A Quiet Christmas

Greetings!  I didn't mean to wait quite so long to post but I know Christmas is a busy time back "home..." and it seems not much happens here until all of a sudden I load in all the photos I think are worth sharing!

Our business cards came back so now we don't have to feel silly not having something to hand back to a person who hands us his or her card.  I was proud they turned out correct since I ordered them from a totally non-English speaking Vietnamese fellow.  And I had to find the street with a lot of signs marked "danh thiep" which is "business card."  He wanted to sell me 1000 (!) because as in the US, it's not much more to buy in huge bulk amounts.  But I told him I only needed 100.

Independence Palace, also known as Reunification Palace.
This is not the main entrance, but we thought the trees
bending toward each other were cool.

The Presidential bedroom in the palace, including a sitting
room with groovy 60's/70's furniture

The projection room to watch movies in the palace!  Such
cool old equipment.

These are said to be "severed elephant feet" given as a gift to
the president.  Ewww!  Are they real?

 On Saturday Dec. 10 Bob's knee was still healing (it's much better now, although he is still wrapping it up for a long walk, for extra support) so I spent the day being a tourist with my colleague Hui Hiang and 2 of her optometry friends visiting from Singapore.  We saw several sights I'd seen before but it was my first time in the Reunification Palace.  This was the home and workplace of the president of South Vietnam during the Vietnam War. It was the site of the end of the Vietnam War during the Fall of Saigon on April 30, 1975, when a North Vietnamese army tank crashed through its gates. (there's your history lesson reminder).  The 1960's architecture and decor was interesting to see, as well as the basement "war room" and telecommunications center with old radio transmitters and maps on the walls.

The following Saturday I helped with the party my local church threw for a the Sunlight and Sunrise Shelters.  The pastor calls it an orphanage but he also told me many of the children are abandoned and yet they are not up for adoption.  They are sheltered here and educated (but they didn't know much English so I could only interact on a limited basis, sadly), and 3 of the home supervisors came along; according to the pastor they are to be watchdogs so the church only has a party and does not evangelize the children, since the shelter is run by the government.  The children were so sweet and the girls sang us a song at the end.  All the students knew the words to "We wish you a Merry Christmas" in English!  We had lunch (Domino's Pizza and Popeye's chicken!!!  Not my choice, lol, but the kids of course loved it), played games, had a skit and a story, and gave each child a gift bag.  It was nice but I do wish I could communicate better!

The above picture is an alley-way nativity scene I walked past.  Lots of foil used for a "snowy" look.  I like the snowman in the bottom and the Santas sliding down the roof.  Lots of blending going on!

Christmas Eve we headed to the City Center and the historic Notre Dame cathedral (established by French colonists, built between 1863-1880).  Mass was to begin at 8:50 and we were advised to arrive around 5 pm because of the crowds.  There were masses of people!!  We wandered around and ate dinner but still stood outside the cathedral for a long time, chatting to other tourists and locals who wanted to practice English on us.  We weren't sure if we'd get in because of some confusion about needing tickets, but we learned some Vietnamese were let in first and they had tickets (perhaps they were church members?) and instead of leaving we stayed, having some hope of getting in.  Then a man told Bob foreigners could get in without a ticket!  So we were let in after all.  The mass was in Vietnamese but it was still pretty cool to be in that church.  They had a small portion (abbreviated homily) in French and in English.  The photo shows the lights decorating the cathedral, as well as the many, many motorbikes!  (my captioning isn't working all of a sudden...sigh, me and computers)

 

This Santa dude made us laugh, he wanted a picture and he kept saying "Ho! Ho! Ho!" in a deep voice.  I think he was getting the biggest kick out of himself!

On one of my walks I saw for the first time puppies being sold streetside.  I resisted the sale, haha!  

Finishing up with a few random things.  The health club I joined was having a time of having a photographer in for some sessions, apparently for a promotional video.  Last Friday evening I went there, invited for a party (wasn't sure if it was a Christmas party, but I learned it was the promotional kickoff party).  Before I entered the building I saw this huge streetside screen playing a video of different classes--that's me in the turquoise in the back towards the right side!  The party consisted of different class demonstrations and some good Vietnamese party food!  

