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.

100 legs are better than eight

“The only way of catching a train I ever discovered is to miss the train before.” – G.K. Chesterson

After blogging last night I came to the unfortunate realization that even if I had locked my house guest in the bathroom, it was perfectly capable of creeping under the door if it so desired. I spent much of the night thinking of the many places it could hide in my room. So, it was a relief to see it in my shower this morning -- sort of. See, I was planning on taking a shower, and I certainly didn't plan on doing so with my eight-legged visitor. I generally don't kill anything but roaches and mosquitoes, but this visitor had long outstayed its welcome. Morena lent me her bug-killing spray and I started in on the spider. I don't know if it was the contents of the spray or the sensation of being sprayed, but the spider was really not pleased about it. It started scurrying all over my bathroom. Lest you get the wrong mental image, let me tell you I was not running all over my bathroom, chasing after it, finger oppressing the spray trigger. I would spray until it started scuttling, and then I would wait for it to stop, and spray some more. It started heading towards my broom and that's when I had my great idea. Whack! About five more broom-whacks later, the spider was dead and I was saved. I could shower in peace. Or so I thought. Partway through my shower I opened my eyes to find something rapidly sliding across the floor. Then I realized it was a centipede making a beeline for the crack under the shower door. Great. On the upside, at least it was leaving me to finish showering in peace. When I emerged from the shower it seemed to be writhing in pain, and dying an agonizing death. Perhaps it had run across some of the residual bug spray. Reading up on it later I discovered that it was probably a small Vietnamese centipede, an aggressive species whose venomous bite can cause extreme pain. I guess it's a good thing I'd had to take down the spider before my shower.

Belly up

After all of the shower drama, Morena and I began our quest to take the bus to the city center. As you may recall, the last time we tried we spent an hour waiting and ended up having to take a taxi. This time the bus actually showed up within the alleged 15-minute interval and it was a pretty quick and easy ride. My school has provided me with a yearlong bus pas, which is actually a laminated sheet of paper with a lot of information and my photo and the signature of someone important. Apparently this is pretty unusual, because the bus attendant had to spend a good while reading it to figure out what it was and accept the fact that I didn't need to pay anything. (More on bus attendants later.) Originally I had planned for us to eat first, because by the time we arrived it was almost noon. But, we got distracted by shopping at the central market, though neither one of us ended up buying anything because no one would bargain with us, even though that is de rigeur. By the time we finished shopping it was around one, well past meal time by Vietnamese standards, and we couldn't find anyone selling anything other than fruit. Morena suggested that we walk to the supermarket, which is more like a shopping mall, to eat at the food court.

Vietnamese transportation ingenuity

Fuzzy-wuzzies at the market

Fishing supplies

Sugar and bees

At the Co-Op Mart food court I discovered that they sell pizza, spaghetti, and a hamburger. The pictures didn't inspire much confidence, but it was kind of reassuring to know that in the unlikely event that I ever desperately need an escape from Vietnamese food I don't have to go all the way to HCMC to get it. We did some more shopping after lunch, and miracle of miracles I found a pair of pants that fit me. Never mind the fact that they are sized XXXL. Curiously, all of the pants have button holes sewn but not cut. They don't cut the holes until after you buy them. There is a park across the street from the supermarket, and I've zipped past its epic statues many times, but this was my first opportunity to visit and take some pictures.

