Day Eight: Monday

On Monday we woke up and went to UEF for the culture and language classes. This culture class was about the history of the Vietnamese people, and history has never been a subject I've never been really good at. I found it interesting, because I was spending time in the country and was interested in its past, but the lesson did seem to drag on for a while. After that we had a language class, and I have to admit I wasn't picking it up very quickly. The Vietnamese students help though, so it's not horrible. Im starting to be able to remember sentences, but whenever I get a paper to read I end up even more confused since the letters are all pronounced differently.

For the afternoon, we went to the University of Agriculture and Forestry for lectures on catfish farming. This university was much more of a campus than UEF, but I saw a lot less students around as well. We had three separate presentations from faculty members, but with all the overlap I felt like it all could have been one presentation. The information was interesting, but I didn't know much about fish farming so it was kind of lost on me. We had read about the Catfish Wars as a case study, but I was really interested in hearing all of the work they put into perfecting the catfish production and really getting the best profit margin. After the presentations we went to see some of their research facilities, but there wasn't much research going on so it wasn't as interesting to see. The university was pretty far from the hotel, and a lot of us were dehydrated for some reason, so we stopped for waters on the way back. Some of the guys got cookies and other snacks, so it was a nice bus ride home.

For dinner, Elizabeth, Rayna and I went to Pizza Hut. I was shocked to see that it was a sit down restaurant that even had escargot on the menu! It was very different than the Pizza Hut's in America. I think I was starting to realize that American food chains had really adapted to the Vietnamese culture of socializing during meals, and that "take-out" didn't really exist in the country.