learning life

A brief run-down of the courses we are taking here:

-Vietnamese Language

-Vietnamese Culture

-Public Health History (in Vietnam)

-HIV/AIDS (in Vietnam)

-Oral History

So far, I've had Language, PH History, and HIV/AIDS. I won't even try to tell you how the scheduling works because I don't understand it at all myself. The language class is difficult, mostly because I am forcing my mouth and throat to make sounds that they have never made before, which is exhausting. PH History and HIV/AIDS are both set up as seminar courses with guest lecturers and class discussions. This is great because we get to stretch our scholastic minds with inputs from different voices and each other. I'll let you know how those are going as I get deeper into them.

My day-to-day, now that I'm in a routine, is easy to keep up with. I get up and run with Maeve, watch the Vietnamese MTV (which has music from all over the world) while I get ready and eat, got to class, eat, go to class or study, eat, and then entertain myself until it's time to sleep. I've found some really fun music on the music channel including the rediscovery of some of my favorite U.S. artists. My classes, except Language which is an hour and a half, are all 3 hours long. This is a very long time, and I find myself struggling to stay focused for that long. I need a coffee hook-up

Sometimes, to entertain ourselves in the evening, we go for post-dinner dessert adventures. I tried to get us back to a sweet roll shop that I remembered from a previous day, but I evidently didn't remember the way because we ended up being back on our road, but fairly far down from our school. This ended up being a blessing in disguise because we found a wonderful bakery/cafe. I got a pastry with chocolate inside of it and sat down at a delightful table among the brightly colored wall paper. One of the girls who was working behind the counter gave us a huge smile and walked over to talk with us. Thank goodness we had our TA, Kim, with us to translate because the girl talking with us didn't know much English and she got a serious kick out of our attempts at Vietnamese. Lan was so sweet and talkative. She gave us her number and expressed a desire to hang out with us and show us parts of Hanoi. Not only was she so wonderful, but the bakery/cafe is the absolute perfect place to do work. I have been wanting a cafe where I can read and do work comfortably while inhaling minimal cigarette smoke. This is the place. I plan to spend a lot of time there in the coming weeks!

I wanted to share a picture of me and my roommate, Ngan, and me from the Mid-Autumn Festival. We hang out, we have good times, and we mostly understand what each other is saying. In this picture, we are eating choco-pies, which are, essentially, what we at home refer to as moon pies, not to be confused with moon cakes here.