souped out

This morning for breakfast, I had duck with bamboo and rice noodle soup. I a little souped out considering that that was three meals of soup in a row. Soup has never been my favorite, but I like to eat it in the winter when it's cold outside. Experiencing the sweat flowing down my back, soup is pretty much the last thing I want to eat.

Almost everyone of the U.S. students went with our roommates to this large supermarket where I was able to get a towel, soap dish, shower caddie, and some snack crackers and cookies and peanut butter. I got some jack fruit chips. I don't know how to explain what jack fruit is like, so you can look it up. I also got some paper so that I can write some letters, but I don't know my own address yet, so I'll have to figure that out.

For lunch, I walked with some students (US and Vietnamese) to another street food/alleyway vendor. One of the Vietnamese students ordered all the food for us, so I don't know what most of it was. There were fried pork sticks, a shredded papaya salad with peanuts, something called "che" (like a smoothie but not necessarily with fruit and I think one of them had tapioca bubbles in it), and then I had a fried egg sandwich on white bread and french fries. I don't know why we got french fries, and I thought that the sandwich was going to have lots of stuff on it, but I wonder if they just brought me what they thought I could handle.

We had orientation at 2 this afternoon followed by a brief tour of the important parts of campus. The tour was  super short because campus is super small, but really pretty (I promise to put up pictures soon!). After the orientation and whatnot, I went to dinner with some people at the campus canteen. I got fish, boiled peanuts, some cucumber-esque vegetable, and, of course, rice. It was really good!

For the Autumn Festival, there are moon cakes everywhere. I'll have to figure out the story behind moon cakes later, but, for now, I know that they are tasty. I ate a baked one filled like lotus seed filler which also contained a solid egg yoke. I wasn't feeling the egg yoke, but the cake and the filler were great. A bunch of us sat on the steps of the main building on campus happily munching our moon cakes and chatting about summers and getting to know one another. I eventually joined in a volleyball game. We have a sand court on campus and people seem to play there every evening. The men playing seem older than students, but they are very welcoming and let us join in. The evenings here are cooler, but the humidity never slackens.

I've found myself smiling a lot. It's a good find.