Mad dogs, Englishmen...and Quy Nhonese?

Let me begin by saying that Joelle and I come from the Pacific Northwest, a part of the world that receives only slightly more direct sunlight each year than the dark side of the moon.  When the sun appears in Washington, people flock to it.  We soak it in, knowing that it might not appear again for weeks or months.  In the long days of summer, when it’s light out until 10:00 (or later) at night we eat dinner outside, play Frisbee or go for long bike rides at 8:30 at night, delay going to bed until midnight…all so we can catch a few more of those precious rays.  Embedded deep in the psyche of every true Washingtonian is a simple equation that states:  SUN = GOOD.

So it was funny to me at first when I moved to Vietnam and realized that people here avoid exposure to the sun as assiduously as I might avoid exposure to, for instance, anthrax or news about Justin Bieber.  When class is over and my students are going home for lunch, they transform from pleasant, casually-dressed college students into armored, bicycle-mounted UV-battling warriors with nary a millimeter of skin showing.  Jeans and long-sleeve shirts with sweatshirts over top, gloves that go past their elbows, face masks that drop all the way down the neck, toe-socks to cover the feet and yet allow for the wearing of flip-flops, topped off with an umbrella (not for rain but for sun).  We’re talking UV-Protection Level Midnight. 

This has become completely normal to see over the years and it’s quite understandable. If you’ve ever spent more than 10 minutes uncovered in the sun here you quickly realize that your primary goal in life has become finding shade (preferably air-conditioned) and staying in it until nightfall.  Here's a typical beach scene in Quy Nhon between the hours of 8:00 AM and 4:30 PM.  Notice:  Population zero.

That’s why I laughed in my friend’s face when he mentioned in passing this morning that today was a special day.  A holiday of sorts in which lots and lots of people go to the beach at high noon to take a dip in the sea and look at the sun.  Those were his words:  look at the sun.  At noon.  Not only did this sound foolish and potentially dangerous, it sounded like the least Vietnamese thing imaginable.  It was as if once a year everyone just went crazy for 10 minutes and did the precise opposite of what they were supposed to do.  It would have been like the whole population of Bellingham running up to Canada to go shopping and buy gas at Canadian Costco for an afternoon.  Never happen.

I wasn’t sure I believed him, so at 11:45, forsaking lunch and my family (for 20 minutes), I grabbed my camera and headed down to the beach.  Sure enough, the world had gone mad.  Quy Nhon is known for looking absolutely deserted from about 11:00 AM till 3:00 PM.  People who arrive in town for the first time at midday sometimes wonder if the zombie apocalypse has actually begun.  No one ventures outside if they can possibly avoid it.  The old saying from India about “only mad dogs and Englishmen” going out in the sun rings true here, as the only type of person you would tend to see on the beach at that hour (other than a fisherman) is the pasty European kind, punishing their skin because hey, they’re on holiday and they figure a raging sunburn will make everyone back home jealous. But the beach today was far from deserted.  Kids and parents, grandmas and college students—up and down Quy Nhon’s 3-mile long crescent of sand, they were sprinting or hobbling or sauntering out to the water and splashing around in the glaring hot sun like it was no big thang.  

Hundreds—maybe thousands—of people were out there, many of them fully clothed, enjoying a little dip, laughing and playing.  There was something wonderfully childlike about it all, as though some usually strict parents had allowed their little ones to stay up past their bedtime just this once.  

I even saw a guy waterskiing behind a fishing boat, it was that nuts.  (I’ve never seen anyone waterskiing in Vietnam, let alone behind a fishing boat.)

