 minutes sitting in the corner at the meeting of the student Communication Corner. It was conducted entirely in Vietnamese. I still have no idea why I am there. I watched the clouds grow thicker and grayer throughout the meeting, and had the sneaking suspicion that they would let loose just as I would finally walk back to my room. Instead, it never rained. At five Morena and I were taken out for dinner by Mr. Luan and his assistant, Ms. Long. After a long motorcycle ride we had bánh canh, a beef soup with thick rice noodles similar to Japanese udon noodles. I enjoyed it, and will be keeping an eye out for it on my street. Before leaving we were treated to a vivid pink sunset.

Bánh canh

Yes, I live in a postcard

The topic of tonight's English club for teacher was neighborhoods and businesses. When we were talking about karaoke, it was requested that I sing a song. I should have seen it coming. I opted for I'm a Little Teapot. Short and sweet and cute. It has become a habit for teachers to bring me a snack for their English club break-time. Today it was coffee-flavored chè rau câu, or what Wikipedia informs me is gelatin made from algae. During break I also learned that blue represents hope in Vietnam. When I shared that green represents hope in the US, I learned today that blue and green are not differentiated in the Vietnamese language. They are covered by the same word. If you need to differentiate, you say the word followed by something like "like the sky" or "like the leaves on a tree." Insert linguistics sigh.

The brown strips are the coffee-flavored parts

A coconut for your thoughts

I opened the previous post with a picture of a beetle. I was happy to have my gestalt confirmed in the comments: it is a longhorn beetle. This morning I stumbled upon this guy, flailing in slow motion. He was about the size of my big toe. I righted him, but about a minute later he was back on his back. Alas. 

Do you recognize my shirt? When I bought my pajama set I intended to use the top as a blouse. This morning I put that to the test. I was slightly worried that someone would recognize it, but if anyone did at least no one said anything. And I felt cute.
When I first arrived in Ben Tre I was warned that my students would be like teddy bears: cute but silent. The teachers often refer to them that way, though hopefully not to their faces. Thus far this had been shown to be a largely inaccurate description, but today both of my classes seemed to have been repopulated by teddy bears. Maybe that's to be expected when you wear pajamas to class.

Trang and her sister took me out to lunch. We went to a place she had taken me on one of my first days, but back then my camera was on the fritz. We had the sour soup again, as well as cá hú, which literally means screaming fish, and a pork womb stir fry. The screaming fish was prepared in a sort of cast iron pot and it was probably my favorite of the three. When the pork womb came out I thought it was octopus, as the pieces looked more like chopped up tentacles with suckers, and it actually had a similar consistency. Despite the potentially off-putting organ identity and its rubberiness, it was really good. It had what I would describe as a Chinese-y brown sauce and was prepared with ginger.

Sour soup

Cá Hú   Maybe not the most visually appealing dish, but really really good

Stir-fried womb with pickled cabbage(?) and ginger

In the evening Morena and I went out for phở at a place that is closer than but not as good as the usual place. Other than when my friends visited for my birthday, it is the first time I have eaten at a sit-down restaurant without being in the company of a Vietnamese person since coming to Ben Tre. Moreover, it is the first time I have really had to do all the leg work myself: ordering food, drinks, and asking for the bill. To my pleasant surprise, everyone seemed to understand all of my requests without much need for miming or repetition. It was empowering.

On the way back to campus I decided to stop to buy a coconut. In Hanoi coconuts cost around 20,000 VND (just under $1). Here in Ben Tre, where they are locally produced, I had been buying them for 8,000 VND. Yesterday I stopped at a different place and was charged 3,000 VND. That's about 1¢. While some of my readers might prefer the penny, I'll happily start taking a coconut for my thoughts.

Prepping the coconut: another life skill I hope to acquire while I'm here

After dinner it was time for the student English club. I recently learned that Morena will be taking over this once October starts. This makes me a little sad, as it is one of my favorite activities, but I will probably keep participating at least occasionally. I had already started planning a Halloween party for the students, and intend to follow through on that. Tonight was as fun as always, and we reviewed past songs and learned new ones. I taught them "I'm a Little Teapot" and an abridged version of "You Are My Sunshine." Did you know that the latter is one of Louisiana's state songs? The full lyrics were certainly a surprise to me.

