Day Two in Nam

Xin chao ban! Ban co khoe khong? As you can see, I am fluent in Vietnamese now. Today’s outfit consisted of darker khakis, black shoes, and a grey shirt with black stripes (or a black shirt with grey stripes, I’m not really sure).  After a deceptively long two hour presentation about Urban Development in Ho Chi Minh City by a guest lecturer at UEF, we jumped right back into a language class, where our focus became how to pursue small talk in Vietnamese. The first two sentences at the beginning of this entry read “Hello! How are you?” Stunning, I know. My partner for today’s class was Phuc, who was very helpful in teaching me some of the nuances of pronunciations and (especially) tones. This class was followed up by another amazing lunch provided by the UEF cantina, this time complete with good old fashioned mystery meat, of which I am not sure what exactly it was. Unfortunately it was delicious, so if it was meat belonging to a certain domesticated animal, I cannot say that I hated it. Immediately after this we headed out to Phu My Hung for a presentation. Quite honestly, I was blown out of the water. From the picture displayed in the most recent post, you can see a rough estimation of the size of the project. It’s awe inspiring. They’ve developed an area from nothing but marshland into one of the most desirable living spaces in Vietnam, if not the world. Residences range from apartments for middle class families to villas for rich expatriates, valued at $1,000,000 USD. They have built a huge convention center, hotels, a mall, apartment complexes, and the Crescent, a water front complex combining a mall, three residence halls, commercial eateries, and a business center. The entire urban area must have cost billions of dollars to develop to this point, and they are only 40% complete with the commercial zones that they have planned. It’s ridiculous. A few of the UEF students went with us to this presentation, and invited us to join them at dinner, which we gladly accepted. After a short nap at the hotel, we headed out to Long Huy restaurant, which is known for “one type special food” according to Ton, one of the students with us. This specialty food consisted of a pancake like shell stuffed with (in this case) beef , shrimp, and bean sprouts. To eat it, one took rice paper, placed various leafy vegetable matter on it (obtained from a plate that had lettuce and mint on it), and then removed a portion of the pancake-type deal and placed it on the paper, rolling the whole thing into a burrito like object. This structure was dipped into fishsauce (the local staple dressing for all types of food) and eaten. Absolutely amazing, despite its odd nature. This was complemented with spring rolls and water. Afterwards, we went to… I don’t remember. Some odd Swedish sounding frozen yogurt place. Here, they added fruit to frozen yogurt, and blended it fresh into a new flavor of soft serve, making the texture and flavor much sharper than that found at Razzy Fresh. Ingenious idea, I must say. That concluded the day.