It's Tuesday night in Vietnam, so I've been here for 2 full days, but thanks to all the long flights and timezone differences I feel like I've been away from home for a whole lot longer.
The trip to Vietnam was my first flight overseas so I was no where near prepared to be that bored for such a long time. When we finally got to the hotel on Sunday night, the last thing I wanted to do was sleep, but knew I had to because Monday morning was when all our trips were going to start bright and early.
On Monday we woke up and went to the hotel's buffet breakfast. I had heard that the food was different from last years students, but really had no idea what to expect. There was a lot of rice, which didn't surprise me tooo much. I'm not very adventurous, so i stuck to mainly toast & fruit, but hopefully by the end of the trip I'll have tried more. After breakfast we went to the University of Economics and Finance for an opening reception. The 45 minute bus ride there was the first time we got to see the city in daylight. The traffic patterns are crazy, people ride motorbikes more than do they use cars, and everyone is weaving in and out of each other constantly. Even in the van, I was afraid we were going to hit someone, or be hit. It was also really interesting to look at all the storefronts on the street, the sidewalks seemed to be almost impassable because everyone was sitting in chairs in front of the stores.
Once we got to the University we were greeted with a banner hanging outside the school. Up in our classroom everyone was so excited to see us! We all sat next yo students from vietnam and heard speaches given by professers from both programs, and they gave us all gifts. One of the girls sang "rockstar" by hannah montana/miley cyrus, which was very random but still fun. I think my favorite part of the morning was when we all sang "Heal the World" together. It made me very excited to get to know the students and their culture.
For the rest of the morning we had a language class. Thankfully, the Vietnamese students were there to help me or I would have been so confused. It's a tonal language, so theres a lot more than a new alphabet to learn, and they pronounce some letters totally different, so it's very hard to follow along reading what she says.
We had lunch in the Can Tin, which is their dining hall. It was rice, soup, shrimp, and surprisingly, french fries.
During the afternoon we had a tour of the city and went to the US Consulate. During the tour we saw one of the local markets, and I'm really excited to go back and get souvenirs to take home. At the consulate we learned some about US relations with Vietnam, the history of the countries, and how Vietnamese citizens apply for visas to the US.
In the evening we had our welcoming dinner..
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