Hàng Ngày

So, apparently, this post wasn’t saved when I wrote it before…grr, cursed technology! Well, it’s been a while, but I basically remember:

The People’s Committee invited all of the foreigners to their headquarters for an “informal get-together.” This meant full suit and tie for men and ao dai for women, of course. We were warmly welcomed into a stark, cold room, with giant heavy wooden chairs and tables. The heads of the province sat on one side of the giant wooden oval, and the foreigners on the other. Very informal…We each introduced ourselves in turn, and each introduction was translated for the head of the province. He then told us about the goings-on in the province, and allowed us to ask questions, which were not necessarily translated completely accurately. While the head of the province was talking about environmental clean-up in An Giang, I noticed the vice-head open a bottle of water and intentionally drop the plastic wrapper seal onto the floor! Amazing. I guess ideas about litter are just different here…maybe someone gets paid to clean up after him, and he wants to keep them busy.

 After the “informal chat” they gave us presents and beautiful flowers, and we all got to shake hands with the head of the province. I wondered if they really wanted us to be there, or if they felt just as awkward in showing us their gratitude as we did in going there. Because the boys don’t have baskets on their motorbikes, I was stuck with the job of carrying all of the giant bundles of flowers back. The highlight of that afternoon was riding my bicycle, in an ao dai, with a basket full of flowers. I thought I should sell them, but that might’ve made the boys upset. I was quite a spectacle.

The next morning was the birthday of the university, it’s seventh anniversary. Dr. Xuan, the rector of the university, got up and gave a speech that I understood a lot of, surprisingly. This was because it mostly consisted of numbers listing the various accomplishments of the university over the past seven years. It’s quite impressive to know that this school has only been a university for seven years. There are still a lot of problems and changes to be made, but it’s remarkable how much they’ve accomplished in such a short period. After watching song and dance performances by students, we had a toast, and a meal. We toasted with red wine, which would have been great, had they not come around and dropped giant blocks of ice into every glass. Red wine with ice, delicious.

So, the crossdressing…Saturday night my studends in 6D2 wanted to go to the church for some “youth party.” They didn’t seem to really know what it was, but it sounded like fun. Well, it turned out to be a Christian youth party, and so we kept hearing the priest address “the christian youth of An Giang.” Oops. After the mass, we went upstairs for the celebration. This included song and dance performances, similar to teacher’s day, but all with a Christmas Theme. They even had a few Christmas carols whose lyrics had been translated into Vietnamese. The highlight for me was the fashion show. This was not just any fashion show, but a cross-dressing fashion show. The young me paraded around the stage in costumes made from straws, rice sacks, paper, trash, anything they could get their hands on. I was shocked, especially because the priest was sitting right there in the front row!! I still don’t really know what to think, accept that I wish I’d had my camera, and I had a wonderful time seeing the spectacle with my students.

As Christmas approached, and I began listening to cheesy Christmas carols alone in my room, I was worried that the holiday would be an extremely lonely and homesick time for me. I could not have been further from the truth: the past few days have been so busy that I have hardly had time to think of homesickness. And the experiences that I have had this Christmas are some that I know I will remember for the rest of my life. This will be a long post, so pour yourself a cup of hot cider before you sit down to read…

This week we (Tyler, Eric, and I) have had Christmas parties for all of our students in the English department. This meant Christmas parties every night this week, with snacks, games, “white elephant” gift exchanges, and lots of Christmas carols. I enjoyed meeting some of the other students in the department who I will no doubt teach at some point during my stay here. It was fun to share the holiday cheer with all of them.

Christmas decorations are for sale everywhere in Long Xuyen, as are Santa suits for small children. This is a new tradition for me: the dressing up of children in Santa suits, but it is possibly the cutest thing I have ever seen. Saturday and Sunday it seemed that every adorable child under the age of 9 was wearing a santa suit or a Mrs. Santa dress. Many people have these five-pointed stars hanging in their doorways, which seem to be similar to American Christmas wreaths, but more gawdy and tacky. Classic.