At the park

After having spent a few hours in the midday sun Morena and I were both feeling ready to head back. The problem was that I wasn't really sure where to catch the bus back to campus. We waited at one stop for a good while longer than 15 minutes, and then I decided it would be easier if we went back to the city center. We waited at the bus stop there, but when a bus pulled up and I showed them the school's address the bus attendant waved me off, indicating that they weren't headed that way. Just after I called Trang to ask for help, another bus appeared. The bus attendant turned to us and asked, in English, "Where are you going?" I showed him the campus address and he seized and shoved us onto the bus, yelling "Go! Go! Go!" Here's the thing about bus attendants: they do everything, and if they stop moving and yelling and pushing and waving and shouting, the Vietnamese bus system would shudder to an off-schedule halt. He hops off the bus before it stops to find out whether people are getting on and drags them onto the bus if they are, so the bus barely has to stop moving. Barely weighing in at over 100 lbs, he loads the bus with sackloads of fruit or dried fish being lugged by the even smaller women trying to get onto the bus, and fits them into spaces you didn't even know existed. He points everyone to a seat or a standing space, organized by destination. He makes sure everyone pays after they have been situated. He waves on 18-wheelers (or the Vietnamese equivalent) who are trying to pass the bus, and tells the driver to let them pass. He gets you on your feet and near the door as your stop approaches. He does it all. Somehow, this bus attendant found moments to chat with me in the midst of all the bustle. During one of our Vietnamese lessons Trang had told me that the way I say yes in Vietnamese is very lovely, and that any man would immediately fall in love with me upon hearing me say it. I laughed, but today when the bus attendant asked me (in English) if we were teachers and I said yes in Vietnamese, his whole countenance changed and he told me I spoke Vietnamese very well. It was literally the only word he had heard me say.

When I got back to my room, there was still a dead centipede in my bathroom. Except that when I approached it it started moving feebly. To be on the safe side I had to kill it. My bathroom trash can is becoming a bug graveyard.

Tonight Trang and I went to dinner together. On the way, I was telling her about the spider and the centipede. Just as I mentioned the centipede, I remembered that she had once told me that she is afraid of them. It was a good thing we weren't going very fast, because I felt her jump as she realized what I had said. She then told me how once, when she was a little girl, her mom was getting dressed and, as she put one leg into her pants, a centipede fell out of that pant leg, and when she put the other leg in, a centipede fell out of the second pant leg, which made Trang afraid of centipedes (and putting on pants, for a while).

Trang took me to try cháo trắng hột vịt muối, rice porridge with a brined duck egg (language side note: hột vịt literally means 'duck seed'; there is a word for egg, but the word for seed, followed by the kind of animal, is used just as often). The egg is cut in half, you slice out a tiny sliver with your spoon, and then scoop up a bit of the piping hot rice porridge. At first I was surprised to discover that the albumen was significantly saltier than the yolk, but when I stopped to think about it, it made perfect sense.  It is also served with pickled cucumber slices and shrimp cooked in coconut milk that you can add in as you wish. My favorite was the shrimp.

Porridge and, diagonally from the top left, shrimp, cucumber, egg

Take your pick

Eight beautiful legs

[Warning: don't scroll past the second paragraph if you are afraid of eight-legged creatures and are hoping to go to sleep any time soon.]

Clearly I am a poor judge of Vietnamese standards for attractive dressing. On Fridays I teach the FCE class, the class for high school teachers, and unlike my student classes, these classes are about equally divided between men and women. I try to make a point of dressing conservatively on Fridays. There are three male students/teachers in particular who somehow find a way to work my looks into their answer for almost every prompt. You may recall the story about the 'beautiful foreigner,' aka me, from last week. It was not an isolated event. Today, when I asked the class, "if you could invent something to help people, what would it be?" One of them said he would make a magic wand so he could make himself a handsome man because I am a beautiful woman. I thought I had succeeded in putting together an excellently frumpy but professional outfit, but I was told repeatedly throughout the day, by men and women and students alike, how beautiful I looked today in particular. One of the male teachers asked if he could take a picture with me, because I looked especially beautiful today. Later a female teacher told him that his wife was going to hit him when she saw the picture. After I left the class I thought I had left my keys in the classroom, and when I came back the male teachers were in the midst of talking to the teacher about how beautiful I looked today. Clearly, nobody finds this running commentary objectionable, and I try to roll with it, but it can make my Friday classes feel like an hour of culturally-sanctioned (mild) sexual harassment.

