Da Lat, Vietnam

After a twenty hour trek from Cheorwon to Incheon airport, then Incheon to Shanghai, then Shanghai to Vietnam, I finally touched down in Ho Chi Minh city. I met a bearded Matt at the airport, who had spent the previous week traveling in and around Hanoi.

We spent my first day walking around Saigon, drinking beer in the parks, sampling Vietnamese foods and getting cheap yet amazing massages. This was my second visit to Ho Chi Minh City, and I liked it even better the second time around. After a long day, we caught a night bus to the city of Da Lat. We didn't have high expectations for the city because we barely knew anything about it. When we arrived in the middle of the night, it was a lot cooler in Da Lat than it had been in the sweltering city of Saigon.

Matt in Saigon

Baguettes

Lunch?

street cleaning

Da lat wound up being a little oasis of paradise in the mountains. It used to be called "the little Paris" because it has kept a lot of French influence in its cuisine and architecture. Because the climate there is so mild, they do a lot of farming of vegetables, fruits and flowers.. which is rare for Vietnam, where they usually farm rice. We saw green luscious farms and trees of almost every fruit or vegetable you could think of.. Mangoes, papayas, durian, jack fruit, bananas, strawberries, onions, lettuce, potatoes, coconuts, moon berries, peppers, etc etc. There were veggies I hadn't even hard of before. We spent our first afternoon walking around the city. It was a really cool time to be there because they were getting ready for both the Dalat Hoa (flower) festival and Tet (lunar new year). The city was bustling with people selling exotic flowers, orange trees (that thy put in their house like Christmas trees for Tet), and dragon shaped plants for year of the dragon.

Exotic flowers

so much fresh, cheap produce!

Tet (lunar new year) trees

Tet trees shaped like dragons

We spent our next day in Dalat riding on the backs of motorcycles in the highlands around the city. Our tour guides were a couple of really cool older guys that were part of a tour-guide motorcycle gang called "the easier riders." The man driving me, who went by Rooney, was about 70 years old, had about 3 teeth, and he was a firecracker. He loved America and liked reciting "facts" he knew, such as "Barack Obama is from Kenya.". We found out after talking to him more that he had fought with the Americans during the Vietnam war and had been sent to Georgia to train. He had fought in Dalat and had a lot of interesting information about the area. He fought through the Tet offensive (the night that the communists attacked during a new year's cease fire) and ran missions through valleys that he pointed out to us. He had a lot of really cool stories.

The guys

A valley (which until fairly recently, was filled with mines) where our tour guide had fought during the Vietnam war.

During our tour, we stopped at a lot of look out points and pagodas. My favorite stops were when we went to see the way local people and businesses produce their products. The people of Dalat seem to do very well for themselves and are very thrifty.  Because they are one of the only places in Nam that grows fruits and vegetables, they take their products to Saigon or to the Mekong Delta to sell them at high prices or exchange them for rice.  We saw flower farms, saw how they made coffee, rice wine, weasel coffee, black pepper, silk, tools, and brooms. Something I noticed was that the working conditions were not very bad.  Especially with "slave coffee" being such a big issue in other parts of the world, it was comforting to see the coffee there was grown fairly.  Of course, there could be terrible labor conditions in Vietnam, but of course they would never show us or tell us about it on a tour.. so these were just my observations about the factories we went to.  The silk factory was interesting.. They had baskets full of silk worms inside their cocoons and we saw the boilers and machinery in action that they use to thread the silk.  As a coffee addict, the coffee-making process was really interesting to me.  They had fresh, local coffee in Dalat that grew on trees right along the road. 

flower farm

lush farms

coffee bean extraction

spooling silk from the cocoons onto a wheel

spooling silk

It was really interesting seeing the way the local people live and work. The seem to have good lives in Da lat. What i like the most is how resourceful and not wasteful the businesses are. They use every scrap of material for something. Once they extract the coffee beans from the shells, they use the shells as fire. They use every bit of material in the silk house. They use the silk for material (obviously) then they sell the silk worms for eating, and they dry the garbage silk to sell for pillow and blanket stuffing.  In restaurants, they scrape uneaten food off of plates to feed to the pigs the next morning.  They make brooms from tree branches on the side of the road.  They are extremely resourceful in their manufacturing, which was really interesting to see.

Hwacheon Mountain Trout and Ice Festival

For the past week and a half, I have become not only an English teacher, but a science teacher as well.  While teaching a 2-hour per day science class seemed daunting at first, my former doctor-wannabe nerd self came out and stepped up to the plate.  Each day, I started out with a kid-friendly powerpoint that no one paid attention to, especially the kindergarteners that don't know how to read.  Then we got to the fun part of doing experiments.  I wracked my brain for the fun experiments that I did in elementary school, then used the internet to fill in the gaps.  We did all the fun stuff.  We started out with a mini-unit on lemons and acid, so we made invisible ink with lemon juice on day one.. the experiment didn't actually work too well (it didn't work at all) so that was kind of a crappy way to get everyone's interest.. but fortunately, it was all uphill from there. On day two, we made "fizzy lemonade" from scratch.  The rest of the week, we made volcanoes, pizza dough (yeast lesson), ice cream, oceans-in-bottles, etc.

