There isn't much more to it than that. The first picture is the view from my balcony, and the second is the front view of the school. The school is a large academic building that sits next to a few dorms and an administrative building. It's a super small campus, which is nice because the dorm to classroom walk is about 3 minutes.
Friday, we had HIV/AIDS class in the morning where we learned about testing, counseling, models for tracking the epidemic and risk behavior surveys. It was a broad overview and left me wondering about more of the specifics of Vietnam. I'm sure we'll get into that more as the semester goes on. One interesting way of tracking a person's medical history is a card with a bar code on it. In theory, this card could be shown at any medical facility and a person's records could be pulled up from a large database. This is only happening in Ho Chi Minh City right now, but, if I had one of those cards, it would mean that I wouldn't have to go to multiple buildings around UNC looking for my medical records because someone decided to move them.
Friday afternoon was spent in a discussion section with Dr. Bennett's husband, Howie, who was a high school history teacher. We talked about the Vietnam war both through his experiences and his knowledge as a history teacher. He made his own opinions clear, but he was also very even-handed in his answers to our questions. The only perspectives I have on this war thus far are those belonging to my father's friends from the Army Aviation Heritage Foundation. The main point that he stressed was that every war has two sides and we needed to be aware of both sides.
Maeve and I went for a run Saturday morning at a different lake than the one we had previously been running at. This new lake is eons better than the other one. It's surrounded by trees and green space, you can run a full circle around it, it doesn't smell like a mix of urine and dead fish, and it is somehow is much more quiet. The loop was a little shorter, but we were so much happier with the overall scene, and it wasn't much farther away. After the run, we cleaned up a bit and got a lunch of beef fried rice and something beef with noodles.
Lunch was followed by some work in the bakery/cafe we found the other day. I got a cup of coffee that was the most delicious cup of coffee I've ever had. It may not have actually been the best cup of coffee ever, but it was what I really wanted. The majority of the coffee here is super strong and has an after-taste that I am not used to. That coffee was exactly what I wanted.
Last night, we went to see a water puppet show. It is a traditional performance art of the Vietnamese people that started long ago during long flood seasons when there was an excess of water. The stage was set up so that the musicians and singers were stage right and the stage was a a square pool of water. The puppets would float in the water as people behind a curtain manipulated their movements. The puppets ranged from people working in rice fields to boys herding cattle to women riding large fish. It was a fantastic display of traditional music of Vietnam as well as the dancing puppets.
After the show, we went back to our area of Hanoi. We took a bus back from the Old Quarter, which was a lot like the P2P. It was packed full, the radio was on, and the stops were jerky. The only thing that made it not like the P2P was that the bus didn't always come to a complete stop for people to get on and off. When we finally made it back to our area, we went to a karaoke place near the school with our roommates. We sang some crowd favorites like I Want it That Way and Livin' On a Prayer as well as several songs that our roommates knew that we really didn't. The one disappointing thing about karaoke was that the place didn't have You've Lost That Lovin' Feeling. What's even worse is that no one on my program has seen Top Gun. Some people need to get on my level.
<3 P2P!!! and who hasn't seen Top Gun? cultural deprivation
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