Almost every time I am with Trang, she asks me for the English term for a very specific action or situation, and almost every time she asks it is something that, as far as I know, we have no single word for. Today she asked me how we say 'to salute the flag' in English. I proposed 'saying the pledge of allegiance,' but that was deemed inadequate. In Vietnam, at the start of every major meeting or conference or event, everyone stands and silently faces the flag while the national anthem is sung. She wanted a word that encompassed that, and I couldn't offer one. But her insistence that we must have a word for it ties in to a theme that was particularly salient this week: nationalism. As part of the warm-up for yesterday's listening activity on air travel, I asked the students where they would go if they could go anywhere in the world for free. At least 10 of my 40 students said they wanted to see a particular place in or all of Vietnam. This may stem from the fact that most of them have never left the province, but I wonder how many underprivileged kids in the US would choose to travel their own country over going anywhere else in the world. As we discussed after the question about saluting, Vietnam's battles for autonomy are not in the distant past. People remember the struggles. People lived those struggles and sacrifices. Trang told us about the symbolism of the flag, which I had previously read about, repeatedly emphasizing that the red field behind the yellow star represents blood, the blood lost in battle. The star is a guiding star, like the North star. If you want a better taste of the ideals under Vietnamese patriotism, check out the lyrics of the national anthem.

It's been a while since I had creepy-crawly visitors, don't you think? Well, today I had more than a visitor, I had a house guest. [Warning: don't scroll down if you are afraid of eight-legged creatures and are hoping to go to sleep any time soon.] I decided that I needed to do some cleaning, and when I was done sweeping I went to go get the dust pan. Guess who I found on the side of the dustpan? A spider who either wanted to help or wanted to discourage me from any future attempts at housekeeping. I didn't want to poke it because I didn't want to antagonize it, but I also certainly wasn't going to use the dustpan with the spider along for the ride. With some cautious wiggling of the dustpan I managed to coax the spider onto the wall. The spider stayed in that same spot for the next several hours.

This evening after dinner I went to the bathroom and of course automatically checked for the spider. It was no longer there. Good. Then I noticed that it was on the door, not too far from where my hand still was. Me being me I ran away -- to get my camera. No longer lethargic, the spider bordered on hyperactive, scampering all over the back of my door. Then I saw another bug on my curtain and went over to take pictures of it. When I turned back, I saw that the spider was making its way through the space between the door and the door frame, and would soon be outside of the bathroom and in my hallway. Not ok. If I closed the door really fast I could crush it, but my reluctance to kill it slowed my reaction and the spider made it through to the other side. Now what? I managed to startle it back where it came from by whacking the wall near it. I closed the bathroom door and closed it out of my room. My bathroom is more or less closed off from the rest of my space, but I can't close the door when I'm inside, so I have been reluctant to go back in there lest I release the spider back into my room.

On my bathroom door. I had scarier photos but I decided to be nice to my
faithful readers.

Were you in cahoots with the spider? I'll never know.

Some perspective

There are a lot of things that I encounter in my life in Vietnam that make me feel guilty, in that they make me aware of my privilege. They come in little bits, like Hansel and Gretel's breadcrumbs, leading me to a gradual realization of what it means to be an American in a global context.

I mentioned in the past that my students have remarked that the food at the canteen is both bland and overpriced, the latter of which is hard for me to perceive since the difference between overpriced and reasonable is usually less than twenty five cents. I also mentioned (I think) that I appreciated my room a lot more when I found out that it is normally shared by eight students. I become aware of my privilege when none of my students and even most of my fellow teachers have never been on an airplane. Paying seventy-some dollars for the airfare to Da Nang seemed like a great deal. Talking to my students at English club last night, talk turned to rent. Those who live in the dormitories in eight-person rooms pay 50,000 VND ($2.50) per month. Those who live in the slightly nicer boarding house off campus pay 200,000 VND ($10) per month. No matter how you cut the cake, just the airfare for my weekend trip, not taking into account all the other expenses, would have paid for my students' housing for more or less an entire school year. And then I understand why none of them have been on a plane, and how much I have. The bus to HCMC cost me 70,000 VND ($3.50). There and back becomes almost 3 months or 1 depending on the housing option. And I understand why so few of my students have been there, and how much I have. Then I think about the travel I plan on doing, more or less twice a month, and what that means, what that translates to in the life and budget of one of my students. And then. And then I think about the fact that my students almost always insist on paying when they invite me out for breakfast or dinner or yogurt. Or that they bring me bushels of fruit.

