Day 8

Today is Monday and the start of another school week for us at UEF. Once we got to UEF we had our Vietnamese history class which I find really interesting. Today we learned more about the yin and yang philosophy that the Vietnamese culture is based off. The teacher is really informative and really easy to understand. I also think his accent is humorous, but the main thing is that he is a good teacher and I am learning a lot about Vietnamese culture and the transitions the country has made from the traditional culture to the more westernized culture it has adopted today.

After our Vietnamese history class we moved on to our Vietnamese language class which is always so fun. Most of us are pretty terrible at the language but I find myself doing okay and Matt and Julie are doing really well also. Our teacher, whose name means snow, is a great lady and she keeps the ambiance of the class very fun and informative. Recently she has been calling on me a lot more which I don’t mind because it helps me to learn the language better. I really do love foreign languages and hope to be multi lingual someday, and adding Vietnamese to my repertoire would be really awesome. It is also really helpful to have some Vietnamese students sitting next to you the whole time helping you with your pronunciations of the words.

After an uneventful lunch at the Canteen we headed to our site visit at the University of Agriculture and Forestry to hear three presentations about the school and what they do. While all the presentations were very informative they did over lap a lot providing for a lot of redundancy. That plus the heat made it really hard for a lot of us to stay awake. I felt awful for dozing off especially when I was genuinely interested in what was being said I just couldn’t keep my eyes open with the fan blowing right on me. The campus of this place was not much like a school I have ever seen. It did have a lot of green and some catfish ponds or something of the sort which makes sense seeing as it is the university of Agriculture and Forestry. After the presentations we headed over to a small research facility where a partner of the University is doing research on catfish. The visit was basically just a tour of the small facility and a photo op for us students.

After the brief stop we got back on the bus and headed back to the hotel. Tony had called us earlier with plans to play basketball when we got back, so we all rushed up to our rooms to get dressed and headed down the street to catch a cab. All of us except Andrew and Mike went to meet up with the UEF kids to play basketball. Unfortunately we were really late because of the terrible traffic but we still managed to play for an hour or 2 with everyone. It was really funny because all of us really aren’t that good at basketball but we were just so much taller than the rest of the Vietnamese players that we would get 3 or 4 scoring opportunities with every shot. That plus I swear the nets looked a little lower than normal. The best part about basketball was beating this one team that looked like they were trying to be the lakers. They were a bunch of stuck up kids who cheat pretty badly and Tony said that no one really likes them. Fortunately the “Dream Team” (that’s what we called ourselves haha) put them to shame multiple times.

After playing a few games with everyone we all had to go and we were really hungry. After saying goodbye to the UEF kids we hopped in a taxi and headed back to shower real quick. When we got back Mike and Andrew told us about a really good burger place and we all got really excited. The place was called O’Briens and Matt, Kyle and I hailed a taxi and headed over there immediately. David was busy with a dinner date with one of the UEF girls. When we got there we got three huge burgers and reveled in the fact that we were eating good old greasy American food once again. I swear that these burgers were drugged because we all were so giddy for the rest of the night. We were so happy and full that all we could do when we got back was head to the girls room and just lay face down on their beds and laugh about how good dinner was. I swear those burgers were edible happiness. And on that happy note we decided to stay in for the night and hit the hay around 12. Another great day in the books.