"When I get all steamed up, hear me shout: tip me over and pour me out!"

Language stories

Today was uneventful, so I'll offer a potpourri of trivia and anecdotes.

Cá heo means dolphin, but literally means pig fish.
Hươu cao cổ means giraffe, but literally means long necked deer. 
Mông Cổ means Mongolia, but literally means butt-neck.
Rau thì là, dill, is named 'is' because when God created everything He forgot to name dill, so dill went up to God and asked what it's name was. God pensively began to reply, "your name is... is..." and dill happily scampered off thinking it's name was "is".


Folklore/local belief has it that migrant fishermen are the cause of the different dialects in the North, Center, and South. In theory, their lackadaisical, lazy lifestyles translate to their approach to language, and as they migrated down from the North their pronunciation grew lazy and sloppy and so the Southern dialects are essentially derived from lazy pronunciation. I wonder if the South has it's own version of this story.

"Bà ba béo, bán báhn bèo bên bờ biển" means "Second fat Grandma sells cake down by the beach." "Bạn tôi bán bàn ở bản" means "My friend sells tables in the village in the mountains." The two are tongue/tone twisters that I can only hope to be able to pronounce correctly by the end of my time here. 

In our daily quest for lunch today we ended up in a magical tent town/market around the corner from our conference center. Pungent eel was out to dry; cuts of meat, possibly including snake were for sale; enticing fruit piled high. Lunch was what I have now come to call 'rice et cetera', and possibly my cheapest full meal yet (15,000 VND, which is about $0.75) and just as delicious. After lunch I tried the highly praised custard apple, which unfortunately did not live up to expectation. It tasted like eating the smell of sweet perfume, which was not unpleasant but rather overpowering. And kind of powdery in texture. The fruit kind of looks like a fuzzy reptile, but in the back of my mind it reminded me of something else. After a while I realized that it reminded me of a magnolia's seed pod, and I was later proud of myself to find that my botanic gestalt held true; they are in the same order. To eat it you peel off the fuzzy scales and take a bite.

 











On my last post I got a request for information concerning the "local yeast derivatives". I have tried Bia Hà Nội, Tiger, La Rue, and Bia Hởi. All are lager style, which is not my favorite, but all are more than drinkable. Bia Hởi is a bit of a cultural phenomenon and remarkably cheap, and actually perhaps the best of the four, in my opinion. 

Six days, 18 hours, ...

I'll be honest. The main motivation for this post is for me to get off my chest the realization that by this time next week, I will be in the air, on my second flight, headed to Tokyo. All week I have been saying things like "I leave in just under two weeks," or "I leave a week from Friday." Well, it's Friday. I'm down to a week.

I'll spare you the (not so) thrilling details of my departure preparations, and instead I'll fill out this post with some trivia about Vietnam and Vietnamese culture, culled mostly from a travel guide* I received.

• "Over two-thirds of the population is under the age of 35"
• At its widest, the country is about 400 miles across. At it's narrowest, it is about 30 miles across. The coastline is about 1900 miles long.
• Over the centuries, deposits carried by the Mekong River have collected on a shallow undersea shelf, forming the Mekong Delta, which grows by dozens of square meters every year.
• "During the last three days of every month, dog-meat restaurants often heave with customers as Vietnamese believe that their specialty will help disperse bad luck accumulated earlier in the month. It is also believed that this protein-rich meat aids sexual potency."
• Ben Tre, pronounced more like Bun Treya, is on the aforementioned Mekong Delta. "The South has two seasons, wet and dry." The rainy months are from May to November, and the dry season is from December to April. Throughout the year, highs range from mid-80s to mid-90s, and the lows stay pretty steady in the mid-70s. Plus humidity, of course.

*Insight Guides: Vietnam, 2009