Today was the day I launched my big idea. My main goal is to get my students speaking, and speaking comfortably. The thing is, there's only so much speaking someone can do in a 40-person class, 90-minute class. For the last few weeks I'd been thinking that I'd like to abridge my third year speaking class to 60 minutes and have small group conversation sessions for the last 30 minutes of class. But, I was also worried about deciding on the right amount of time. Too short and it wouldn't be enough to let students come out of their shell. Too long and students might lose confidence if they run out of things to say. I decided on 10 minutes and spent the last ten minutes of class with the bold students who chose to be the first group. We ended up chatting for 20 minutes. I'd call that a success.

This evening Trang took me out to dinner to try -- you guessed it -- something new. Technically, it was a snack, but we made a dinner out of it. Thập cẩm means something like 'many ingredients,' or essentially a mixed platter, and can be used to describe many different dishes. I repeatedly tried to find out the name of this specific dish, but this was all I got. It was a plate of fried tofu, okra, meatballs, fish (meat) balls, little eggs, wonton, and sausage. We had tiny two-prong forks to dip the assortment into a mixture of hoisin sauce, hot sauce, and sweet and sour sauce. There was also a plate of fresh cucumber slices, which were also to be dipped in the sauce. It was good, but it did feel like more of a snack than a meal, so we supplemented with some spring rolls on the way home.

Locked up in language

This morning I cracked my noggin working on translation editing. Enjoy some samples from the two different documents I am wading through. The first, I fixed. The second, I still don't understand.

As part of activities in responding to the "Wetlands Day in 2011", the project of Vam Ho bird sanctuary conservation, in the weather of the full moon of Nguyen Tieu, Tan Mao, in the afternoon of February 17, 2011, a group of experts and volunteers of Bird conservation project in Vam Ho, Creative Youth group from Be Tre College together with more than 250 Buddhist from Ben Tre city cam to Vam Ho bird sanctuary (Tan My - Ba Tri) to perform the bird releasing ceremony.
[My version: The Vam Ho Bird Sanctuary in Tan My – Ba Tri, which is organized by the Creative Youth Group from Ben Tre College, performed a bird releasing ceremony on the afternoon of February 17, 2011, as part of the activities of  “Wetlands Day in 2011.” Participants included experts and volunteers from the Vam Ho sanctuary and 250 Buddhists from Ben Tre City.]

Diffusing instruction for exploiting materials on integrity prevention and combating in organs creative; with high reality by showing designed scenario-curricular lectures on integrity prevention and combating to students and youth, on after class time, the family and community.

It took me at least five minutes to explain that I didn't understand the second document. For the first four, Mr. Luan thought I wanted to know more background about the project being described. It wasn't until I said, in exasperation, "This has no meaning!" that I started to get through. For the record, I'm pretty sure that "integrity prevention and combating" is actually intended to mean the opposite.

I texted Trang today to set up a lunch date. It felt like it had been eons since we had really spent time together; she is always so busy, but luckily both of us were free today. Occasionally I wonder if and when the day will come that I run out of new dishes to try. Today was not that day. Trang and I had bún xào Singapore, a large appetizer abundant enough to make a meal for the two of us. It was a Vietnamese take on a traditional Singaporean dish, featuring a crust of fried, eggy, crunchy vermicelli over shrimp and squid. Yum yum, crunch crunch.

Trang and I had a fascinating discussion about the semantics of 'pride' and 'to be proud of'. It all started when I said I had felt proud of Morena yesterday when she conducted a transaction in Vietnamese by herself for the first time. Trang asked if I felt proud because I had taught her. I tried, somewhat bumblingly, to explain that I was proud of her, not proud of myself. I'll fast-forward through the linguistic meanderings and get to the conclusion. Essentially, in Vietnamese, the concept of pride is communicated using, in part, a word that refers to the self. So, pride is always self-reflexive and never something you feel for others. When you say you are proud of someone else, you say it because you are proud of the role you played in their accomplishment. When you are proud of your child, it is because you are proud of yourself for having been a good parent.

Tonight's visitor decided to get a little more intimate:
the last time I saw him he was hopping under my bed.