Saturday the 23rd, the Christmas festivities went into overdrive. I was invited to visit my student Khoi’s house for the weekend, and so Saturday afternoon I and two other students in 6D2, Luan and An, set off on the bus to Khoi’s house. We arrived in Chau Phu district mid-afternoon, and were immediately whisked away to meet one of Khoi’s old English teachers from secondary school. Ms. Lan Chi welcomed us into her home, and we walked around the neighborhood a bit before hitting the road to go eat dinner (Ms. Lan Chi’s two small children dressed in santa suits, naturally). Dinner was at a restaurant that was about 3 km off the main road down a narrow dusty lane. The sun was setting over the rice fields whose color I can not describe to you accept to say that it is the most brilliant green I have ever seen. So bright that it almost seems it can not be real: it must be an oil on canvas masterpiece or something like that.

After dinner we drove around the town and then sat down to drink warm milk (it was quite cold by now, for Vietnam at least) and walked around the “country festival” where there were games, rides for children, and a stage where there were LADYBOYS performing. I was shocked, and reminded of Chiang Mai, Thailand, where we saw a lot of cross-dresser shows. I learned the word for cross-dresser (very important) before we returned to Khoi’s house where we ate a snack of cooked duck embryos (sounds gross, and it’s a bit odd if you think about what you’re eating…I try not to think about it). Embryo became one of the students’ new favorite words. After our snack we collapsed into bed with exhaustion.

Sunday we woke up early and headed out to breakfast with Ms. Lan Chi and her family. After breakfast we went to the market where we bought “Banh Tet” a sweet sticky-rice cake that is traditionally served at New Year’s time. Our next adventure was to Khoi’s uncle’s farm, where there were ponds of fish and groves of mangoes for us to pick and enjoy. The farm was on an island, and we took a short ferry to get there. We walked around the farm and finally came to a church where Khoi introduced us to the priest and gave us a short tour of the grounds. It felt right to be enjoying Christmas Eve day with my students at this location. After watching Khoi’s uncle feed the fish with this giant fish-food-making machine, we took the ferry back to the mainland and returned to Khoi’s house for lunch. After lunch we (sadly) had to leave so that I could return and prepare for the class party at the guesthouse.

Only about half of my second year students came to the party, but it was wonderful to see them and many of them brought beautiful cards that they had made themselves for Christmas. We had Christmas cookies that I had made, as well as Christmas birthday cake: Jenna and Phil’s kids had had a birthday this week and left a whole cake in the fridge when they went on vacation. Tyler cleverly doctored the cake so that instead of saying “Happy Birthday Kalla and Aspen” it said “Happy Birthday Jesus.” We were laughing hysterically at this, and tried to explain it to the students, but I think it was lost on them. They enjoyed the cake, however. We learned songs, and when I turned music on the students started dancing in a circle. At first I was really confused as to what they were doing, and then I saw that a few of the more coordinated students in the class were dancing the steps to the Greek dance I taught them at Thanksgiving! They were dancing my dance, which made me so happy (although they were not exactly doing it well…) and they seemed to be really enjoying themselves.

Luan opens his white elephant gift while Trieu laughs…

The white-elephant gift exchange went well, with mostly good presents and a few “duds” such as packages of instant noodles and a box of toothpicks…after the party ended we took some sparklers outside and lit them while we sang “We Wish you a Merry Christmas” and danced around outside of the guesthouse.

After the students left, Tyler and I went to meet our friend Hang in order to go to the big cathedral in Long Xuyen for midnight mass. Tyler and I seemed to be minor celebrities there: while standing outside we collected a crowd of onlookers (probably because people come from the countryside for Christmas Eve who have never seen foreigners before). The church was decorated in high-style with a cheesy nativity seen and neon lights. The mass was similar to any mass in the US, which was very meaningful to me. Although I’m not really Catholic, it was really cool to see this continuity of tradition and ritual across different cultures. We even sang a song in Vietnamese that had the same tune as “Angels We Have Heard on High.” I remembered the JBS Christmas pageant fondly and the year that we were finally old enough to walk down the aisles of the theater with candles singing this song. The teaching of the songs was quite funny: the priest got up there in choir-director fashion and taught each verse in turn, moving his hands to conduct the congregation as if we were a chamber chorus. It was quite humorous. At about 11:30 the mass ended and Tyler, Hang, Hang’s roommate (also named Hang) and I walked back to campus. On the way Tyler and I stopped and got some corn on the cob, and so Christmas Eve finished with Tyler and I jumping over the fence to sneak back to campus, and then sitting in Tyler’s room eating corn on the cob at midnight, reminiscing about Christmas’ past and sharing fond memories.