Drinking their homemade fizzy lemonades

Making volcanoes

DongHak and his volcano

Shaking the bags to make ice cream

On Thursday, we had a big field trip.  We piled the kids into 2 cars and headed to the Hwacheon Mountain Trout and Ice Festival.   The festival was on a frozen river that was divided up for different activities.   We started out the day by going through the ice tunnel (that changed colors because there was Christmas lights inside).  Inside a small room with paper mache trout in the ceiling, we wrote hope letters and hung them on the trees. 

Color changing ice tunnel

Writing hope letters.. notice the paper mache trouts

Hope letters

My hope letter

 Once we got inside the ice festival, it was a winter wonderland.  They built an ice castle and a huge penguin out of ice.. they had an ice slide, bob sledding, ice skating, ATVing on ice, sitting on the back of an army vehicle and doing donuts on ice, etc.  You name it, and they were doing it on ice.  

Ice Castle

Frozen river

Pororo made of snow

Ice slide

ATVing on ice

ice skating

The kids were too scared to go bobsledding, so my class decided to go ice skating.  I hadn't been ice skating in ages, and have never been ice skating on an actual outdoor body of water.  I've always wanted to after hearing stories about the "good old days" of ice skating on frozen ponds from my parents, so that was cool.  The kids were really funny to watch because they were just falling all over each other.   I couldn't stop laughing at some of them who just couldn't grasp the concept that you're supposed to skate, not run on the ice.

eating hot lunch

After a hot (pretty awful) lunch of uncooked dumplings, we moved on to the main event: ice fishing.  I had never been ice fishing, and never really expected to go during my life.  I think regular fishing is boring, and that's when it's summer and the sun's out and you can drink beers on a lake.  So ice fishing really stood no chance.. it was the boring fishing aspect but ON the ice, minus the summer, sun, and beer.  It was about zero degrees.  The kids were really excited about it but lost interest after about 20 minutes.  There were hundreds of people fishing and obviously not an a correct ratio of fish.  People may have caught fish in the beginning of the festival, but by the time we got there, no one was catching anything.  You couldn't even see trout in the river.

On our way into the fishing arena

Excuse me, your face is in the ice

My girls

Donghak

So many people, so little fish

Yoonjoo digging a new hole

We went home empty handed but everyone was in pretty good spirits.  I got a bit grumpy from my lack of lunch and nauseous because my students were eating silk worms and fish in the car...  Whenever I smell silk worms, I honestly feel sick to my stomach.  I really try to be culturally sensitive most of the time, but I draw the line here...

See what I mean? The smell is even worse.

The ride home from Hwacheon is through the mountains and is unbelievably curvy.  If there's any snow or ice on the road at all, you can't make it.  Lucky for us, on the way home it started snowing.  And then it got dark.  We were doing fine and JiYoung, my co-teacher, was being a real good sport about it all.  She only got her license a year ago and she borrowed her husband's car for the trip.  All of a sudden, literally out of no where, one of the students vomited ALL OVER the back seat and all over herself.  So... that was that.

So my first field trip as a teacher had all the essentials: bad food, too many activities, babysitting, and vomit.  Not too bad.  But I'm so ready for a vacation.

Which is why it's great that today was my last day! Time has flown by.  I've been such a brat these past 6 months.. i've worked less than I've been employed.  Oh well! Hello Southeast Asia!

The Hills are Alive.....

For the past month or so, I've been working an institute ("hagwon") in Dong Song.  Basically, when the kids are done with their actual school, they come to "hagwons" to learn more.. (because god forbid they go outside and play).  At my hagwon in Seoul, I felt guilty about working there because I knew the kids resented it's entire existence.. I really felt bad that they had to come to me for an hour and a half after they spent a full day at school.   But in Cheorwon, it's a lot different.  Because it's a rural area, things are laid back in general.  Parents are much less intense, and this hagwon is a lot of fun.  It was brand new when I showed up, so I've gotten a lot of freedom do teach what I like.

Since the kids are officially on winter vacation (which lasts from mid-December until March), my boss decided to run an English camp the week between Christmas and New Years.  She used to be a producer, so she decided to make it a Musical Theater camp.  I thought this was a great idea, and I agreed to run the camp.  I figured she would do most of the dancing/singing teaching, and I'd take care of the English stuff.  Well, I was wrong.

I found out a few days before the camp that we would be doing the sound of music.... and I would be playing Maria.  Just because I'm blonde, I can sing.. right?  Actually, I'm tone deaf, I haven't taken dance lessons since I was in kindergarten, and I've never seen the Sound of Music.  And the icing on the cake... we had five days to learn three different scenes, complete with songs and dances.

After a stressful week and learning to dance and then teaching it, our show was a success!  I was really nervous that the kids weren't going to remember their lines/dance moves but everyone really pulled together and did a great job.  I sounded bad, but no one was covering their ears. Phew!  We sang Do Re Mi, My favorite things, and Edelweiss.  The families of all the kids came, and Matt was nice enough to come cheer me on (it also gave him something else to make fun of me for!)

Here are some photos from the show that Matt took.  No laughing!

Do Re Mi

My favorite things

Finale

The cast