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

Da Nang, Hoi An, HCMC

 “Tourists don’t know where they’ve been, travelers don’t know where they’re going.” – Paul Theroux

Does a weekend away after two months in Vietnam make me a tourist or a traveler? Or something else? I think I know Vietnam well enough to know where I am, not just in name or on a map, but in meaning and culture, at least more than a casual tourist.
I'm not sure how to tell the story of this weekend. I suppose the best way would be to tell it in order.

The excitement of leaving Ben Tre for the first time since I got here and the fact that the first phase of my travel was done solo filled me with butterflies. Trang got me a bus to HCMC and I was expecting the stereotypical developing country bus ride: one involving sweat, smells, chickens, and someone practically in my lap. Instead, I found myself on a cushy, pleather, air conditioned bus with assigned seating. The two hours were good to me. Outside of Ben Tre, physically and mentally, I was able to reflect on my experiences and my progress. I never feel quite like a local, but feeling like a traveler -- one with improved language skills -- gave me a new energy. I was filled with the breath of adventure.

I arrived in HCMC and took a harrowing xe om (motorcycle taxi, literally 'hugging taxi') to the airport. I have ridden on a motorcycle countless times by now, but HCMC traffic is a creature unto itself. When my driver's need to check his text messages while in motion combined with the perfectly natural tendency to drive head on towards oncoming traffic, I questioned whether it would be worth the $10 or $12 dollars I was saving. I'm alive and I have a story, so I guess it was. I met Kelly (another ETA) at the airport and we waited for our flight. We had both given ourselves an extremely cushioned transportation schedule, so we had about three hours to kill. After having spent the last month being the only foreigners in our towns, it was odd to see so many westerners around us.

Arriving in Da Nang

Our first stop was Da Nang, in central Vietnam. Maria, one of the ETAs teaches in this mountainous, beachy paradise, which also happens to be fifth-most populated city in Vietnam. Three other ETAs had already arrived, and Kelly and I headed to Maria's university to join them. After a few hours of hanging out, though, it was time for them to go to Hoi An, a nearby historic city. We would be headed there the next morning. This eight-hour offset was to recur throughout the trip. So, Lam and Kelly and I stayed in Da Nang. We went to the highly recommended Bread of Life, a restaurant that serves excellent western food, gives all profits to support education for the deaf in central Vietnam, and is entirely staffed by deaf people. When we departed from the hotel there was a light drizzle underway. We debated going back up to our rooms to get ponchos but it wasn't really raining, and it seemed like it would be a fairly short walk. Bad choice. The precipitation gradually escalated to rain; the walk was much longer than expected, and by the time we arrived we were drenched. After trying to towel off with toilet paper and wringing out my clothes in the bathroom, I reemerged, soggy but at least no longer dripping. I indulged in a baked pasta dish, french fries, and a brownie. Hey, I was eating for a good cause, wasn't I? While we were eating, Violet's flight landed, and she joined us at Bread of Life. That night, the four of us shared a spacious room at a nearby hotel, and I reveled in having a mattress and pillows whose shapes actually change when pressure is applied.

Saturday morning we went to the Cham Museum, showcasing sculptures of the Cham people. Since I knew nothing about their existence, let alone their history, it was a fascinating and surprising experience to see intricately carved Hindu gods in central Vietnam.

Ancient coin jar

After lunch and relaxing in a café, we caught a bus to Hoi An. We opted out of the cushy tourist bus, which would have been similar to the one I took to get to HCMC, and instead took a "people's bus." The seats were a little stiffer and the airflow came from the windows, but it was practically as nice. It was a gorgeous, cool, sunny day, and with karsts and blue sky zipping by it felt like the beginning of a great adventure.

On the bus to Hoi An

An hour or so later, we arrived in Hoi An around 130 in the afternoon. My first reaction upon seeing the old town was that we had arrived at a movie set. After five minutes of sightseeing, all of us were ill at ease. We spent a good while trying to figure out what exactly was so off. It could have been the smoothly paved streets, the sidewalks, the fact that there was no trash in sight, the absence of buzzing and honking motorbikes, the presence of more foreigners than locals, the fact that all of the locals spoke better English than at least half of our students, the complete absence of street food, the stereotypically 'Asian' street lamps. I started calling it Disney Vietnam, because that was exactly how it felt. I didn't take many pictures.

