Pudding

I started my day with Vietnamese lessons with Trang. After some time together, she confessed to me that before we met up she had been in a bad mood and had worried that it would affect our interaction. However, when she saw me and saw me smiling she felt relieved and she knew that everything would be fine.

After breakfast and over drinks she quizzed me on flashcards she had given me a few weeks ago, and then surprised me by giving me a written quiz for the flashcard vocabulary. I surprised myself for getting almost all of them right, tones, special characters, and all. Among the many other things I learned, I learned the funny literal meaning of the Vietnamese way of saying "I'll be there in five minutes": "I will have my face there in five minutes" (Tôi sẽ có mặt ở đó trong mười phút). Also, instead of 'taking' pictures, in Vietnamese you 'catch' them, so when people want you to take their picture they sometimes say 'catch me!'

After five and a half months, Vietnam is sinking in. I was remembering a particular dinner out from a long time ago, and I caught myself retrofitting my memory with chopsticks. Last night I handed something to someone in my dream, and I used both hands to do so (something very Vietnamese). More interestingly, I am also absorbing local ideas of beauty. Even though I am looking forward to getting some sun this weekend, I catch myself admiring fair skin. I'll see someone and think, "Oh, her skin is so light! She is so beautiful." Appended to that is a parenthetical 'here', as in, 'she is so beautiful here,' but that caveat isn't as strong as the rest of the reaction. More than anything it makes me think, if after five months in one country I can start to internalize local beauty ideals, how very very hard it must be to escape unseen manifestations of cultural bias acquired through a lifetime of exposure.

Last week I said that the USA quizzes looked more promising, but that the proof would be in the (grading) pudding. Well, today I finally got around to said grading. The class average was 7.1, a marked improvement from last week's 4.2 and even slightly better than the 6.9 yielded by the first week's cheating frenzy. Moreover, there was an all-time high of six perfect scores. However, there are still some issues that I'm not sure how to address. The last question on the quiz is always something like, 'What is something you find interesting about this region?' (originally it was was 'The state I find most interesting is _________ because:', but I kept getting answers that weren't about states so I tried to open up the question). As far as I'm concerned, this question is a gimme. Last week I even made it worth 3 out of the 10 total points, and explicitly explained that the more they wrote, the more points they would get. However, I still have students leaving this question completely blank. Why? Some of them are clever enough to rephrase the answer to another question into something that suits this question, and I'll accept that. There should be no reason for someone to leave that question blank if they successfully answered any other question on the quiz. One of my students seems to think that 'Abraham Lincoln' is a good guess to answer the question 'Who was Elvis Presley?' (previous quiz) and 'Who was Henry Ford?' (most recent quiz). Again, why?

In the evening I had the teacher's English club. The class gifted me with flowers and puppies glued into a basket (it makes more sense in the picture).

Basket o' puppy love

The theme was love stories, specifically, how they met their spouse, or another story if they weren't married. The stories ranged from interesting to sweet to a little strange. The first teacher talked about how his friends secretly found him a match using a matchmaker and introduced the two of them at a party, and despite the fact that some may object to that practice nowadays, they are still living happily ever after. The second told us how she met her husband on the ferry. The two of them had gone to high school together but never met, and then they both went to university in HCMC and met one weekend on the way home to Be Tre. One teacher told a love story he read in the newspaper, about a Vietnamese man and an American woman. He called the story 'Transnational Love' and told me he told the story because he hoped to 'communicate a message' to me. I hope the message is not the one I find most obvious. I taught them 'roses are red,...' and then we translated it into Vietnamese.

Hoa hồng thì đỏ
Hoa vi-ô-let thì xanh
Đượng thì ngọt
Và em cũng vậy!

If my internet had been working last night I would have recommended impressing someone with this, but now it'll have to wait until next year.

After the club I had a lot of lesson planning and prepping left to do. Most notable from this endeavor is that I came up with a solution to my quiz quandary. Today, the only question on the quiz, other than naming the region and the states, is "What is something you find interesting about this region?" We will see what happens.