An and Vi in front of the tree
And for Christmas Day? Today I will go to Mr. Scott’s house in Can Tho (about an hour away) for Christmas lunch. After I teach class, that is…I plan to teach my second years a few more carols this morning. Because really, who wants to teach on Christmas Day? I hope that everyone else is having a lovely holiday season wherever you may be. I send my love and my best wishes to all of you. Ho ho ho!!

The weather has gotten cool in Long Xuyen ( I mean, for real cool, like 60 degrees in the morning) which has been great for morning runs. There is a strong breeze every morning, and I almost feel like I’m back in New York City walking or running around the corner of 116th and Riverside to be greeted by a gust of cold wind in my face.

So, this morning, I was out running and I saw a man running in flip flops and jeans. This is fairly common here in LX. The concept of “workout clothes” is lost on many people. But this guy was even more surprising for one reason: he had a cigarette in his mouth! That’s right, running in flip flops and jeans with a cigarette in his mouth…

The last week was spent in the scenic mountain town of Dalat, where temperatures are a delightful 20 degrees celsius by day and a crisp 12 by night. All 14 teachers from the VIA Vietnam program got together for our annual conference to make important decisions about the future of the program and de-stress after our first 4 months in Vietnam. It was a much needed break for all. We spent the days in meetings discussing future post openings in some interesting new directions: next year we will have a volunteer working at an orphanage in Hue, the University of Public Health in Hanoi, and ADAPT, an organization that works with girls who are at-risk for being trafficked here in good ole Long Xuyen. All of the decisions are made by consensus process, which means that current volunteers have a real say in swaying the future direction of the program. We redefined the organization’s goals as well as our own personal ambitions, shared lesson plans and “decoded” cultural situations together.

We also got a few spare moments to see the city of Dalat. The city is very “European” in some ways, with twisty roads and cobble-stoned sidewalks winding down to a beautiful lake where we rented tandem bicycles one evening and rode around trying to to kill ourselves in the process. The bikes were pretty janky, without any gears and sufficiently lacking in the brakes department…but it was fun despite (and maybe because of?) this fact. We went to the “crazy house,” an architectural masterpiece designed by an eccentric local woman. The house reminds me of the City Museum in St. Louis, a giant maze of cave-like rooms with strange tree-shaped furniture, skylights, and oddly shaped windows. Good fun to climb around on. One afternoon I went walking until I was completely lost, in the middle of grape orchards (Dalat is famous for wine, strawberries, and vegetables like peppers and cabbage. The climate reminds me of upstate New York.) and came upon the university here. We are re-opening a post here teaching in the English department as well as the department of social work and community development. This is a relatively new field in Vietnam, and a completely new type of post for VIA. The university is gorgeous, a sprawling campus on top of a hill surrounded by fields and a golf course on one side. Maybe I’ll end up staying longer than I thought…

Last night we all returned to Saigon and had dinner at a former VIA volunteer’s house. He is currently working as a lawyer in Vietnam, and is the managing partner for a big international law firm here. His house was unbelievable: like a castle-oasis amid the constant bustle of Saigon. A yard, a pool, a sprawling patio, a guesthouse, high ceilings, and a Christmas tree surrounded us while we ate dinner and drank wine and listened to holiday music. Rather surreal. The night ended with a HORRIBLE midnight busride to Long Xuyen. I’d forgotten how bad the road was, and even worse because it’s “under construction.” (If you don’t know what this means, read previous post on road construction…) I didn’t get any sleep at all and probably lost a fair number of brain cells in the bumpy process. But it was good to get home to LX, refreshed with new teaching ideas, renewed motivation for VIA’s mission and developing new opportunities for future volunteers. And! It’s relatively cool here! I was wearing a jacket when I got in and actually felt comfortable. Maybe it will actually be a Christmas-y season soon after all.

