End of Week 1

Hey all-

Now that I have a week under my belt, I have a better handle on my routine for the next three weeks or so will be. This week, we (the 14 ETAs) have orientation every day from 8-4:30. We start with a 2 hour lecture on Vietnamese culture and history and then have approximately 6 hours of Vietnamese lessons.

Our classroom for Vietnamese lessons

Vietnamese lessons are HARD. Spanish doesn't hold a candle to it. Vietnamese has 12 vowels and 6 tones, so any given word can mean 6 different things. (La with a down tone means "is" and with an up tone means "leaf." Not even counting the words that mean two different things, like the word for country and/or water and/or liquid). If you can imagine, the letter "A" has 18 different permutations. 

We've progressed from practicing vowels, to consonants, to dipthongs (like ong or an or ut) and now can read almost any word* (We can read it, but most of us struggle, me especially, with the question mark tone). I'm pretty good at flat tone, up tone, down tone, tilde tone, heavy tone, but question mark tone really gets me. (Its like an up and down at once).

 We have really good teachers and the class is really supportive, but man- it is really frustrating to practice saying ba over and over again. I've been working on increasing my vocabulary (mostly through asking one of the 4 Vietnamese speaking ETAs). My highlight today was telling our cab driver where to go, and asking him his name and telling him mine.

Yeah. Vietnamese has 6 tones. The question mark tone is really hard.

(Before you think I'm too good, yesterday I told our taxi driver to go to our hotel on Hang Ga, and he took us to Hang Gai! Luckily it only added 4,000VND to our bill, or $0.20)

My end goal for Vietnamese is to be able to get directions around a city, ask people about their day, ask people the appropriate questions to figure out their title, and handle myself in a restaurant. (Also, it'd be cool to surprise Vietnamese people in restaurants back home, too). Hopefully I'll surpass that, but we will see!

After Vietnamese lessons, we head back to the hotel and go out to dinner. It is a little bit more involved than in the States, because, while there are "restaurants" every where, we need somewhere big enough for 4-5 Americans that is also safe-ish to eat. If we split off into 3s, 4s and 5s, it usually takes about  1:30- 2 hours to find an interesting, new, safe place to eat, eat and then come back.

Not quite big enough

After that, we come back to the hotel and do a "spotlight" where one ETA sort of tells their life story and takes questions and receives affirmations- sort of similar to a life map for you RAs out there.

The next month seems pretty straight forward- I'm heading to Ninh Binh in about an hour for the weekend (google search it and look at the images. Trust me) I have language classes all next week, then we go to Mai Cau for a team building retreat. The last two weeks are centered on teaching, with a homestay during the weekend. Then, I ship out to Lao Cai!

I'm hoping to post a more thoughtful, less news-y blog post at some point this weekend, but I just wanted to let y'all know what I'm doing day to day. This is what I'm doing, not what I'm feeling, but hey.

Onward. Always Onward.

Daniel

On Thursday, Erik, Diane, Josh, and I saw the water puppet theatre

On Sunday I went exploring and found the Temple of Literature