Now you may be wondering at the title of this post..."haven't you been engaging for two weeks," you may ask. The answer quite simply, is no. We have been chilling in Ho Chi Minh City then bonding with Vietnamese roommates in Quang Tri. But starting Thursday we finally began engaging.
A few words on Quang Tri: It is a super quaint town. I think a lot of us like it better than Saigon as it is quieter, less polluted, and just more homey feeling. That said, half the days there are blackouts and there is no wireless in our guest houses and it's super hot and buggy. I am always sweating...always. But our roommates are great and we've been bonding over cards and games and questions about relationships and differences between American and Vietnam and riding our bikes together and swimming and eating together. One huge difference between here and Saigon is that the white kids get stared at. All. the. time. We are told we are beautiful and tall and funny looking and fat and we are poked and shouted "Me" at (this means American in Vietnamese and is spelled My with an accent over the y) or "Hello" or "What is Your Name?" It's rather surprising because staring here seems to be far from offensive where as in America we are taught not to stare. I guess we are pretty strange looking. Brown curly hair? Unheard of. Six feet tall boys? Giants! But everyone that we do talk to or that does speak English has been super nice and we've been enjoying sampling Che (a sweet soup) and other smoothies at local cafes (I got one with mangos, avocados, dragon fruit, pineapple, condensed milk, and ice that you crush yourselves).
Tomorrow we will go tour some caves and the 47th parallel to further our education about how this area was affected by the war (we've already seen several museums and citadels and fortresses in the area on a bike tour we took at the beginning of the week). We are all looking forward to a break from the manual labor of the past few days (see next post)
No comments:
Post a Comment