Every year VIA has a conference for volunteers to gather together and discuss the future of the program, relax, and process the experience of volunteering abroad together. This year our conference is in Dalat, in the central highlands region of VN. I left for Ho Chi Minh City on Friday afternoon with Christine, the program director from the US, and Sharla, another volunteer down here, although not at the university. We spent Friday night and Saturday night in the city. It was great to get away from LX and see a bit of urban color: I didn’t realize how much I missed NYC until we were driving into Saigon at rush hour with all the neon lights, the cars, the people, the noises, the smells. We stayed at a nice place in the backpacker district: small and clean and family run, unlike a lot of the dumps in that area (not my favorite neighborhood) and spent Saturday wandering around the city. Saturday night was spent with my former host family, having dinner, relaxing, and especially spending a lot of time talking to My, the 13 year old daugther whose English now seems to be quite good after two years of private language classes at a nearby English center.

Sunday AM we took the bus from HCMC to Dalat. After being told it left at 8:15, the tour company leader knocked on our door at 8 to tell us frantically that the bus was leaving now. We had to quickly rally our party of 8 people, and ended up leaving one behind because we simply couldn’t get in touch with him. I realized later why they wanted to get an early start: the bus to Dalat is supposed to take about 7 hours. But we had, I’m not kidding, the SLOWEST bus in Vietnam. The bus driver seemed to downshift into low gear at any opportunity, which meant we crawled up hills that were barely hills at all. It took about 8.5 hours in total. But when we got to Dalat, it was all worth it. The weather is AMAZING. It’s cool and dry, and breezy. It feels like November in NYC. I brought a jacket and my only long sleeve shirt, and it still feels a bit chilly. I need gloves and maybe even a scarf! The first thing I did when we got off that godawful bus was to go for a run around Xuan Huong Lake in the center of the city. 7 km of breathing in crisp air left my lungs aching with a wonderful feeling of impending winter weather. It was lovely. We all went out to dinner together and then I went with Eric, Tyler, and Tyler’s friend Dung to get some warm rice wine, which really hits the spot when you’re chilly.

Today we started early in the AM, and in the afternoon had a free period in which we went to a pagoda outside of town, rode the famous cable car across the mountains, and ended at the Crazy House. The Crazy House is called such because the architect is a bit crazy, aka, very modern. This house will eventually be a hotel, and reminds me a lot of the City Museum in St. Louis: fake sculptured trees and rocks rising up into the sky with little tiny cave-like rooms carved out of the rocks with funky wooden furniture, and little cozy pocket-like beds in the walls. I want to hire this woman to design a house for me someday. Tomorrow it’s work all day again, although the work is interesting because we’re discussing the future of the program, our mission in Vietnam, and what we’re all learning from this experience. And now off to wander the streets in the chilly evening air. Hope I don’t get sick with this “cold” winter weather!

Yesterday Typhoon Durian swept it’s way across southern VN leaving destruction and havoc in its path…for the first time in my students’ academic history, they had a day off from school. All schools had the day off yesterday in preparation for the storm. However, school offices were still open (??) I awoke at the usual hour to find it was pleasantly cool and breezy out. I went for my run as usual, although I was a bit hesitant for fear that the storm would come on suddently and sweep me away Wizard of Oz style. The storm was supposed to come at noon. By noon it was quite cloudy, and windy. A few raindrops…but no storm. Then they said it would come at 4 pm. By around 3, the wind had subsided, it was cool and almost sunny. Then they said it would come at 6 pm. The sunset at 6 was beautifully clear, and the crisp air brought all of the students out to play volleyball and badminton as usual–after their nice day of rest. Kind of like the snow-days in the US: when it doesn’t actually snow, and the school officials feel like morons for cancelling school…

US Consulate General, Ho Chi Minh City

Warden Message

04 December 2006

This warden message is to notify American citizens of the approach and potential impact of Typhoon Durian.

According to news reports, Typhoon Durian is expected to hit the southern area of Vietnam sometime around the evening of Monday, December 4, and the morning of Tuesday, December 5.  Maximum sustained winds may be as high as 80MPH. 

Residents and travelers in the area affected, including the cities of Nha Trang, Phan Ranh and Phan Thiet, should take precautionary measures to prepare for the storm.  A storm of Typhoon Durian’s strength may cause some coastal flooding, although no real damage is expected to buildings.  Winds may cause damage to trees, shrubbery and unsecured objects.