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!