Cockroach Shenanigans

After leaving the internet cafe last night, I immediately went to hang out with DiDi in her room. It's apparently pronounced "ZeeZee" but spelled DiDi. Silly Vietnamese sounds and spellings. Anyways, DiDi usually hang out on her bed and cuddle and talk. I realized how much I like that the other night and it's because I don't get any human contact here in Vietnam. I don't know anyone in our group well enough to hug them or touch them all the time. DiDi also gives amazing scalp massages that usually put me to sleep.

So we were having this three-hour long heart to heart when my roomie Jill busts into the room. It scared us a bit, since it was close to 1:30 am. She started screaming about a cockroach in our room so DiDi and I went up to my room to fix this problem. We entered the scene to find the large insect facing us in the middle of the room. As we looked at it, it scurried under the nearest piece of furniture, our large wooden desk. I grabbed my 98% DEET spray and started spraying it like there was no tomorrow. As I do this, it sprints to the safety and darkness that the underside of Jill's bed provides. We move the bed and Jill falls apart and runs away to find a male from our group to serve as backup for this crazy roach chase. This leaves DiDi and I, a sneaker, and a bottle of DEET. We chase it across the room and behind the fridge, throwing the shoe at it multiple times. As we move the fridge, it moves to the foyer and begins scaling the backside of our door. DiDi and I are hugging each other in the doorway and are continuing the spraying of very dangerous bug-killing chemicals. In response to this full-out assault, the roach looks at us and flies straight into the huddling mass that is two brave women. We perform the predictable screaming/rapidly brushing off our clothes dance while backing up from the scene of the retort and fall right on our butts as we hit the bed we previously pulled out. I jump up and inspect my clothing for the infamous cockroach while trying to simultaneously console DiDi, who injures her ankle almost every day. Just then, I spot him as he cuts and runs out the door and crush him under my sneaker just as he hits the safety of our balcony wall. I then got DiDi a bag of ice from our freezer and walked her back to her room. Having dealt with the intruder in the traditional American style, find and massacre, I turned off the lights and went to bed.

Waking to my alarm this morning at 7:45, I get ready, go out and find breakfast, and meet the rest of the group in front of the dorm at 8:30. We then walk about ten minutes in a light rain to our classroom for our new Vietnamese language classes. From now on, I will take only two hours of Vietnamese on Tuesdays, Wednesdays, and Thursdays. We were immediately split up into two groups and asked a few questions in Vietnamese in order to assess our knowledge of the language as well as our pronunciation. I did fairly well and an hour passed before they assigned us to teachers and classrooms. We spent the rest of a frustrating hour repeating vowel and consonant sounds. My voice still is not fully healed, so it was very hard to say all the tones and vowels correctly.

At 11:00 I walked back to the area of the dorm and found lunch at our favorite spot. They have two girls our age and they talk to us in Vietnamese. We feel a certain loyalty to them and never go to the food stands next to theirs. I went back to the dorm and hung out in DiDi's room, where she gave me one of her famous scalp massages. At 12:45, I headed back to my room and prepared for my photography class. Our class meets right behind our dorm and I got there and set up my laptop. Today in class we simply looked at three other people's photography projects which were due today. Then we had a small break before the professor came around and viewed our favorites. He really liked a lot of my pictures so I was pretty happy. I have posted my entire photo project here: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2019203&l=61625&id=32001827

At 4 pm, I went back to the dorm and had an odd run-in with some guys from our dorm. I locked my door and played music and computer games until Leah came and got me to go to dinner. DiDi , Leah and I again visited our favorite neighborhood eatery and Jackie and Brittany joined us. We discussed the different sounds that farm animals make. Apparently, cows in Vietnam say "mmmmm bah," instead of "moo." Odd, I know. We then made our way to "Kem My," which serves its namesake, American ice cream. I had coconut again and we joked and laughed for a long time. I have been at the internet cafe writing this blog and posting my pictures on facebook since 6:30. It's time to go back to the dorm and get ready to go out and see the mid-autumn festival! You know what to do...leave comments! :)