Teaching and Moving...

...those are the things which have been consuming most of our time lately. Which is one excuse for why the blog hasn't been updated very regularly. The other excuse is that I (Steven) am just plain lazy sometimes.

This has been "crunch week" in a couple of ways. It's my first week of teaching actual classes of actual students. It's actually been quite fun, for the most part. I taught alone my first day and with a partner today (and tomorrow and Friday as well). Our practicum has been at the Diplomatic Academy of Vietnam, which has been kind of exciting. Today I actually had a class comprised entirely of Lao students, which proved to be interesting. [Note to the geographically challenged: Lao people are from the country of Laos, sandwiched in between Thailand and Vietnam. The entire country of Laos only has about twice as many people as the city of Hanoi.]


The words "Laos" and "laid-back" go together a bit like peas and carrots. A friend who taught a Lao class last year told us once that he was always wondering if there were a gas leak in the room, his students were so mellow. This group, indeed, was mellow. And quiet. And they had really, really long names. Just as I was getting used to Vietnamese names (which usually are a single, one-syllable word like "Thao" or at the most two single-syllable words like "Van Anh") the Lao students had names like Xaisomboun Soukhummalay (which, by the way, is a real name). Fortunately most of them had one-syllable nicknames which were a bit easier to pronounce.

I digress, however. All told, the teaching has been a lot of fun and I'm looking forward to getting to Quy Nhon and really getting to know my students.

While I've been in classrooms trying to pronounce names like Xaisomboun Soukhummalay, Joelle has been packing all of our earthly belongings into big bags that once held rice (weird, but that's what you get if you want big containers around here). It's a far more impressive feat than it might sound, and I'm glad she's the one doing it. She's done an amazing job of handling the logistics of our move to Quy Nhon (coming up in a little more than a week). This is all in preparation for tomorrow afternoon when we head over to the train station with a Vietnamese friend and send most of our stuff south on the rails. Hopefully it will be waiting for us when we get to Quy Nhon.

That's the long and short of it for now. Thanks for checking the blog and being our friend.

P.S. The hat was a goodbye gift from one of our Vietnamese teachers. The hot pink neck strap is a nice touch, don't you think?