DEEEEEEET

I woke up on Friday morning at 7 am in the hotel and sprayed my clothes with some DEET. Being in the Mekong Delta, a mosquito bite can mean disease. I had breakfast in the restaurant in our hotel and it was very tasty. I ordered bread and an omelet and it was perfect. We left on our coach bus at 8:30 am and drove for an hour and a half. I fell asleep for the entire ride and woke up when we arrived at the Hoa An Biodiversity Research Center and met Dr. Duong Van Ni. He spoke to us about his 15 years of work to plant eucalyptus and acacia trees to shade the area and invite birds to sit in the trees. The birds' droppings land on the ground below the tree and native trees sprout up. Dr. Ni then walks around and chops down the eucalyptus and acacia trees so the native ones can thrive in the sun. He then took us around the research center and I took a bunch of pictures. I even got a leech on my ankle! I was so excited except no one around me had a lighter on them (sorry, Andy). :) About 45 minutes later, we had reached our lunch destination, which was back at the office for the research center. It was a huge open patio with some Vietnamese women scaling the fish and preparing our lunch. Predictably, I fed the stray dogs and cats hanging around.

We boarded the bus and left the research center at 1 pm. An hour later, we arrived back at our hotel and then left to go to the Co-op Mart down the road. It's sort of like the Wal-Mart of Vietnam. I got soft-serve ice cream while others in my group bought beer for their night. While I was wandering around the front of the store, I found a huge plexi-glass box with a sign that read "fund for agent orange victims." I caught some locals watching me look at the donation box and wondered what they were thinking about me.

We walked back to the Asia Hotel in a light rain and I immediately crashed (with the lights on, even) from 3:30-5:30. I woke up and did some journal assignments for one of my classes and then we all went to dinner as a group at some restaurant right on the Mekong River. There was an amazing tomato soup and we got to practice our Vietnamese again. The meal ended and the group split up again. I went with ZeeZee, Brian, and Tony, but we didn't get any farther than the market right that was attached to the other side of our restaurant. Tony and Brian took forever to haggle with the woman who was selling linen shirts, so I wandered around the corner and made friends with some kids who were running around. My camera was the ice breaker again. The boys finished their shopping and the four of us rented a driver who had a moped with a carriage on the back. We went on a 45 minute tour of the city and had a lot of laughs.

After the moped/carriage ride, we were dropped off at the hotel and ZeeZee and Tony went to the find the rest of the group at the discotheque. Brian and I set off to take pictures of the city and people at night. We were walking on the outskirts of a park next to the river when three tiny children came up and hugged us. Being white in an Asian country, this happens sometimes. I prefer it over the staring of the men, though. We made really good friends with the kids and soon discovered that they were not doing that well. Their teeth were framed with black gunk and we stopped taking pictures of them and speaking with them in Vietnamese when the little girl went into quite the coughing fit.

Brian and I then went to the fourth floor of this restaurant to find David, a man whom our professor had met and photographed earlier that day. We ordered drinks, talked, and took pictures of the city from the roof for the next hour and a half. We then walked a block to the park with the statue of Ho Chi Minh and took more pictures. We also found three more children to befriend and photograph. We started to get tired and walked back to the hotel. I was showered and in bed by 11:30.