Horsies and Goalies

Good news! I can speak enough Vietnamese to change my blog back to English! I saw a small bar on my sign-in that said "tieng Viet," and screamed "No! Ting Ahn!" Thank God for my settings in English again. Yay!

Today I woke up at 11 am, if you don't count the ten seconds that I was awake at 8:30 when a maid busted into our room in order to take laundry and leave fruit. I posted some more pictures on facebook, which can be found at http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2018583&l=4ceed&id=32001827 . Then I realized I was extremely hungry, so I ventured out onto the street to find some vendors. On the way out of the guest house, I took a picture of one of our security guards watching a James Bond movie. Classic. We searched for about ten minutes for our usual people before giving up and ordering some soup in front of our guest house. This soup had a bunch of unappetizing things in it, unfortunately. It had noodles and greens with leaves as well as some phallic meat, something like kidney, and pink/gray meat that was chipped off a giant meatball floating in her cauldron. The kindey was sweet and I liked it. I didn't eat most of the soup, though. At least I still had my daily iced coffee with milk!

I set out with four of my new friends from Union College and we hailed a taxi that took us to the Saigon Race Track. It was a lot of fun, except it took me a while to figure out what the heck was going on, since I have never been to a race track before. We sat around and tried to talk to the people around us. My friends bet on some horses, but I wasn't sure they would know when they won. Instead, I found some small Vietnamese girl and showed her how to use my camera. She was not so sure about being close to us, but spent a few minutes with us and became pretty goofy. She liked looking through the camera at the race track and especially liked the pictures I had already taken of her. After she left, our small group went down to be next to the track as they paraded the horses for the next race. I took a few more pictures of the small horses and their small, adolescent jockeys when I saw it: a boy of about six or seven kicking an empty water bottle into a soccer net. Of course, I ran to play goalie for him. He was so happy and we even had a short conversation in Vietnamese before the inevitable happened: about ten more children swarmed towards our little game of soccer. They posed for pictures, spoke with us in Vietnamese, and tried to score on me. I let the little ones score, of course. I felt like a camp counselor when a small boy climbed the netting on the back of the soccer goal and wanted me to take his picture. I complied and then motioned for him to climb back down, but some of the older boys saw this and grabbed the net and tried to shake him down. I was pretty worried for that little boy, and they stopped pretty quickly. :) At 3 pm, a bunch of people left and our group took it as a hint. It was also about 100 degrees out and we had been standing in the sun for a few hours. We walked down the street, took some more pictures, and then hailed a taxi back to the guest house.

I basked in the air conditioned room and wrote a journal entry about yesterday's field trips for one of my classes here. Then a group of six of us went to dinner at my favorite roof restaurant. The roof was closed, however, since it's Sunday. We sat on the third level (it's the same restaurant anyways) and the waiter messed up our order somehow. By some cruel act of somebody in charge up there, I got the same soup I had this morning. Irony is rampant here in Vietnam. They finally understood that they got my order messed up and brought me what I really had ordered. There were no peanuts on it, though, which was a disappointment. I don't think I am going to go there on the weekends any more. Then our group went to the Wal-Mart-esque superstore that my roommate just found today. It was bustling with activity. And by bustling I mean PACKED. We couldn't find the big sizes (I'm Godzilla sized) and were trying to find our around the clothing part of the store when a woman our age approached us to practice her English. She's really neat and Jackie gave her her email so we can get together with her and her friends some time this week. We left the store and walked back to the guest house at 8 pm. I got to take a cold shower and now I am finally sitting in our air conditioned room and feeling like I am clean and not bathing in my own sweat. I need to drink more water! Time to go to Acoustic for my nightly dose of live, American music and my watermelon juice. :)

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