2.15.12
The day started with my USA class and the weekly intrigue of the quiz. Writing the quiz (and the lesson plan around it) is a weekly exercise in plus or minus, trying to make it just above the students' level. I want them to do well, but I don't want it to be easy. This week's region was the Southwest, with an emphasis on Texas, and I prepared a powerpoint about the region, given that it is my own. Sadly, the projector refused to cooperate, and the photos I spent hours coaxing my sputtering internet to load went unseen. The upside of this was that it gave me more time to address recurring errors in last week's quiz and hammer in exactly what I expect from them on the quiz. Sometimes it feels like I am trying to make the whole experience foolproof. I have to remind myself that my assumptions and habits as an American-bred test-taker are not necessarily the same as my Vietnamese students', and that if I want them to do something (like write as much as possible), I need to tell them so. I am hoping that the open form of the latest quiz will give students a chance to show what they know, rather than reveal that they didn't internalize whatever ideas I selected to quiz them on, as was sometimes the case with previous quizzes.

In the afternoon I was invited to attend a mysterious event that was at one point described as a fashion show, later a competition, and later, a conference. I struggle to describe it now to you. It was like an academic beauty pageant with audience participation. There were some lectures, then a fashion show featuring the contestants (tourism students), then the contestants had to answer questions relating to different scenarios they might encounter as tour guides, then the audience had the chance to participate in addressing those scenarios, and it ended with students singing. Below, the last few minutes of the fashion show. If you want to watch the whole thing, here are Part 1, and Part 2. And, here's another singing video.

I sat in the back with some of my students, and they were excellent interpreters for the whole event. When it was opened up to audience participation they really really really wanted me to raise my hand and answer a question. I didn't really want to, but I figured it was my turn to put my money where my mouth is as far as in-class participation and volunteering (even though this was not a class and I was not a student). So I did it. I got a prize/gift for participating, and when I opened the box later I found three toothbrushes and two shampoo samples. Among the tourism scenarios presented there were:

• You take your tourists to the airport and then one realizes he/she forgot his/her bags at the hotel. What do you do?
• You are supposed to take your tourists to many different pagodas, but they think they all look the same and are not interested. What do you do?
• You are a male guide and your group is in Nha Trang (a beach destination) for several days. A female tourist asks you to teach her how to swim. What do you do?

During the event, one of the students decided to inform me of the origin and meaning of the name Ben Tre. I have been trying to find this out ever since I got here and no one ever knew, so I was delighted. He told me that Ben Tre used to be a part of Cambodia, and back then it was called (something like) Ben Se. Ben means 'fish' in Khmer, and they saw many fish here. To the Vietnamese, Se sounded like Tre, which means 'bamboo' in Vietnamese. Ben means port. So, many people think that Ben Tre is 'Bamboo Port', because there is a lot of bamboo, but that is because they don't know the whole story.

I had a Valentine's Day party for the English club and, after a short presentation about Valentine's Day, students made Valentines. At the end I gave out prizes for the top three cards.

Valentine factory

Showing off the finished products

The winning card, front and back, below:

 2.16.12
This morning I taught Listening 2. Overall, the lesson I was supposed to teach was too short, and this was exacerbated by the fact that one activity that I anticipated being challenging ended up being super easy for my students. So, to fill the time I ended up doing something I've been meaning to do for ages. I asked the students to make name cards and took their pictures with their names. After that I collected their name cards, wrote a word on each one, and tried to read off their names in order to give them back to them. Then we went outside and they had to get in alphabetical order based on the word I had written on each of their name cards. Again, they surprised my with how quickly and efficiently they completed the task, and when they were done and I said class was over they were shocked and maybe slightly disappointed. I think they thought that it was a setup for some grander activity. Not this time, but I'll keep it in mind as a way to set up groups in the future.

Minor chaos

One student takes charge

Order!

Now I'm headed to Hue, home of the former Imperial City, by way of Da Nang. I'll be back Sunday night.

