Shots Day!

One month from tomorrow is the day we leave for Vietnam!  Summer always seems to fly by; more so with our big adventure looming.  What have we been up to since my last post?  Lots of busy work seeing to details:  getting bills set up to be paid electronically (and to receive them that way), reading blogs about Vietnam, making sure our mail is dealt with for 10 months, making sure our continuing education is set for when our licenses need to be renewed while we're gone, emailing past and present workers at the university where we will soon be located, figuring out and choosing global health insurance, registering for absentee ballots, cleaning up old emails and unsubscribing to the dozens and dozens of junk emails I don't sign up for (!), things like that!  Also living life and working on our "farm" near our new house:  the big garden and fruit trees and grapes planted this spring.

Today's big event was receiving our travel vaccinations!  They were done at the "Infectious Disease Clinic."  (ewww)  It actually wasn't a bad experience and my arm is only a little sore.  The typhoid is oral and so far, so good; the pill went down about 10 minutes ago.  I'm off to bed soon!  I had to try to add a picture so here it is, for a little visual interest (ha).  I won't admit to how many tries it took.  Since it did take more time than I thought (I'm still new at this blogging thing) I am signing off and not adding any more tonight.  Till the next interesting thing!

Feel free to comment any time on my posts so I know someone is reading them!  :)  Good night all.  Or in Vietnamese (without the accent marks my keyboard doesn't have):  Chuc ngu ngon!


Hepatitis A, Hepatitis B, and Typhoid.  We hope we don't
get Japanese Encephalitis...shots for that would be over
$500 and we shouldn't need them in the city.  If we travel
rurally our nurse-practitioner said we can probably get the
shot at our local clinic in Vietnam.

To-do list: Create Blog: check!

My first blog post!  2 weeks ago we signed the contracts to teach/assist with program development in Vietnam!  Our contract begins October 15 but our flight leaves October 1.  Only 8 weeks!  I am making lists and checking them more than twice.  I did want to get the blog begun, and so now I can cross that off my list!  I can be technology-challenged :) so it's a big thing to me that I have it started.

Bob and I have been teaching in the optometry clinic once a week at Ferris State University since January so we've had some experience in academia.  We have really enjoyed working with students and overseeing their clinical experience.  Tomorrow is our last day of the summer session of clinic, then we can totally concentrate on what needs to be done in the next 8 weeks.  We are both working on learning some Vietnamese words (NOT an easy language to learn!), although the students at UPNT (the abbreviation for Pham Ngoc Thach University of Medicine--just don't ask me how to pronounce that) must speak English to attend.  I'm quite sure it won't be the type of English I hear and speak everyday in Michigan.

I keep a journal already and can find myself being tedious sometimes in my writing so my goal for this is not to be tedious!  I hope to share "amazing" moments and things I learn with living in a very different culture.  One of our big eye-opening travels was in 2011 when we took a trip to Morocco.  It made me realize how much we take American comforts for granted.  It was a good trip and I think it made me less of a complainer.  Not that I think I complain much, but you know that internal voice sometimes that whines about how inconvenient life can be?!!  My internal voice has become more positive and upbeat.

I write this at 4:20 pm on Sunday in Charlevoix and the temperature is 73 degrees; a perfect summer day!  My smartphone icon that I have set to Ho Chi Minh City (historically named Saigon) says it is 78 degrees there, and it is 3:20 am on Monday morning there:  11 hours ahead.  Just a fun fact for future reference...(We had a few conference Skype calls while setting up our adventure and we usually scheduled them for 10 pm our time to accommodate the callers in Sydney and Hanoi who were in on the call!)

Time to tick off another thing on  my to-do list; much of my list is organizing things to be gone for 10 months!  Till the next interesting event...