Monday: Day 1

Today (Monday) is our first official day in Vietnam. We got up nice and early today and had breakfast at the hotel. The breakfasts are absolutely amazing! They have a huge buffet of food, and it's all traditional Vietnamese food. The only semi-American looking food they have is a big plate of bacon. They have noodles and dumplings and big dishes of fruit. They even have a whole pho station for breakfast. They also have coffee, which is amazing. You put condensed milk in it, and it's the best thing you'll ever drink. After eating, we met up in the lobby, where we all got red polos with the logo of our partner school, UEF (University of Economics and Finance), to wear. At the school, the students and faculty had a huge welcome planned. We all got flower wreaths as we got off the bus (like you would expect in Hawaii), and they took us to the top floor of the school for the welcome ceremony. A student group put on a couple different traditional dance performances; there were speeches from representatives of their school, our school, and the Ministry of Education; and they played a short video of highlights from the past years of the program. We also met the Vietnamese students for the first time. They're all very friendly. I can't even count the number of pictures they took with us. We'll be spending a lot of time with the students: they sit through our classes with us, and some of them will take us out at night and show us around. A lot of them already wanted to friend us on Facebook. They all seem really excited for us to be there, almost as excited as we are.

After the ceremony, we went down a couple floors to a classroom where we had our first Vietnamese language class. We sat at tables with the Vietnamese students, and they helped us throughout the class. It was the first day, so we started with the basics: learning how to pronounce the Vietnamese alphabet, learning the accents and tones, and learning to to say "hello" and "my name is . . .". It was actually a lot of fun. The tones are hard because we don't have anything like them in English, but it isn't too bad once you learn. After class, we went to lunch at a different school. It was a whole family-style spread, with big bowls of rice, chicken, beef, and pork, vegetable soup, and salad. It was incredible. From what I've seen so far, all the food here is amazing. After lunch, we had roughly an hour and a half to hang out before our next appointment. The girls went off to get measured for traditional Vietnamese dresses, and the guys had to hang out and amuse ourselves. 

After that, we went to HUTech (Ho Chi Minh University of Technology), which is under the same umbrella of private universities as UEF, but it actually has technology programs like engineering. We watched a short video about the school, and then we split into a business and engineering group and they talked to us about their programs in our fields. The guy that talked to us was really cool. He was a 45 year old Vietnamese man who had studied in Moscow and taught in the US, and spent most of the time talking to us about how we should gain experiences and always be learning and broaden our perspectives. He also talked about the engineering program, which was cool, but mostly he just gave us interesting life advise. We all loved it.

After HUTech, we went back to the hotel for an hour, and then walked to dinner. We went to this really nice restaurant that had basically taken a bunch of street vendors and put them under one roof, so they had really authentic and great street food but with higher standards for cleanliness. We were able to walk around and watch the cooks making the food, and then we ate. They had crab and quail egg soup, shrimp and vegetable spring rolls, giant prawns, fried spring rolls with crab and pork, beef and vegetables on rice cakes, crab noodles, and even more. For dessert, we had this coconut drink that had a bunch of stuff in it, sort of like bubble tea. It was really similar to Thai desserts that I've had before. At this point, we were all exhausted, and we barely made it back to the hotel before passing out for the night.

It's only been one day so far, but I can tell that our trip is going to be amazing. Everything we've seen, heard, eaten, and experienced has been nothing like I've ever dealt with before, and I'm absolutely loving it. Based on the first day, I can already tell that I made a great decision coming to this country.