As Long As You Love Me

I'm going on a short trip on Thursday, enabled by the fact that I'm done for the week by 9:35 on Thursday morning, so it already feels like the weekend is almost here. Since I'll be gone from Thursday to Sunday, I tried to get a head start on next week's lesson plans. This ended up taking less time than expected, because I have now reached the point where I can start recycling lesson plans (I'm teaching the second semester of Speaking 2 with the same book and syllabus I used last semester for Speaking 3, with different students.) Before I can get on that plane, though, I have to get to the other side of this Valentine-themed week. I don't know if it's at all related, but all of my students were particularly giggly today.

Today my Translation class worked more on the love song translations that they started last week. Even though I made the lesson plan, it was up to Trang to do most of the teacherly things like checking on student progress, given that I have no way of helping them find a more accurate Vietnamese translation. I felt a little de-teachered, but it also felt good to be able to work together rather than struggle alone. That lasted until break. Trang said that she was busy and scrambled away, and then only returned briefly and intermittently for the second half of class, during which the students were supposed to work together to edit the translation into something that would mesh well with the music of their songs. This had been Trang's idea, and I had made it clear to her that this was not something I could do on my own and she had agreed to be there. I realized that from now on I have to stick with lessons that I can carry out on my own, because I can't actually depend on her to be there. Despite a rough start to this activity, we managed to make some progress and the class didn't turn into a disaster.

Group work

As Long as You Love Me by The Backstreet Boys

As much as I love Vietnamese food, after eating more or less the same handful of things every day for several months, it has gotten a little tiring. The main issue is lunch, for which I don't have many options within walking distance. I've had rice and pork about three times a week since September.  My go-to rice and pork vendor sells other things too, like chicken, stuffed tofu, or unidentified fish, but of those the only one I enjoy is the chicken, though I get it less frequently than I do pork. Today, I was hoping to have some chicken, but I didn't see any on display. Rather than assume that it was not available, I decided to ask. It felt like a small victory, not because it was a challenging thing to ask, but because it would have been even easier for me to circumvent speaking by just pointing at any of the other proteins on display. There was no chicken, but I decided to get shrimp instead of my usual pork. I'd never had the shrimp before, and it turned out to be delicious! I am delighted to have a new lunch option.

It's time to provide some updates on my most recent visitors.  A few days after finding this awesome artwork conscripting caddis flies as goldsmiths, I found my own, less glamorous larvae. Recently I had been bemoaning the absence of adrenaline-stimulating spiders, and last night I was treated with a small (by Vietnam standards) but feisty friend.

Five months later

Friday morning I awoke to a surprising phone call: 'Please come to the office. You have a package.' Who could have sent me a package? No one had told me to expect one. What could it be. I got to the office and got an even bigger surprise. It was the package my dad and Sandra had sent for my birthday, five months ago! By now we had all assumed it would never make it. I celebrated with grits for breakfast.

September 15, 2011

In the late afternoon, Violet arrived. We had planned for her to visit me this weekend before my spontaneous visit to Tra Vinh last weekend. The last time she came was for my birthday weekend, about five months ago. Back then I had yet to discover all of the awesome nooks and crannies of Ben Tre, and I didn't have a way to take us around. This time, I have more local knowledge and she has a motorbike, so we got to be more adventurous. Violet came to my door and a snake joined me in greeting her. We went out to my favorite hu tieu place and then came back and enjoyed a bottle of wine that I had received in my Tet gift basket from the college.

The snake did not like having its picture taken

On Saturday we had the luxury of sleeping in. I hadn't woken up so late (past 10) in at least a month. We went out for bun thit nuong and then went to a nice outdoor cafe to relax for a while. After that we took a quick tour of the city center, and Violet saw the supermarket, the market, the Ben Tre River, and the lake. We came back to my room and Violet asked me to cut her hair. I was happy to comply, though slightly apprehensive about having so much responsibility thrust upon me, given that it was my first time cutting anyone's hair other than my own (not counting haircuts using clippers). Lucky for both of us, I'd say it turned out well.

