Let's get this started!

Valentine's Day dinner at Brix

Hello again at long last!  I decided to get my blog started back up after hearing so many kind comments that people enjoyed reading my observations and experiences.  Thank you for your support!  And this is a good way for me to record and reflect (and notice "funny" things here), so here goes!

We have been back in Ho Chi Minh City for 5 days now.  We took a long break over Christmas into January since we expected to be working more as consultants this year and not as intensively active teachers...oh well!  We contracted to leave Dec. 21 after first semester even though school continued through Jan. 25 before breaking for the Tet holiday.  It was WONDERFUL to be home and attend family Christmas parties and have Christmas with our kids.  But we did feel badly that our new colleague (Dr. Lori who joined the program from California in October, a couple of weeks before we came back) had some extra stress during first semester testing in January without us here.  She did have the five new teaching assistants to help but they are brand new at this teaching assistant job, being some of our first graduating class last November.  Our headmaster Mr. Long is still in the program, but we are still down 2 Vietnamese lecturers.

Our first week back we've had a couple of staff meetings to get organized for 2nd semester's schedules, and I have had 2 lectures in Applied Optics (2nd semester focuses on Progressive Add Lenses--imagine teaching 19-year-olds about the frustrations of losing near focus in one's vision!) and Bob has had a lecture in Contact Lenses and a session in the Academic Vision Clinic.  We've had a bit of a glitch in the policy at the AVC in that patients must now begin in the ophthalmology department before they can be seen by optometry, which is not at all the Western model we teach.  Optometry is primary care and is what we are training our students to do!  We have been working to change this new policy that was somehow instituted.

The Year of the Pig

We took a walk in our local park the day we got back (trying to reset that jet-lagged clock) and found a few decorations remaining from the lunar new year which fell on Feb. 5.  A lot of flowers are used in the beautiful displays, but many of the displays are being taken down this week.

This morning I walked to school and saw 4 workers holding ropes and looking up into a tree.  I stopped to see what was going on and saw tree trimming done the Vietnamese way!  I'm glad that's not my job.   

The ground crew.

The tree trimmer with safety ropes letting down a branch he'd cut, also held by ropes

Lastly, we just returned from dinner.  We'd walked past this Street Food Market several times before and finally tried it tonight.  It's a popular tourist spot near the Ben Thanh market.  We chose a noodle bowl place (actually you could get rice or noodles for "step 1" then "step 2" was choose a meat, then "step 3" was choose 3 vegetable toppings, and a sauce, then the cook stir-fried it all together and put it in a paper bucket!); we liked how "Sprite" was spelled :) on the soft drink option.

The soft drink combo of noodle bowl and "Splite" is $3.88 USD. $4.31 if you choose beer.

That's all for now; it's getting late and it's been a long week!  We had thought to explore a nearby beach this weekend but have just decided to stay home and do some advance schoolwork and rest and maybe explore locally instead.  Thanks for keeping up with us and have a happy weekend!