Japanese covered bridge

Disney street lamp

Freshly painted ancient temple, Westerners out front

We found a few alleyways to wander that made us feel a little better, and a little before sunset we ended up at a café overlooking the river.

For dinner we met up with the rest of the group and went to our next sanitized stop. I tried to order something that I couldn't compare with food in Ben Tre. This restaurant claimed to offer traditional street food, but it declined to mention that you would be paying quadruple the price and getting half of the flavor. It mostly just made me realize that I'll probably have a hard time enjoying Vietnamese restaurants when I get back to the US, though what I've had there was actually better than what I had at this restaurant. I had a funny moment when I was paralyzed by the prospect of eating this food with silverware. Luckily, chopsticks were also available.

Basic pork and vermicelli

What really struck me about Hoi An was that, for all intents and purposes, our group was taking a vacation from Vietnam while still in Vietnam, but everyone around us was vacationing to Vietnam, or what they thought Vietnam was. A Kiwi couple who sat next to us at dinner told me that Hoi An was their favorite among those they had visited in Vietnam because it "had so much character." I wanted to shake them and cry that this 'character' was a construct for tourists. I later learned that Hoi An's history included a lot of Chinese and Japanese influence, which partially legitimized why so much of it looked like a generically Asian theme park, but still didn't make me rush to embrace it.

Sunday morning, Kelly and Violet and I, who weren't already heading back to our posts, were planning on going to the beach. Unfortunately, the weather had other plans, and it rained grayly all day. We did a few last wanderings in town and ended up getting lunch at that terrace café again, even though the terrace itself was closed due to the rain. We tried some traditional Hoi An cuisine: white rose and Hoi An rice chicken. White rose is, from what I understand, a dumpling-esque dish made with ground shrimp. I have no idea what is in Hoi An rice chicken. My first mouthful tasted like popcorn, but I discovered more subtle flavors of lemon and herbs. Both were quite delicious.

White Rose

Hoi An chicken rice

We walked to a nearby covered market and I got some earrings I had eyed the night before. The saleswoman thought I looked Vietnamese, and when I told her I was American she was still very insistent that I was in fact Vietnamese. I don't know how to talk about more than one person at a time, so when I started to explain my parents' heritage, one parent at a time, she interjected a guess/assertion of 'Vietnamese!' every time I made it through 'My mother is...' and 'My father is...'.

Since we couldn't go to the beach we decided to go back to Da Nang early and hang out there until our 7pm flight back to HCMC. We went to another market to get gifts for our coworkers back at school and did some shopping for ourselves while we were at it.

Just one corner of one floor of this mega-market

The rain was still at it, and my poncho was becoming less and less useful. After a warming meal of pho gà (chicken) we decided to go to the airport early just to not have to trudge around in the rain anymore.

We arrived in HCMC around 830. Our hotel was in the backpacker's district, essentially cheap hotel central, which was lined with bars and restaurants and blaring with American music that was popular about 10-15 years ago. We had planned on having a calm night in, but the lights and music lured us out. After surprisingly good pizza we found a sports bar. To my astonished delight, about 15 minutes after we arrived, they started showing two NFL games. It made my night.

View from our hotel window

All in all, it was a good, bustling escape. I was disappointed that I was so close to the ocean but never got to see it, but that was secondary. The best part of the trip was being with people who are having similar lives as me. We can commiserate about cultural confusion, seek or give advice for personal or professional difficulties; we get it. During orientation we were repeatedly told that our fellow ETAs would be invaluable resources, and this weekend really showed me the extent to which that is true.

This morning I bused back to Ben Tre and it was nice to feel like I was coming home. And home felt pretty good until the mosquito welcoming committee made home feel itchy. Tonight I got bánh bao chiên, aka fried goodness, from the usual vendor on my street. I have visited him many times and my Vietnamese is getting better, so for a while now I have been hoping to have a chat with him. Usually he has many customers so it doesn't happen, but tonight I finally got to introduce myself and explain why I'm here. I'm hoping to get to chat even more in the future as my language skills continue to develop and my appetite for his masterpieces persists.