Final result

It's alive!

We went out for bo la lot for dinner, and since it was still light outside I got my first decent picture of the delicious dish. After that we went on a mini road trip to My Tho to visit it's bustling night market. We made it to My Tho easily, but one wrong turn on the way to the night market got us turned around for quite a while. I was wondering at what point it would be better to give up when I saw a sign for it. Hooray! I ended up buying a rare Adelina-sized dress with serious bargining tactics. A few other items caught my fancy but were just not reasonably priced.

Typical night market 'English'

This morning Violet went back to Tra Vinh, and I stayed in catching up on all of the grading and lesson planning I put off while she was here. It's amazing how quickly the weekend goes by when you have things to do and someone to do them with.

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.

No Super Bowl

2.6.12

I woke up extra early on Monday hoping to be able to stream the Super Bowl at least until I had to go teach, but I had no such luck. It would have been weird watching the Super Bowl at 630am on a Monday, but it would have been better than nothing. I survived. Fortunately, this week of teaching got off to a much better start than last week.

I taught Translation first. Last week’s homework had been for students to write in English and Vietnamese about how they spent a day of Tet. I stressed that since this was a personal account, there should be no reason for anyone to copy anyone else’s sentences. I was very happy when I didn’t have to give a single zero for cheating. Again, we used a few of the assignments for translation warm up at the beginning of class. I’m keeping a list of who reads the Vietnamese and who translates to make sure I get to everyone eventually. Our main activity was song translation. I played Simon and Garfunkel’s “If I Could (El Condor Pasa)” and then read them the lyrics. They worked together as a class to produce the Vietnamese version of the lyrics. When we finished, I handed out the English lyrics and we listened to the song again.

I'd rather be a hammer than a nail

Reading along as we listen to the song

Since Valentine’s Day is next week, I changed their homework a little bit. Instead of writing and translating original texts, they will be translating the lyrics to love songs. It was nice to see my students so excited about something.

Next I taught speaking to my 2nd years. Even though these students are notorious for being passive in class, they are consistently more engaged than my 3rd years, or at least more receptive to my teaching methods that differ from what they’re used to. The lesson was about food and dietary restrictions (being a vegetarian, having food allergies, having religious restrictions on what you can eat, etc.), and we started out by reading a sample menu. I asked them to read over it on their own and then tell me what words they didn’t know so I could explain them to the class. I don’t do this often, mostly because students rarely pipe up about what they don’t know. I had prepared a list of words I thought they might have trouble with that I intended to address in case I didn’t get any questions. However, they pleasantly surprised me by bombarding me with a bunch of words. 

Last week I had the students sign up for conversation groups, so that I can spend time actually talking to each student. I met with the first group last week, and this week I would see two groups. Usually, it takes the first 5 or 10 minutes of basic questions (e.g. what did you do this weekend?) before they loosen up and start asking me questions, too. This week, I had barely sat down when one girl started talking a mile a minute. “I’m so happy to talk to you! I don’t speak English very well but I really want to improve and I know you can help me. This weekend I saw some foreigners on my bus and I wanted to talk to them but I was too shy but I want to be able to talk to foreigners.” It pretty much made my day.

2.7.12
Today my Vietnamese class was replaced with a visit to Trang’s parent’s house to celebrate the death anniversary of her dad’s dad’s dad. (I was informed that in Vietnamese this familial position is ‘cha cha cha’.) As far as I experienced, it was no different than any other occasion for feasting, except that the older kids weren’t there because they were at school. I got to try more of Trang’s mom’s excellent cooking, and her reputation as a master chef is more than intact. One of the new dishes was chicken wings with a fish sauce based glaze. I’m hoping to get the recipe; it was delicious and Trang says it is quite easy to make.

