Day One: Monday

The trip to Vietnam was my first flight overseas so I was no where near prepared to be that bored for such a long time. When we finally got to the hotel on Sunday night, the last thing I wanted to do was sleep, but knew I had to because Monday morning was when all our trips were going to start bright and early.

On Monday we woke up and went to the hotel's buffet breakfast. I had heard that the food was different from last years students, but really had no idea what to expect. There was a lot of rice, which didn't surprise me tooo much. I'm not very adventurous, so i stuck to mainly toast & fruit, but hopefully by the end of the trip I'll have tried more. After breakfast we went to the University of Economics and Finance for an opening reception. The 45 minute bus ride there was the first time we got to see the city in daylight. The traffic patterns are crazy, people ride motorbikes more than do they use cars, and everyone is weaving in and out of each other constantly. Even in the van, I was afraid we were going to hit someone, or be hit. It was also really interesting to look at all the storefronts on the street, the sidewalks seemed to be almost impassable because everyone was sitting in chairs in front of the stores.

Once we got to the University we were greeted with a banner hanging outside the school. After walking up 7 flights of stairs, we got to a classroom full of the Vietnamese students, and everyone was so excited to see us! We all sat next to students from UEF and heard speaches given by professors from both programs, and they gave us all gifts of shirts that say "UP-UEF" and mimic the ones worn by the UEF students. One of the girls sang the song "Rockstar" by Hannah Montana, which was really fun. It took us all a minute or two to figure out where we knew the song from, but I found it really interesting that they had Hannah Montana in Vietnam! I really had no idea what to expect, but I didn't think they would be that modern in their music. I think my favorite part of the morning was when we all sang "Heal the World" together. The song choice said a lot about their attitude towards the future. Knowing that the country had been through a devastating war recently, I didn't expect them to be so optimistic. The whole first meeting with them left me very excited to get to know the students and their culture.

For the rest of the morning we had a language class. Thankfully, the Vietnamese students were there to help me or I would have been so confused. It's a tonal language, so theres a lot more than a new alphabet to learn, and they pronounce some letters totally different, so it's very hard to follow along reading what she says. It was hard to pay attention though, the Vietnamese were really excited to get to know us and kept asking us questions during the lesson.

We had lunch in the Can Tin, which is their dining hall. It was rice, soup, shrimp, and surprisingly, french fries. The meal was served family style, and we all got our own bowl and chopsticks to put food into. It was different, but a nice introduction to Vietnamese food.

During the afternoon we had a tour of the city and went to the US Consulate. During the tour we saw stopped outside of the reunification palace, and then went to one of the local markets. We were all in business casual attire, so it was really hot. It was interesting to me that we couldn't walk by a stand with out the shop owner asking was what we wanted to buy or telling us to look at something, even when I go shopping in NYC on one of the streets where you can bargain or a flee market, you can feel free to look at things without being harassed too much to buy. We all quickly learned to avoid eye contact so we didn't get asked to many questions.

We went to the US Consulate, which was a very valuable experience. Firstly, we had to go through security and give up all our cell phones and cameras, so it was interesting to see how secure the building was. We then had a briefing by Charles Bennett, the Chief of the Consular Section. He talked a lot about how he got into the foreign service, and about the duties of the consulate compared to the US embassy in Hanoi. Not knowing much about the duties of US foreign officers, I thought it was all very interesting. We also learned about the process of the Vietnamese applying for Visa's into the US, and the different regulations in place to prevent large amounts of immigration both around the world and the US. We also had an opportunity to tour the consulate grounds and see the memorial plaque to those who lost their lives protecting what was then the embassy, during the Vietnam war. We also saw the plaque that the Vietnamese had commemorating their fallen heros during the attack. I thought that seeing both views of the war was an interesting yet somewhat distorted juxtaposition.