A Day in the Life...

Yet again, it seems like a lot has happened since the last post. So, I think will go through what a typical day is like for me. Although, typical is probably not the right word to use as every day brings something new and exciting and we have a schedule full of travel, plus right now we are living in with our home-stay families, which makes every day more exciting, but here is as close as I can come:

I wake up in the morning at around 6:30, which is pretty late for my family here. They all get up around 6. I grab some breakfast to go (almost all the people here either get carryout breakfast or they go out to eat, and I can’t quite figure out why… but it’s still very good) then hop on Rocco, my bike. I bike (aka battle through traffic) for about fifteen minutes to another part of town to where the pool is. I have made friends with a swim coach there and we practice together in the morning. It's an outdoor 50 meter pool with no lane lines, and although it has seen better days, it is nicer than anything I was expecting. It used to be owned by the military, and there is still a military base in back of it. So to the smell of gunpowder, next to cows grazing, and with kids floating in and out of our “lanes”, Khiêm and I make up a practice for ourselves. It's made more fun by the fact that he speaks very broken English, and if my inability to pronounce his name can is any indicator, my Vietnamese is still very bad. He’s a good, tough coach and laughs when he beats me, which is often, and laughs when I get tired, which is always. I am also starting to get to know the morning crowd at the pool; there is the younger swim instructor who smokes as he teaches, the woman who does dance moves on the bleachers to the sound of her boom box, the lifeguard, the kids splashing around, and the old woman who talks English to me with a French accent. It’s a great way to start the day. [correction: apparently they do have lane lines, but they are only put in when the military is going to use the pool]

Well, then I hop back on my bike and bike another fifteen minutes to the university. Thankfully, by 8:30 the traffic has calmed down considerably. This SIT program is different from others because we are so closely tied with one university, which is great because it gives us a home base to rely on. Our morning class starts promptly at 9 am and we then have a lecturer from the university come to talk to us. Today we went into the rice fields with a great professor and took soil samples, which we then analyzed. All of our classes have been really interesting, although I think there is some content lost due to the language barrier. After class is lunch, and I either go home or go to the cafeteria. Lunch in the cafeteria costs about 4,000 VND, which is about 25 cents. If you really want to go all out and get a soda and a banana, it might set you back about 40 cents. But, if I go home, then I get some more fantastic home cooking, and a chance to relax and take a nap before afternoon classes. I mostly go home. Then we have about and hour and a half of downtime where we can work on homework, take a nap, listen to music, etc. while the rest of the city takes the Vietnamese equivalent of a siesta. Two o'clock means the start of language class, and also the start of a headache forming. I thought the language would be easy to pick up because we are living here, but that is not the case. The tones are easy to say, but hard to hear and the words have no correlation to anything that I know. It's very hard. I think our teachers realize that so they try to teach us things that will help us around as opposed to the very formal education. But, they are patient and I think we are making progress, even if it is very slow progress. Although, living in a home-stay does help significantly.

I think this is a good time in the entry to talk about my home-stay family.
Thông- is the father and the only member of the family that doesn't speak English. But he smiles a lot, gets up at 3 in the morning and does all the housework for the family so they can do their respective jobs.
Lan- is the mother. She spends all day teaching English, and still finds time to teach me to cook! She is so kind, so nice, and we get a long really well.
Tú- is the oldest daughter, at 28. She still lives at home (which is very common for unmarried people), works for an insurance company, and I share a room with her, although she sleeps somewhere else. She is very mild mannered and sweet and we end up spending a lot of time together.
Trí- is the second oldest at 25 and the only boy. He works at the university in the GIS lab, but I don't see him a lot because he is very busy, but when I do see him, he treats me like an older brother should. With a lot of teasing. His favorite thing to do is to try and get me to taste something that he knows I will not like. Example: fermented pork or this really sour fruit.
Thuy- is 23 and works at the university also. She's the sasser of the family, and has a great sense of humor. We also get along really well. She is in biochemical engineering, she's really smart, and she wants to go to grad school in California. She also tutors English and chemistry in her free time.
Tuýên- pronounced like “twin” is my same age, so I joke with her that we are twins. My five letter name also fits into the progression of the children’s names to show their place in the family; the oldest has two, the next three, etc. She is a finance major at the university, so she studies a lot and also teaches and tutors a lot. We get along well also.

They are all awesome, and so nice and considerate. I should also say that the fact that all four children have gone to the university is pretty incredible because each year 40,000 students take the entrance examination, and only 2,000 get in. So they are all very bright, hard-working people. Yet, they would put up some stiff competition with the Eshelman family for teasing. Good thing I know how to give it back. A lot of their teasing is about how I am their younger sister, not their little sister, because I am about a foot taller than all of them. My host-mom also jokes that she needs to find me a good Vietnamese husband so that I will never leave. Funny stuff. It’s just so nice to live in a house and have familiar people to go home to every day. I feel so fortunate to have gotten the chance to have met them and really get to know them.

After a good home cooked meal, I spend some time studying or going out for coffee or just hanging out with my host-family. We have a lot of work to do, but not too much so that I can still enjoy what an average Vietnamese student would do at night.

Oh! I almost forgot to talk about how we were invited to sing a song for a group of students. We agreed to do it, picked a song, and ended up singing the Three Dog Night version of Joy to the World to an audience of over 300 new freshmen. They were so excited that they clapped too loud (and off beat, I might add) to hear us sing. I don't think I will ever hear another applause like that for me in my life as I heard when we finished.

That’s pretty much all there is from here, except we are still in the height of the monsoon season, and there is a big hurricane hitting the north right now. I hope that will have blown over by the time we get there!

Hen Gap Lai!

Julia

By the way, here is a great article about the people here in relation to the Vietnam war. I thought a few of you might be interested:
http://www.utne.com/cgi-bin/udt/im.display.printable?client.id=utne&story.id=11507

[pictures from left to right: Rice at market. Khmer carving in window shutter. Lunch on a field trip. Fabric at market. Man selling flowers on motorbike. Chum Chum, an example of one of the crazy, fantastic fruits here. The last three pictures were taken by the wonderful Nathalie Savell]