Mundane Monday

Today I woke up at 6:30 and got dressed, had Jill clean out my ear, ate a few cumquats, and met my fellow English teachers in front of our dorm at 7:00. As usual, we took the 31 bus to school and taught from 7:30-8:45 am. Jackie and I had a hard time today because we decided to play the ABC Game, which entails us giving the kids a letter of the alphabet and a short amount of time in which the students must write down as many words as they can that begin with that letter. Today, however, many of our students chose to sneakily use their dictionaries. Jackie and I were well aware of what was going on and planned to speak to them privately after class until the other kids complained about the cheating. We were put into a sticky situation because we didn’t want to chastise the cheaters in front of the class but one of the cheaters had won the game. Jackie and I quickly decided not to declare a winner for today’s game, planned another game during Wednesday’s class, and spoke to the class as a whole about cheating. Needless to say, we were a bit relieved when class was over and we met Thuy, our supervisor, and went to get bang bao and iced coffee for breakfast. We had a funny and lively conversation and she had to leave a bit early. We finished up and decided to walk down a couple of blocks in order to find this one spa from which to purchase treatments for our two supervisors. It took about half an hour of using our skeletal Vietnamese and simple English to begin to explain to the spa women about gift cards, and we finally called DiDi and she talked to them in the necessary Vietnamese. Will also walked into the front, glass door and that was pretty freakin’ hilarious because he was not hurt and the door remained intact. After talking to DiDi on the phone, the woman returned to the front desk and pulled out a bag of gift cards and we got really excited. We pooled together our money and bought a really nice stress relieving massage and manicure/pedicure for our supervisors.

The rest of the teachers left the spa place at 10:00 to catch the bus and I got a xe om to Finnegan’s because Jackie had seen a flag store around there. I bought a couple of really cool and colorful Vietnamese flags, including the Vietnamese Buddhist flag, and befriended the three generations that run the store. They gave me some tea and I sat around and talked with them in Vietnamese as they fed their baby boy and the mother sewed more flags. They thought I had two years of the language and when I told them I have only been studying it for two months, they were impressed. That always feels good. I took down their address and told them I’d send my friends, which made them even happier.

I took another xe om back to the dorm where I dropped my stuff, comforted DiDi after some bad news, and visited Jackie and Leah in their room. I then grabbed my laptop and walked out of the dorm where I found Lady Borton, a former presenter for our lecture series, with a cool book for me and some information for other students in our group. I thanked her and walked to the internet café, where I had a good lunch of my xao bo and a Coke while talking to Bridget, Becca Pav, and Amanda. I also officially changed my final photography project from alleyways of Ha Noi to “Personalities of Huan Kiem Lake,” which features my favorite subjects—people. After talking to all of these people, posting three blog entries from this weekend, and adding many pictures to Facebook, I came back to the dorm at 3:30 pm. I again went to visit Jackie and Leah in their room and then sang and played computer games in my room until 5:30, when I ventured out to see what everyone was doing for dinner. Since it was $1 tequila shot night, most of our group was going to Le Pub. At 7:00 I took the 31 bus with Leah, Meggie, and Jackie and then walked from the drop off at the post office. We ate dinner (I had pizza and a Coke) and then the rest of the group came—Mike, Will, Becca, Sarah, and Brittany. I stayed and chilled with them until about 10:30, when Jackie and I took a xe om back to the dorm. I washed up and went to talk to DiDi, whom I found doing a bit better than earlier that day. We ate a big grapefruit I had brought and then cuddled until we fell asleep. I woke up at 1:30, still in DiDi’s room, and went back to my room to sleep.