Third Day - Hanoi 11/4/2010 5:45 PM

Hannah

Can you believe that we have been here for three days already?! Time is flying by, so we better get our plans in. O.K. I will tell you what we did today. You probably are thinking, same old routine, eat, go to class etc. No! It is new stuff today! If you want to know what we did, go right on ahead and read on. I sure hope we always have breakfast, but today’s breakfast was exciting. The manager at our hotel told us to speak some Vietnamese to him, but we forgot, so he told us to to study last night, and if we do not say some stuff to him, we would not get any breakfast. Ahhh! I would starve if I didn’t get any breakfast! This morning I said my thing to the manager. LUCKILY! We ate this curious fruit called Dragon Fruit. It was very good.

      After breakfast we went with our teacher to the market. We saw all of the very curious fruits, vegetables, and other stuff. After a very long time of walking, we got a taxi to The Museum of Ethnology. The museum tells about the different ethnic groups in Vietnam. For your information, there are 54 different ethnic groups. Outside of the museum there are some recreations of some houses that people from those tribes live in. Some were long, one was enormously tall, and a lot of the houses had bamboo floors. They were very well created. After that we went to a restaurant near the museum. It was very neat because the waiters and waitresses were actually street kids. The owners take in street kids and train them to be educated and learn a lot of things that kids who can afford school learn Like yesterday we went to the classroom and studied spelling, pronunciation etc. we are now going to dinner. O.K. we just came back from dinner and we made it past 7:00 PM. Our dinner place was called, Madame Cafe Hien.Long name, Yummy food. But long wait for the bill. We had to wait around 45 minutes just to get the bill. Oh and dinner was not just mom, Sumner and I. we had dinner, or shared dinner with a lady we met at a pagoda, temple thing.Her name is Joy, she is Chinese :( But, she lives in America,California :) well it is 9:00 PM here, and the longest we have stayed up. Our jet-lag is going away, so that is good. Well I think I need to go to bed now, so, see you next time at Basher Academy!!!

Sumner

Today we had a Vietnamese test. At breakfast! Our manager had insisted on us saying some Vietnamese (look at the last post) at breakfast so we had to say some Vietnamese. We introduced ourselves and told him where we were from. What I said sounded something like this “Ten em la Sumner. Em la nyuk me-e gop viet.” What it means is “My name is Sumner. I am from America, originally from Vietnam.” Literally translated it is “Name kid is Sumner. Kid is person of country America originally Vietnamese.” Wow very bad grammar! This is why mom didn’t have very much trouble figuring out which reviews were fake when she was planning our trip!

At breakfast I had*  pho.* Pho is a rice noodle bowl dish with broth, noodles, meat, and some little greens. If you have ever gone to Pot of Pho in Littleton, you know how good it is. After we were finished we went to our rooms to get ready for class.

When Tan (our teacher) came we walked with him around the old quarter of Hanoi he pointed out different fruits and vegetables. Next we went to the Ethnology Museum. The Ethnology Museum is a museum where they have exhibits on many of the different ethnic minorities in Vietnam. It was very interesting seeing how diverse the different people groups are. I have always thought that if you are Vietnamese, you are Vietnamese but the is museum showed me that there are many different groups of people in Vietnam not just one. after we did the inside part of the museum we went to the outside part. In the outside part (in the outside, get it…I guess it really wasn’t a very good joke) there were life sized homes of many of the different ethnic minorities that you could go into. Many of the houses were on stilts so we had to climb stairs that in the United States would not be exhibited because of the danger of people suing them. Either that or they would be roped off and some other steps that had handrails! and on top of that you had to walk on bamboo that would have glass over it to protect people and to support their weight. I’m not saying this to say that they are not considerate of safety, I’m saying that it made the experience a lot more fun!

We were very hungry so we ate at the restaurant near the museum. I had pho with i think beef. The restaurant was very cool because the waiters were former street kids that were taken in and taught how to work at a restaurant.

After the meal we set out for class. At the class today we learned more about grammar and did some pages to work on pronunciation (we really need that!) After class we went back to the hotel. When we arrived at the hotel the staff said that we had a message from someone. It was from Miss Joy and we didn’t know who it was so we called the number and found out it was the woman we met at the pagoda the first day! She asked if we wanted to go have dinner so we went to the Cafe Hien. It was very nice to have someone else that we could do things with and it was nice for her because she is divorced and doesn’t have kids.

After dinner we went back to the hotel and are going to flop innnnnnnnnnnnnn what oh I think I fell asleep pressing the “N” key! I’d better get some sleep!