I ate at the women’s table, but after eating I spent a long time talking with Trang’s dad. I found out that the reason he knows ‘The Yellow Rose of Texas’ is because he heard that it was LBJ’s favorite song, learned it, and played it for him when he visited Vietnam.

Just a few of the preliminary dishes

Not from today, but I think this picture really captures the awesomeness
of the house

I was totally free until six, when I had to teach the teacher’s English club. They had asked me to make a presentation about how I spent the Tet holiday, and it was Trang’s idea to ask the teachers to do the same. To my surprise, everyone actually prepared something, so we spent the first hour with presentations. After that I explained some differences between Tet and how we celebrate the new year in the US. Then, someone asked me to talk about the differences between eastern and western dragons. It turns out I didn’t know much about eastern dragons, but that meant that I could ask my students a lot of questions. While western dragons breathe fire, are generally destructive, and get killed by knights, eastern dragons spray water, are considered good luck, and don’t get killed. Eastern dragons have the head of the lion and the body of a snake, while western dragons look more like winged dinosaurs.

Dragon descriptions

Close-up of my attempts at drawing dragons

Visiting

Friday night I had a millipede that spent hours walking in circles around my desk chair. Saturday morning I set off for Tra Vinh. It takes two hours, the same time it takes to get to HCMC, even though it is probably about half of the distance. Luckily, it is also at least twice as interesting. I spend an hour on the public bus from Ben Tre to the ferry, then I spend 20 minutes crossing the river, and then it's a 40-minute motorbike ride to Tra Vinh's city center. On the bus, I saw a public school named after Che Guevara. I made me do a double take. Violet and Lam met me on her side of the river, and we had a fairly relaxing rest of the day. In the afternoon we met with some of Violet's co-workers for drinks and snacks. I tried Tra Vinh's Khmer specialty, bún nước lèo. It was good, but it didn't really inspire any excitement. More interesting were the fried sweet potato spring rolls that accompanied it. In the evening we did some shopping.

Tra Vinh city center

Bún nước lèo

It wasn't so much the activities that made it a notable weekend, it was the company. Even though getting out of our hometowns and being with friends feels like an escape from work, we can't escape talking about it. In theory, that bothers me, but in reality it is a good thing. These are the people who know exactly what my obstacles are, because they have the same ones. They can empathize like no one else can because we're all in the same boat.

I came back to Ben Tre on Sunday morning. I was planning on my usual set of modes of transportation, but when I got back to the Ben Tre side of the river it seemed like it would be a while before the next bus came. I sat down at a cafe next to the bus stop to wait. A man asked me if I was taking a xe om or the bus. I said that I was waiting for the bus. After waiting a while longer and realizing that I was more capable of conversation than I thought, I asked him if he was a driver. (I always feel uncomfortable asking people if they are xe om drivers.) He said he was a xe om driver. I was going to ask him if he knew when the next bus would pass, but instead I asked him if he could take me back to the college, since he seemed to be offering. He read the address and said that he knew where it was and he agreed to take me. I braced myself for an hour-long bumpy ride, but it ended up taking half as long. Near the end I had to give him directions, and did so successfully. When we arrived at the college I didn't have exact change and he didn't have change. Usually, if this is an issue, the driver goes around asking nearby businesses if they can break the bill. I don't know if this driver was just lazy or if it didn't occur to him that it would be challenging for me to take on this task, but he sat back while I started looking for change. The first woman had seen what had happened so I didn't have to say anything, but she didn't have change. Then I went to a shop across the street. I showed the woman my 200 and said I wanted a 100 and two 50s. She looked at me in total confusion. I said it again. She called her husband over. I said it again, again. Now the two of them were staring at me. I tried a different tactic. I said, "I have a xe om. I don't have ..." and showed them the 200 bill again. "Change!" they both cried out in unison. Success. And a good way to imprint a new word, đổi.

