Hello to family and friends! March is plodding along and I thought it's a good time for an update before I get too many photos to share. Sometimes it seems not much happens but then I load in my latest camera "dump" and I see that life has been happening after all!
The above photo was sent to me by a student (thus the caption!); Bob held a "pig eye" lab for the students to practice removing foreign bodies from a pig's cornea. The foreign body used was a sprinkling of glitter, little metallic flakes to simulate a piece of metal a person might get in his eye from grinding, etc. Every student (ourselves included, way back when) initially has the fear "what if I poke into someone's eye by mistake?!" but using the pig eyes showed the students how hard it is to cause lasting damage to an eyeball.
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| Eye being held in place as stable as possible |
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Our students Hai, Hieu, and Man at this station
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We had two celebrations the week of March 6! Our colleague Ngan was married March 6 to Trong, an local young ophthalmologist. It was fun to see another wedding here. The first one we went to we didn't know the bride and groom personally, and this time we did which was nice!
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Ngan is Catholic so we were invited to the church ceremony, held at 3:30 Monday afternoon.
The church was near our neighborhood: St. Joan of Arc is the translation. |
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| Inside the church. The neon trim was pretty! Ceremony done in Vietnamese of course. |
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| At the reception hall, a strolling violinist ushered in the bride and groom. |
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Introducing the bride and groom, Trong & Ngan. First names are written last here; and you notice dates
are different than USA dates too! Day first, month second, then year. |
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They cut the cake, but I missed the photo. The cake is not eaten at the reception; we decided cake-cutting
must be a Western tradition adopted here. |
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| I asked Ngan about this too and she wasn't sure where this tradition comes from or what it means! Bride and groom pour champagne into the tower of glasses (dry ice causes the "smoke") but no one drinks the champagne! |
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| Once the rituals on stage were finished, an army of servers marched in bearing food! |
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| The menu. 4 appetizers, a soup, 3 main dishes, a dessert, and drink choices. |
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| The appetizers. The first course (front) was "banh mi baguette mini magarita" which you maybe can translate yourself, a margherita-type pizza on a baguette slice! Mmm! Also a fried seafood spring roll, a piece of fried fish (hiding under roll), and a little shrimp salad concoction. |
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| Instead of wedding cake, this is dessert. "Che" is a sweet dessert soup very common in Vietnam. The green cubes are green tea gelatin (kind of) and the white are lychees and it's in a sugar syrup. |
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| Oops, it's out of order but here is what our table setting looked like when we arrived. The centerpiece was cleared before the food came to have a place to put the common dishes. A server dished out individual servings to those of us seated at the table. |
Two days later came a birthday celebration at school! Hui Hiang and Phuong have birthdays only a week apart so we celebrated in our office with a cake as well as lunch ordered in by our secretary. (from Texas Chicken, a chain nearby! Really! Some nice healthy fried chicken and french fries and biscuits, haha!)
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| Hui Hiang and Phuong. I'll let you figure out the birthday numbers so I don't tell any secrets. :) |
Life in General section: sometimes Hui Hiang and I walk home from school (25 minutes if we walk briskly) and one day when we did we found a girls' boxing match going on at our nearby sports arena. We sat and watched a while and she loves selfies so took a selfie of us!
Last picture: a busy street scene outside our apartment. I'm still amazed every day at the busy roads and "crazy" driving (which Bob has really learned to navigate and blend in with) and the fact that there aren't more fender benders happening.
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| Lots and lots of motorbikes, plenty of cars, and buses sometimes to take up more room! |
Well, that's about all the excitement in photos so far. Jobs are going OK; we love the students! We still haven't seen any patients in the Academic Vision Center associated with the new Family Medical Clinic whose grand opening we celebrated a month ago. Hopefully in April!
We have booked our return tickets so we have a coming-home date, June 23! We both miss home a lot after 6 months away, but I try not to dwell on it too much so I won't be sad about it. We have both found some extracurricular activities: I joined a storytelling workshop which has been really fun, one evening a week. I believe everyone has a story to share and by sharing our stories we can understand each other better and be a better community. I've met some really nice people and have learned some storytelling techniques. Next Tuesday I am telling a story onstage! Yikes... Bob has found a "futsal" league another night of the week, it's basically 5-on-5 soccer and they play from 8:30-10 pm or so when it's a little (maybe?) cooler outdoors! He enjoys the exercise and the cameraderie.
This weekend we are getting in another travel experience in Asia, we are headed to Bangkok for 3 days. We hope to meet up with a mother and daughter we met when we visited Da Lat, Vietnam back in January. They offered to show us around if we could get to their city and we could! So next blog will have some Bangkok photos to share.
Thanks again for following our adventures; we appreciate the feedback and notes and emails and messages we get from our far-flung friends and family! Until next time!!