The most I’ve been able to find out about this holiday, named Tết Đoan Ngọ, is that it falls on the 5^th day of the 5^th lunar month every year—shortly before the summer solstice.  (That, incidentally, would explain why I’ve never heard of it because we’ve always been back in the States for the summer).  Tradition says that a dip in the sea at this time is supposed to wash away bad luck and give strength and health for the time ahead.  Like many traditions that people here might not fully understand themselves, it probably came “from China.”  It’s also interesting in that the whole dipping-in-the-sea-staring-at-the-sun part of things seems to be almost entirely localized to Quy Nhon.  When I do an image search for the name of the holiday, the only swimming pictures I get are of Quy Nhon’s beach.  Students who came to Quy Nhon from other provinces have confirmed that this is something only "those crazy Quy Nhonese" do.

 In any case, I walked along the beach for a bit, enjoying the atmosphere though not partaking in the actual process of it all.  After a while, soaking wet people started filtering back to their motorbikes or running back to their houses across the hot sand.

It was a good reminder to me that sometimes life refreshingly chooses not to fit the mold that we like to put it in.  Expectations get turned on their heads, and I recall that I still have a whole lot to learn about this place and these people.  I also saw it as a kind of cheerfully defiant act of civil disobedience toward the sun itself, which can start to feel like a merciless dictator in this season.  Distant echoes, perhaps, of the children of Israel turning their backs and walking out on Pharaoh (who was, after all, supposed to be the embodiment of the sun god himself).

I’m willing to bet that an hour after I left, the sun once again ruled over a desolate beach.  I can’t be certain, though, because by that time I was taking a nap with Micah in a dim, air-conditioned room and leaving the beach to any mad dogs or stray Englishmen who happened to be about.

Gimme a brrrrrreak!

Well, it’s gotten down to a bone-chilling 68 degrees here in Quy Nhon, so I guess you could say winter has arrived.

Actually, the weather has been cloudy and cool (for the most part) since we showed up in early December. The lows get down into the upper 60s and let me tell you—that feels plenty cold for Quy Nhon, especially with a fresh breeze blowing in off the ocean. Joelle and I can’t recall a stretch like this where we’ve been comfortable wearing long pants and long sleeves (even socks and shoes!!) outside for such a long period of time. Come April when it’s 85 degrees at sunrise I’m sure we won’t believe it was ever this cold.

When the temperature here drops below 70, the locals start piling on the clothes. Layers and layers of clothes. Jackets with fur-lined hoods, turtlenecks, big puffy ski-type jackets, gloves. Kids run around in full snow-suit outfits complete with ski masks. It looks a bit like that awful movie The Day After Tomorrow (if you’ve never seen it, you’re fortunate). This screenshot should suffice to give you the idea:

Anyway, in the midst of all this wintry weather, Joelle and I regularly take Micah out for walks in his stroller along the beach. In fact, we consider this to be ideal walking weather because a) we’re not soaked in sweat within 30 seconds of leaving the apartment and b) the normally crowded sidewalk along the beach is often almost deserted at this time of year.

The Vietnamese we do see when we’re out think we’re downright nuts, I’m sure, and neglectful parents to boot. I mean, we’ve got our four month old baby outside in 68 degree weather wearing nothing but long sleeves, long pants, socks and a blanket. For shame. Where’s the snowsuit? Ski mask? Scarf? Moon boots? Some of them just look at us, look at the stroller and shake their heads. Others stop and take the time to explain that it’s certainly not weather for babies to be outside in. They point to the cloudy skies and we hear two words repeated again and again from many different mouths: lanh (cold) and gio (windy).

An interesting side note here: In traditional Vietnamese belief, “bad wind” is responsible for just about every malady known to man. When it gets windy, people start dropping like flies. I was made aware of this during my first year of teaching when one of my students fainted in class and had to be carried back to her dorm room by some classmates. Why had she fainted, I asked her classmates, thinking that perhaps dengue or malaria or at least a good strong case of typhoid fever had been the culprit. “It’s windy today,” came the reply. Ah hah.

In windy weather, children should—at minimum—be dressed like this one:

In any case, we often either smile and nod knowingly at the advice folks give us and keep walking or else we explain that Americans like “cold” weather, that the current temperature back home is somewhere around 35 degrees, that Micah was born in America and that the inside of our house was around 68 degrees for the first few months of his life. So khong sao. No problem. As if bad wind ever hurt anyone. Pshaw. Now if we can just get over these darn colds…

You know you're celebrating Christmas in Vietnam when...

