Flowers, flowers--Ah, the beautiful Flowers.......

The Vietnamese are wonderful at making you feel welcome. Flowers are given for many different occasions. In fact I have three beautiful bouquets of flowers in my room. The photo above shows flowers that were in my room when I arrived last Thursday night as a "Welcome" to Vietnam and to your hostel room. They are absolutely gorgeous!



The Geography Department held an opening student gathering several nights ago for all students majoring in geography. I estimate that there were at least 200 kids packed into the very hot (no AC) room that evening. Many faculty were there and they had a big sound system set up and lots of decorations for this special event. I arrived late (more on that later) and was ushered "front and center" of the room. The MC introduced me and I said "hello" in Vietnamese and was presented with these flowers.....and the event began!

It was a major talent show where various groups of students sang and danced. Many of the students are from areas of Vietnam with large minority populations and they wore their native dress and danced or sang songs common to their area of the country. It was interesting that one group steered away from the traditional song and dance routines and did a very clever skit on climate change. Nice to see how much this message is being broadcast throughout the world. The last group to perform came up on stage with CANDLES.....and proceeded to walk behind the curtains where they lit them and then walked from BEHIND this very flammable curtain to center stage. I had visions of the whole place going up in flames....and of course, I was sitting in the front row with 200 kids between me and the only doors to the room. The Chairman of the department was sitting next to me and he literally LAUNCHED out of his seat and ran onto the stage and pulled back the curtains to keep us all from becoming toast. The Fire Gods were not out that night and fortunately for all of us---nothing caught on fire.

I mentioned earlier that I was late for this event. Well, basically I didn't know it was happening! I had met my old volleyball pals at 5pm for the daily "old peoples" volleyball game. It was absolutely wonderful to see these friends again. We finished about 6:15pm and I wandered back to my room and cooled down a bit before dinner. I was hot.....I was sweaty.....my Tshirt, capris...basically everything was soaked because of the heat and humidity. Since I was pretty tired...jetlag is still haunting me....I decided to eat in the student cafeteria downstairs. I got my food and settled in to eat and study my Vietnamese vocabulary words. Suddenly one of my students rushed in telling me that they had this "big event" at 7:30pm....it was 7:20pm when he showed up. So I left my food.....and ran upstairs to my room and put on some better looking clothes. The interesting this is that this exact thing happened two years ago. At first I was somewhat miffed that I wasn't told about the event. But then I laughed and said to myself "Welcome to Vietnam, Gail". It is just part of the experience and my lack of Vietnamese language skills probably plays a major role in these types of mis-communication!



I taught my first class yesterday......and when it ended I received a huge round of applause and was presented with this (my third) beautiful bouquet of flowers!!! Nice............. I will comment more about my teaching experiences, but at this point all I can say is that it is really "energizing" to receive flowers AND applause after teaching the first class of the semester. It was a very thoughtful and wonderful way to begin my "work" in Vietnam.