Gotta have a couple food photos.  This is a dragon fruit (5728 dong=25 cents) bought from my local supermarket.  The husk/rind/skin peels off quite easily and that's what it looks like inside!  It was OK, kind of bland, but not sour or anything surprising.  Today I bought a mango from a street vendor, all peeled and cut up and with a bag of chili salt mix (how Vietnamese eat a lot of their fruit, dipped into that mix) for 44 cents US.

And lastly, we had noticed a new restaurant in our neighborhood (mostly an outdoor place with canopies to sit under and a nice fountain) so tried that over the weekend.  Here is the menu:

Argh!  I hate it when there is not a lick of English to help us!  "Banh" is common because it's bread (banh mi, a tasty sandwich), but it can also be noodles, or dumplings, or more like a pancake.  Still lots to learn!  We took a chance on 2 things that Google Translate helped us with and they were both tasty.  The English on the street sign (probably why I thought the menu might have English subtitles) said "Hong Kong dim sum" and dim sum, if you know it, are small dishes.  So we each got 3 pieces of our shrimp roll/pork and seaweed roll, enough to share and perfect to take a chance on!

Well, that's about all our latest adventures.  We are finishing our 13th week here.  Teaching is winding down a bit since lectures are mostly over and now we are having more labs/practicals to teach students procedures, especially in preparation for their semester-end practical exams in January.  New Years' Eve we may head downtown again to the City Center, Vietnamese folks seem to love to be outdoors for these celebrations. The weather is perfect for being outdoors in the evening!  Still in the 80's....

Happy New Year and health and happiness are wished to all our friends and family. Thanks for following our blog!  Kim and Bob  

Mostly Christmas

Merry Christmas!  It doesn't feel much like Christmas here mostly because it's so hot and humid still!  But there are plenty of Christmas trees and decorations to be seen.  I'm not sure if most Vietnamese celebrate Christmas (we'll find out soon) but merchants do seem to like to decorate and promote shopping.  Here are some photos to share:

Tree in the lobby of our
apartment building.

Tree in my fitness center

Tree in the library at the university

Fancy tree in the lobby of a tourist
hotel downtown

A Vietnamese church near our university was very decorated
on our walk home one evening (kind of dusky out).

Sometimes Vietnamese doesn't translate so well to
English so Hui Hiang and I weren't sure if this was a
mistake or purposeful to catch attention.  MREEY
CHRISTMAS!!

A few days later Hui Hiang sent me a picture with the caption
"They fixed it!"  

Our apartment entryway has a (snowy!) scene painted on
it.  Someone had scratched off the bear's nose (kids 
will be kids?) but some painters returned to fix it.

I had a hair experience! It was time to hide my grey hairs, so I thought I'd try to figure out the hair salon system myself.  On a previous neighborhood walk we'd seen a couple of obvious women's salons in a block (businesses seem to be clustered in one area) so I tried one.  One of the employees spoke English so I was on my way!  The color smelled strong but my hair turned out fine and healthy.  After the color had processed, before washing it out, I was asked if I wanted my face washed.  I thought perhaps that was the Vietamese way so I said yes.  I was led into the back area where patrons lie down with their head on a board (not a cut-out sink like in the US) and my hair was washed out and then my face had about a half hour of attention!  Washed and massaged, along with my neck and shoulders too.  Then back to the chair for a blow dry and style.  It took about 2 hours and cost $22 US. 

2 people working on me.  The man was
the main stylist, but the girl worked on my
face-washing.

The price list

The hair and face washing area.  I had to take a picture because even
though these clients don't have their legs stretched out, I COULDN'T
stretch my legs and had to lie with my knees bent.  The wall
was too close for my longer-than-Vietnamese legs!

Fiinished style and color.

The Star of Bethlehem concert

This past Saturday we attended a really fantastic concert by the International Choir and Orchestra of Ho Chi Minh City.  At the end the audience was invited to sing along with the final number, "Hark the Herald Angels Sing."  It was very moving singing among so many nationalities.  The concert lasted about an hour (much to Bob's relief) since we were packed in there and no air conditioning!  The concert was held at St. Paul's Convent Cathedral, a building dating from the 1860's!

The front of the church I've been attending, closest
English service to my apartment.

