Thu Tu (Wednesday)

Interested in viewing more of my pictures? I take a few hundred per day because I'm taking a photography class here in Vietnam. This blog only lets me upload five pictures to each post. However, I add my daily favorites to this album http://hws.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2018501&l=8bc73&id=32001827

Our group has very recently been ravaged by avian flu, malaria, and dengue fever. Just kidding. I'm just catering to the entertainment needs of most Americans reading my blog. :) I do wear a fair amount of DEET to avoid these disease-wracked mosquitoes, though.

Today I felt alot better about Vietnam. Last night, I did my Vietnamese homework quickly and I know alot more than I thought I did! Thank God (and Allah. Why not). I also managed to take a grand total of 600 (sau tam) pictures today. Most of them are of people, while the others are from the field trips this afternoon.

I'm getting ahead of myself, of course. Typical. I woke up at 6 am and attemted to talk to Andy on AIM through our microphones in our computers. Of course, although we have previously tested in Cheshire, it worked sporadically for about 15 minutes this morning. Also typical. Got breakfast from a street vendor for roughly 30 cents again. She cooked us up some eggs and stuck them in a baguette along with some spicy sauce and cucumbers. What? That doesn't sound like breakfast? Yeah I've been forced to overcome that idea a couple of days ago. I do, however, enjoy some good American Froot Loops for breakfast occasionally. Then it was off to four hours of Vietnamese language classes as usual. We learned more about the six tones and identifying them, which I seem to be pretty damn good at. Maybe it's from all that ear training I received in the Elm City Girls' Choir. Who knows.

We then found a cheap lunch (roughly another 35 cents) of pork, steamed rice, and of course cucumbers. Hold on. My friend just blew the fuse for the entire building and emergency lights are flickering and I don't want to be alone in the dark.

Ok I have returned to continue the informative outline of my day. I know you're all pretty excited. Or you're family and you feel obligated to read my travel mishaps in order to comfort me more adequately. Just kidding.

Lunch was tasty and cheap. I then took a bunch of people in our group to get their passport pictures taken, as we need them for our bus passes in Hanoi. Good thing I know my way around. While I was walking on the sidewalk, a lady driving a moped honked her horn at me. I almost said "sin loi!" which is excuse me/sorry, but she was driving on the sidewalk. That's always good for a laugh or two. I came back to the hostel room for a good five minutes in order to get a new camera battery and pack my bag for our afternoon filed trips. They're an integral part of our Vietnamese Life and Culture Class that we're taking here.

First, our group traveled together to Reunification Palace. It's only a couple blocks away from where we're staying, so we walked and took more pictures for our photography class. The palace was some Vietnamese president's former home. It was bombed by the North Vietnamese troops, as they hoped to kill him. He moved to another palace he had built for him. They bombed him there at his new palace and they didn't miss the second time. There were tanks and fighter jets parked in the middle of the park surrounding this palace. We went inside and it was all royal- full of yellow and dragons, the signs of strength and therefore royalty. The basement of the building, however, was extremely creepy. It was some sort of command center for the South Vietnamese Army during the Vietnamese War(well, really the American War). It had maps all over and old telephones and rooms with weird stones and stairs. The hallways were short and thin and made entirely of concrete. I was glad to leave, as my imagination was just starting to flare up and scare me.

Our group then walked to the War Remnants Museum. I did not feel comfortable at all, considering America intervened where we should not have yet again. There was barbed wire and military tanks and jets all over. They also had lots of pictures and captions which I did not really have the heart to look at or read. I raced through the indoor piece of the museum and sat out in the courtyard, taking pictures of as well as speaking Vietnamese to a dog sitting nearby. Professor Benjamin approached me and suggested that I would "be a better person" if I went over and walked through the mock Vietnamese jail they had constructed as a part of the museum. I wanted to appear as though I was listening to his advice, so I set off for the jail. I crept into the entrance and peered into the first stone room and definitely was not prepared for the mannequin they had placed in the jail cell. It was a ghostly (as well as ghastly) starving Vietnamese man. Needless to say, that quickly ended my jail visit. There was also a lot of irony in this museum. For instance, a small gift shop inside was selling U.S. Army backpacks and Army uniform patches. The huge sign for the museum also featured a peace dove. No one else seemed to notice the irony, but it practically tripped me and let me land on my face. I left that museum feeling, as Jenny once said, that "my heart hurt."

Five of us then went to dinner in this awesome restaurant near our hostel. We'd been meaning to try it, and it was pretty much as awesome as we had expected. I ate steamed rice with chicken and cucumbers. Lots of cucumbers here, you might be noticing. I've spent the last two hours sorting through pictures, emailing people, and talking to friends who've stopped by my room in the hostel.

Hope all is well in the states! Miss you all! I think you should comment now. :D