Remember Ngoc, Nhat, and Phu, the students I went out with on Thursday morning who were supposed to teach me some more Vietnamese dishes? I was supposed to meet them on Sunday morning but that got moved because I was in Tra Vinh. I was worried that we might have to cancel, but instead we agreed to meet at two pm on Sunday afternoon. Ngoc came to pick me up, and the 30-minute ride to Nhat's house was one of the most scenic rides I've ever had in the delta. Sunlight filtered through miles of coconut palm forests. When we got there I realized there would be no cooking. Instead, there would be eating. I was fed milk-coffee jello, vegetarian spring rolls, corn, xôi (sweet rice with coconut shavings) colored orange with gấc, mango, and persimmon. Could it be that the jello was the previously mentioned 'rice jelly'? It ended up being quite the gathering, and even though most of it took place in Vietnamese I felt very happy, included, and relaxed. I think it probably helped that we were all about the same age. 

A small feast

After we ate they asked if we could take pictures together. Boy, did we take pictures. I smiled for about three cameras and a couple of cell phones all at once, at least once with each person there and then with the group. Then they asked me if I wanted to try on an ao dai and take pictures. I didn't really want to but it was pretty clear that they really wanted me to, so I agreed. As if I needed a reminder that I was in Vietnam, I was suddenly being dressed by Nhat and trying on (aka sweating in) her mother's clothes. Unexpectedly, the ao dai fit (and was too big, actually!) and so I emerged for my photo shoot. Everyone wanted a photo with me again, and then they had me sit in the grass to take pictures of just me, proclaiming me Vietnam's Next Top Model. Once I got over the western-minded weirdness of it all, it was kind of fun. Getting fawned over for 30 minutes isn't so so bad. After that I escaped to change back into my clothes and we just sat in the grass and chatted. It was one of the most relaxed social outings I've had in Vietnam, and even though I had to leave after two hours, I would have been happy to stay longer. 

Coconuts and bananas

Get cooking

The last thing I saw before going to sleep

I dreamed that I was celebrating a Vietnamese-style new year's. Part of the tradition was to jump into a lake and go as deep as you could before coming up. When I jumped in I discovered that there was a dry, oxygenated chamber at the bottom of the lake. However, in the chamber I realized that something, maybe the water, had caused me to break out in hives, but only on my face and shoulders. It didn't seem like a good sign for the new year.

A few days ago Trang and I talked about getting together today for her to teach me how to cook something. To my understanding, we never agreed on a time, so when she texted me at 8:50 this morning it also functioned as my wake up call. I met her a few minutes later and we went off to get breakfast. Once we were fueled up, we went to the market. Believe it or not, it was my first time going to the (food) market since arriving in Ben Tre. We'd driven past it once, and I've been to the supermarket, and I've bought food from small stands on the street, but I'd never really been to this market. As it was, we drove through it anyway. If I'd been on foot, you can be sure I would have taken way more photos.

Shark!

These garlic towers are placed on altars to ward off bad spirits

Ingredient shopping completed, Trang and I came back to my room to cook and assemble spring rolls. Through some trial and error on my part, and with a lot of help from Trang, we ended up with 30 delicious homemade fried spring rolls, and I have my first Vietnamese recipe!

I had a low-key afternoon, and graded the quizzes from Wednesday's USA class. At times the quizzes made me laugh (new states to the union include North and South California, Abathama, Alambama, and Alamabana), but they also concerned me. A few students weren't even able to name the region they were being quizzed on (the South), and several of my students conflated the civil rights movement with the civil war, or thought that the civil war was between slaves and slave owners. Hopefully the subsequent in-class discussion made things clearer for them. As a further indication of how badly the quizzes went, the average score on the quiz was 4.2 out of 10. Unlike Wednesday's class, this didn't make me feel disheartened. But it is obvious that I need to make some changes. I expected students to be able to comprehend and retain major themes in the reading, but that no longer seems like a reasonable expectation. Next week I'll tailor the discussion to the quiz and move the quiz to the end of class, and see how that goes.

I'm going on a spontaneous trip to Tra Vinh tomorrow, so I won't be back until Sunday.
I found this great video about Vietnamese coffee. Enjoy.