You know you're celebrating Christmas in Vietnam when...

• the refrigerator you bought for Christmas is adorned with a massive sticker of the not-so-well-known superhero, Mr. CoolPack.
• one of the main selling points of said refrigerator is that it can "stay cold all day when the power cuts out."

• finding a real, honest-to-goodness turkey breast at the supermarket is one of the highlights of the holiday.
• the only thing around that smells remotely like an evergreen tree is the scented candle someone gave you from the States.

• Christmas breakfast consists of eggs, bacon, Swedish tea ring and fresh mangoes, guava and dragonfruit.
• your visitors from "freezing" Hanoi go swimming on Christmas Day. In the ocean.

It's been a great Christmas--there were 13 of us who got together to celebrate. Seven friends with our organization came down from Hanoi to spend the holiday with us--a family of five (the Breedens) and a retired couple (the Davenports) spent about five days here enjoying the warmer weather, ocean views and quiet life of Quy Nhon. Since this city can feel a bit isolated at times--especially during the holidays--it was a blessing to have such fun people to share a few days with.

A few days after Christmas we decided to give a belated gift to the vendors of Cho Khu 2, the market where Joelle usually shops. These ladies have gotten to know Joelle over the past couple of years and--as Vietnamese women are prone to do--asked her repeatedly when she was going to have a baby. After all their asking, they were thrilled last year to learn that Joelle was pregnant, and even more excited when she returned this year without the belly. But where was the baby?? After several solo visits to the market, Joelle felt that a riot was imminent if she didn't bring Micah soon.

Yesterday, they got their first chance to meet Micah, in all his cute foreignness. The resulting chaos is chronicled on this video, which I shot while Joelle fielded questions and fended off pinching fingers. So, for a glimpse into Vietnamese market culture and the excitement surrounding babies here, watch below. (For those reading this on Facebook, you need to click the underlined title of the video, which takes you to the page where you can watch it).

Micah's Market Adventure from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

Cúp điện!

Cúp điện, cúp điện. The two-syllable phrase is heard all over Quy Nhon these days, often accompanied by a sigh and roll of the eyes or a resigned half-smile. The power's out. Again.

In a country that is heavily dependent on hydroelectric dams to provide electricity to its citizens, water is power. Literally. Which means that, after what's been called the driest rainy season in 40 years, Vietnam has precious little energy to go around.

Rolling blackouts started in Quy Nhon a couple weeks ago. Not wanting to begin with half-measures, they started by shutting off power to whole swaths of the city for 15 hours at a time--a move which proved to be rather unpopular, disruptive to business and life in general and (it was later discovered) actually forbidden by law. Fine then. Fourteen hour blackouts became the norm. Twice a week, in most parts of the city.

Then someone came up with the bright idea to conserve by shutting down power to the entire city all night on Sundays. Now, when I was living in Washington the electricity would occasionally get knocked out at night during a storm and I wouldn't realize until I overslept my alarm the next morning and saw the clock blinking "12:00" at me when I woke up. But in Vietnam, nighttime power outages are pretty much impossible to sleep through.

With overnight temps in the mid-to-high 70s, humidity to match, and sun-baked brick buildings radiating off the heat of the day, our apartment quickly becomes stifling without fans or some sort of air movement. I would reckon that most folks in Quy Nhon (Joelle and I included) had about two hours of uncomfortable, much-interrupted sleep the night they shut the whole city down.

Realizing that they were well on their way to creating a city full of irritated, sleep-deprived zombies, the authorities most likely fired or exiled the yahoo had suggested the all-night outage, because it hasn't happened since (a very good thing). Instead, they've begun cutting power daily from 5:00 to 7:00 in the morning--all-in-all a much more bearable state of affairs.