This coming Sunday my church (International Christian Fellowship) is celebrating Christmas since the pastor says many will be gone on Christmas Day, going to their home.  We have a fellowship meal after the 10:30 service.  Then next Saturday the church is having a Christmas party with a local orphanage to give gifts and "hang out" with the kids.  I'm excited to be signed up to do that.  This past Sunday I walked to church both ways (Bob resting his knee: see below), it's a 45 minute walk.  I tried the bus one week but it's quicker to walk, believe it or not.  Plus I enjoy seeing the neighborhoods.  I just had to take one "weird food" picture.  My google maps led me back home a new way and there were three food carts in a row with this animal hanging in it--I think a cow!

Big meat!

My last post mentioned Bob's elbow infection and it is mostly better.  Still a small area of redness but the pain is gone.  The newest complication is his knee began having pain for no apparent reason.  So he's been laying low and icing and wrapping and resting his knee. Maybe it's just "old age" but it's quite frustrating!  Especially because he had just heard about a group of students willing to let him join in their weekly soccer games.  That is on hold for awhile now!

That's all the news for now. Work has been busy with a lot of labs lately, teaching 3rd years about contact lenses and 2nd years about optometric procedures in an eye exam as well as beginning to teach them how to fit glasses as well as grind lenses to fit a frame!  On Dec. 20 we are taking the 3rd year students on a field trip organized by Mr. Long, to a local School for the Blind.  This will tie in to their class in Low Vision.

Thanks again for following our "adventure" and we wish you a peace-filled holiday season!

First Domestic Flight and a birthday!

Greetings!  We are in our 6th week of teaching and enjoyed a long weekend last weekend for a "teacher's holiday" (day off) in Vietnam last Friday the 18th.  First, some school goings-on.

Pizzas:  ham,sausage,onion; ham and pineapple;
seafood.  Yum!  The ketchup did come with the
pizza delivery and our Vietnamese colleagues
dip their pizza in ketchup.  :)

Yes, we sang "Happy
Birthday!"

Dr. Koh, Phuong, Bob, Kim, Mr. Long, and Ngan.

A beautiful bakery cake with a pineapple filling layer.

Thursday Nov. 17 was Mr. Long's birthday (the head of our optometry sub-department here at the university) and we celebrated with a pizza lunch and cake!  It was a nice lunch in our little office.  We told him he's not old yet because Bob is still older :)  ( and so am I for that matter!).  He has 13-year-old twin sons.

Plastic body parts

Medical students memorizing parts of the body.

Often on our way in to our office in the morning, the medical school students are practicing their anatomy lesson with a "tub-o-body parts" that makes us chuckle.  It looks especially funny when a student is cradling a hand or leg in his own arms!

leaves (and yellow marigold flowers)
drying on racks for use in tea.

More tea leaf drying racks

Kitties eating...what else here but...rice!

Two weekends ago we thought one way to try to figure out this mysterious city bus system was to take one of the buses that gets us to downtown/the city center all the way to its terminus on the opposite end of its route.  It put us at a large intercity bus station.  We walked back to our apartment for a good morning of exercise and explored along the way.  Hui Hiang (Dr. Koh) came along since she lives in our apartment building and she enjoyed discovering 2 pagodas/Buddhist temples along the way.  Many tourists like to find the pagodas to look at and go inside.  These tea racks were at one of the temples, as were the kittens.  Kitties here are the skinniest we've even seen!  A woman who seemed to be cleaning one of the fountains at the temple was feeding these kitties that we saw come out from under a planter.

A cloudy but still beautiful sunset on the island.  And no
traffic noise!!

Now for our "exciting" weekend.  Thursday we left school a bit early to catch a flight on Vietnam Airlines to Phu Quoc Island, a nice weekend trip suggested by our Vietnamese colleague.  It's known for its beaches and is in the Gulf of Thailand off the coast of Cambodia.   The flight was very nice, only an hour on a big Airbus and no delays.  We arrived in time for a peaceful sunset.  After we watched the sun go down, we found a beachside bar/restaurant for dinner and sat for awhile after dinner chatting with 2 girls from the UK.  Thursday night Bob woke up with severe pain in his left elbow and we saw it was red and swollen.  It's always something, isn't it?!  It seemed to be a cellulitis, he thought maybe he had picked up some bacteria from the table that entered through a dry skin spot on his elbow.  So he started himself on some antibiotics and we lay low Friday but when he woke up with it worse on Saturday we thought we should explore the international hospital on the island.  Not in our original game plan!  The hotel staff was very kind in arranging for a ride for us (the hospital was 27 km away and a taxi would have been expensive) that waited while the doctor saw us.  The doctor spoke only Vietnamese but he had an English-speaking assistant that was very helpful. He ordered x-rays and ended up agreeing to the cellulitis diagnosis and gave stronger antibiotics as well as 2 anti-inflammatory meds and an enzyme to "speed up chemical reactions in the body" (according to Google--we don't use enzymes much in the US).  So Saturday was another day of medicating and sleeping and reading.  

