Shitting, Pukeing, and Vietnamese (Daily Life)

(Street food is AMAZING)

No, I'am not writing this blog from inside the confines of my bathroom. A place where I have spent much of the past week observing fine vietnamese cuisine exit my mouth and rear end; hopefully, that ship has sailed.

I would love to write pages on all of the science experiments that could be conducted with my body right now, but it's hard to relive such terrible moments when the threat of anything making me run straight to the toilet is very real. The diet in Asia is tottaly different than in the U.S. To explain this phenomenon here is a list of things that I have eaten in the past week, going from least to most shocking:

Catfish Whisker Soup

Snake Wine

Chicken Tail

Quail Egg

Wild Boar

Pigs Ear

Fish Eye

Chicken Feet

Fish Liver

Fried Snake

Coagulated Fish Blood

While you take that list into account heres a picture of all the great fruit on the side of the street.

(hella fruit yo)


This past week...



Excercise




Mill Valley - Gym, Surf or play basketball




Vietnam - Can't find a Gym anywhere, They are as out of place in Vietnamese culture as the hamburger. I have, however, played basketball the last three days in a court on campus. There are no nets and the basket is at least a foot and a half lower. But there is always a game going on, and the guys are usually stoked to have an american come to the courts to play. In Can Tho, you can find me on the low post. Like my teamate yesterday advised in sparse english, "you tall, you rebound." Something no one has ever said to me.

Recreation


Boulder - 17th and Cascade

Vietnam - Vietnamese are ridiculously friendly. People will cut me off on their mortorbike just so the passenger in the back can say hi. on Sunday me and a couple other kid's in my group where just wandering around the riverside when we where pulled in by a house full of old drunk men to sing karaoke. They wouldn't let us leave. Walking back we had no idea that we would be dragged into another house where shit was seriously poppin. They made me sing every vietnamese song in the book, didn't matter how bad I was. We've flown kites on campus, been taken out too many dinners, and some of us even attended a buddhist funeral. I went to a legit karaoke place with my friends last night, it was a blast. Though we've been doing so much school work it's hard to find the energy to go out once we get back.

(They're playing chinese checkers, but instead of the star, it's just on a big board)

School


Boulder - Go Buffs

Vietnam - School has been pretty brutal this past week. In the mornings we have Vietnamese class for four hours! 7:30 - 1130. The language is nearly impossible to learn, as it has nothing to do with spanish or english and sounds like it might as well be from another planet. The sentence structure is so different that it's unlikely I'm ever going to be able to carry on a conversation. Also the tones, there are five of them which make every word very very hard to pronounce. O ya, also the alphabet is completely different... we haven't even gotten to the vocabulary yet. But whenever we have class students from across the university gather at the windows to watch us talk. It's so funny, girls laugh and stare as they walk by and guys huddle up in groups outside the door. We've been doing alot of school work, 7 hours a day. Good thing we only have this for 2 more days or my head would explode asian characters. After Vietnamese we usually have a couple hours off before a 3 hour lecture from one of the local professors. Topics have ranged from Vietnamese history too Mekong Delta ecology. Interpreters translate what the proffesors are saying to us, the process takes a while and the classes are bogged down by excessive miscommunication.

I move into my homestay on sunday! this is the last week we have class every day, after sunday we split time with traveling across the country and researching the delta with studying.

(mmmmm dragon fruit)

hard to imagine i've only actually been here for 10 days