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I "passed" the class and received a certificate! Haha.
Yes, everyone passes. |
Hello to all interested parties! It has been a LONG time since my last blog; it has been a busy month. Did you realize it's May in 4 days?!
I'm not in chronological order but thought I'd start out with some fun photos. A couple of Saturdays ago I ticked another thing off my "Vietnam to-do" list and took a cooking class a with my colleague and friend Hui Hiang and another expat woman from Arizona that I met. It was a really fun class and I recommend taking a cooking class if you ever have time as a tourist! We had 14 in the class and met a lot of fun talkative people. Now I can for sure cook some Vietnamese dishes...with flair!
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One of my favorite dishes in Vietnam, fresh spring rolls.
Real name: goi cuon. I learned to make the carrot
flowers, too! |
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| Bahn xeo, or "sizzling pancake." |
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Pho ga, or chicken pho. Traditional pho in Vietnam is "pho bo" made with
beef but the broth takes hours to make so chicken pho is faster for a morning
cooking class after a market visit. |
We did get to Bangkok the last weekend in March, but I already posted most those photos (especially the weird food photos!) in my facebook feed. Here's just a few more interesting ones. Our last day there we did a bicycle tour, another thing I highly recommend if you have time in a new city! Our guide was great and taught us things about Bangkok culture, including how to address a man or woman properly. We had only one other rider on our tour, a man from Japan who was a lot of fun. Bangok has LOTS of temples (we also did a temple tour and visited 3 temples with a guide who again, taught us about the history and culture) and markets similar to Vietnam. I think Bangkok would have been more "different" to us if we didn't visit there after living in Vietnam. Traffic was MUCH worse because they use cars more than motorbikes and cars are slower and more cumbersome! Frequent gridlock in that big city. We were glad to have help from our Thai friends in learning to navigate public transportation. It was SO HOT there (yes, worse than Ho Chi Minh City!), too hot to walk.
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Our bicycle tour operator. The guide was a Dutch guy who has
lived in Bangkok for 30 years. |
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Cycling through a market (I think it was under an overpass so it's not indoors
as it looks to be) |
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| Bangkok had bright pink taxis!!! |
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One temple sign. Asian languages don't always translate well into English.
You can be rich like money! |
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I had posted our eating of tentacles but not the big fish Bob chose. Grilled with salt on the skin.
It was delicious! Served with not one, but two little bowls of chili. (we didn't need any bowls of chili!)
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One of two full tables of food
at the potluck. |
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Close up of the fish
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The weekend after we were in Bangkok, we attended a POTLUCK!! And I thought that was such an American thing to do. I heard about it on a facebook group I'm in, "Foodies in Saigon." It's my way to learn about food terms here and where to eat! The potluck was fun to meet people from all over and try international dishes. It makes me want to start a "Foodies in Charlevoix" group when I get back home!
We had a nice treat when our son Alex could fit into his schedule an 8-day visit over here. He's waiting to begin his medical residency in psychiatry in June. He handled the jet lag pretty well but does NOT enjoy this Saigon heat. We showed him areas of our big city and tried some new foods and ate in air conditioning as much as we could.
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We had to show him the "wet market" in our neighborhood, kind
of an outdoor market that is mostly covered. Busiest in mornings. |
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| Fresh meat!! |
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There are always cats at the market. This one was creepy and wouldn't stop staring at me!
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We had a nice Easter (2 hour service at our church!) followed by a buffet lunch--this past Sunday the Singaporean pastor made me laugh when he said "of course we can't fellowship without food!" and then he added "We know that God is somewhat Asian because the Bible says there is a heavenly banquet!" People are the same everywhere--we all like food! Easter evening we had a nice outing at one of Bob's futsal (soccer) buddy's place, he hosted a homemade pizza party. He had a great pizza oven to cook the pizzas in and NO A/C in his place, whew, it was hot. But the company was delightful; again, people from all parts of the globe. Well, not Alaska or Antartica. But a couple of people were from Finland!
Not only has Bob been playing on his soccer team, he actually found out about a place to play HOCKEY!! There is a full-time rink in a district quite a ways from us, but he inquired about it and played last week on a half-sheet of ice in a mall. The hockey is sponsored by the Canadian chamber of commerce here in HCMC, and when we arrived there were children still on the rink from their skating time. I bet that's fun for Vietnamese kids to learn to skate, and to be on ice!
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| A scene I haven't seen in months! |
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| A happy hockey player...although now he wishes he had his own skates from home. |
As regards school (we don't just have fun here), we are doing lots of "teachery" stuff lately like reviewing and making policies for retesting (if a student fails an exam), reviewing curriculum and the order in which classes are taught, and discussing things like getting a "job code" made up for optometry in Vietnam since it's a new profession here. Salaries are based on the job code and optometry doesn't fit into the nursing code or the technician code. We had an all-day meeting this week about things like that, and 2 representatives from Brien Holden Vision Institute attended as well as university personnel and the optometry staff. Regarding our classes, my Applied Optics unit has finished and I'm beginning to teach Environmental and Occupational Optometry and Bob is finishing up his Contact Lens course and beginning Practice Management. Next week we both are presenting at a medical conference hosted by the university (requested since we are "foreign" lecturers); my topic is Nutrition and the Eye and Bob's is Optometric Care of the Diabetic Patient.
We have a 4-day weekend coming up since May 1 is a national holiday (Reunification Day) and May 2 is also (National Labor Day)! So we are headed off tomorrow to see another part of Vietnam, Danang and Hoi An, cities near each other, 530 miles north of HCMC, a plane ride of 1 hour 20 minutes. Next blog will be sooner than one month and I'll let you know what's cool about our new explorations!
Thanks again for keeping up with us and for comments; they really make our day especially when we feel homesick and disconnected from home. 8 weeks from Friday and we come home!