Bob's arm at lunch on Saturday.  The line I had drawn
the day before to mark where the redness/swelling
had stopped, but it had spread!

Sunday morning he felt like his arm had improved so we ventured out on a motorbike to explore the island!  Renting a motorbike in Vietnam:  we were at breakfast and some guy there asked if we wanted to rent his bike.  We made the deal:  Less than $7 US for the whole day!  No required return time, no deposit to put down!  We did start with only 1/4 tank of gas so found a gas station as soon as we could.  Good thing Bob grew up on a farm and knows what old gas tanks from the 1930's in America looked like so he recognized the station.  It was fun to drive along the island not limited by traffic hemming us in on every side.  We found another beach, and had a Western-style lunch of big Australian beef burgers and french fries!!  I rarely order a burger in a restaurant but I did here!  And it tasted really, really wonderful.

Most people drink Vietnamese coffee iced
but I finally got the real thing (brewed
slowly over the mug) hot.  I ordered it with
milk and at first I thought they forgot, but
then saw the thick layer at the bottom.  Their
"milk" is like our sweetened condensed milk,
so thick and rich.  Delicious!  Even though I
never use sugar in my coffee at home.  Coffee
here is very strong as well, my favorite!
After brewing is finished, one stirs the milk up.

I would have thought "oh, they
are out of gas!"  Nope, the gas
needs to be pumped up into the
holding tank.  She asked us
how much we wanted, 1 liter?
Two?  We ended up with 2 liters at
a cost of about $1.00 US.

Now the gas has been pumped into
the holding tank, then she'll open
the valve to get it into the gas tank
under the motorbike seat.

Sometimes we had to wait for a cow to get off
the road!

We also stopped at a pepper farm, after wondering what plants we kept seeing tied up on a pole.  Thank goodness for Google!  We bought black and white peppercorns from the owner of this farm; she had a stand set up inside a building on her property.

Pepper trees

If you look closely, you'll see
little green peppercorns
in the leaves.

We decided to spring for one more "touristy" event Sunday evening in light of 2 days of inactivitiy.  We booked a sunset squid fishing/barbeque "cruise."  We left from the marina at 5:30 and after sunset began to fish for squid!  There were perhaps about 40 people on board and only 2 people caught a squid.  We used a hand reel and a lure and just hung it over board and were instructed to frequently "jerk" the line to hopefully catch the squid on the lure.  After about an hour or a little more of trying, we were told it was time for dinner and to find a seat.  Dinner was a rice porridge, roasted prawns (shrimp), and a stir-fried noodle dish with seafood in it (including cut-up squid).  I forgot to take a photo of the meal!

One of the two squid caught on
our fishing trip

Bob hoping for the lucky catch.

That catches you up with our latest goings-on.  Bob's arm this morning is MUCH better; he did go see a follow-up doctor back in Ho Chi Minh City yesterday afternoon as suggested. This doctor added one more med to help the swelling.   I think we just want to be all better in two days!!  Impatience.  But we also don't want to have our worst fears realized about some weird infection that won't go away.  It is another reminder of how much we take for granted when all is well with our bodies.

Thank you for following our blog and Happy Thanksgiving!  We are missing the family times especially with holiday reminders coming up (on facebook, etc.).  I have 2 afternoon lectures to give both Thursday and Friday since Thanksgiving is not a Vietnamese holiday of course.  But there are Christmas trees going up in some stores!  No, they don't celebrate Christmas but Hui Hiang (from Singapore) guesses that they just like the decorations.  I don't think we'll find any turkey (they don't seem to have that here--but they do have duck and geese and chickens) but maybe we'll spring for some western-type food over the weekend to feel a little of the old homey feeling.  Until next time!