Living on the university campus has had its advantages for us, as we've been spared from the long daytime cuts (though seemingly random cuts lasting from 10 minutes to 2 hours have been common enough).

During all of this, I've reflected on what would happen in a North American city, were the civic leaders suddenly to declare four or five months of regular blackouts in the middle of summer. I think "tea party" doesn't even begin to describe the sort of outrage that would be directed at the government. Lawsuits would be plentiful. Senate hearings would be convened. Militias would be organized. Eco warriors living off the grid would chuckle to themselves and pour another bowl of organic muesli. Most people, in other words, would basically freak out.

Not so in Vietnam. Though some might grumble, the attitude here seems to be one of "We've been through a lot worse than this. Just make the best of it." So people just take long naps, head out to the beach where the breeze is fresh, or cruise around the streets on their bikes and feel the wind. The guy who runs the photocopy shop I frequent has just lost about 30% of his business due to lack of power. Rather than spending his free time organizing riots and making molotov cocktails in the back room, he now spends two days a week kicking around a soccer ball in the park with his friends or visiting people in other parts of the city. It's just what you do.

So, next November and December, when the heavens open up and the rains pour down I promise I won't grumble about not being able to go out, or whine about the mold growing on our walls. Instead, I'll smile, flick on our electric tea kettle, and quietly say thank you.

The Binh Dinh Exploratory Commission Inaugural Journey

Yesterday was an "I love Vietnam" day for me (Steven), and particularly an "I love Binh Dinh province" day. I'll tell you why.

As I'm sure I've explained before, Quy Nhon is far from the beaten tourist track (though it's grown noticeably more popular in the last year and a half since we arrived). But compared to the rest of Binh Dinh province, Quy Nhon is a veritable tourist magnet. Except for a couple of spots on the main bus routes, hardly anyone who's not Vietnamese ventures very far outside the city, including us.

This was going to have to change. And change it did. A couple weeks ago, a New Zealand volunteer living in Quy Nhon told us about an old Catholic seminary he had been to. He described for us the general part of the province it was in, but said it would be hard to find if you'd never been there before. Perfect. I did some digging online and Jason rounded up a few of our friends with motorbikes. We set out from Quy Nhon yesterday morning under delightfully cloudy skies with some vague directions clipped from a website (in Vietnamese) and a not-so-detailed map of the area.

As it was, we only had to backtrack once and we got far more than we were hoping for out of the whole deal. The seminary was great--quiet and peaceful, with stately old trees swaying in the breeze. It's been officially shut down by the powers-that-be since the early 1980s, but an elderly Vietnamese priest still lives there and cares for the place, and employs a husband and wife couple who help him out.

We've heard two different versions of the history of the place--one, that the seminary and church were built by the French in the early 1900s; another, that they were built by the Portuguese long before that. It's possible that both are true--the site could have been used by the Portuguese (perhaps even as early as the 1700s) and then re-built by the French later on. Either way, the grounds are well-kept and it's a wonderfully quiet place surrounded by rice fields and well-shaded by the trees. I asked the priest/caretaker if it was possible for people to come spend a night or two there (they certainly have enough rooms) and was told with a smile that sure it was possible so long as permission was granted by the authorities. Which, I'm guessing, means "No."

Either way, I'd like to go out again and spend the better part of a day with a Good Book and a journal. Seems to be a great spot for reflection and thinking.

Our journey wasn't over yet, though. As it turns out we were right out near the hometown of one of the friends who had come along with us. Following his lead we wound our way through more villages and rice paddies until we came to a Catholic cemetery that, according to our friend/guide, dates back four hundred years. The tombs were impressive and shaped like lotus flowers, turtle shells and other crazy, unidentifiable objects. One of the tombs even had stairs that descended underneath it--right down to the water table (which in that part of the country was only about five feet beneath us). We didn't venture down to see whether the tomb's occupant was hanging out down there or not.

From the cemetery it was just another couple of miles to an old Cham tower--the oldest of the 14 towers left standing in the province, apparently. The Cham were a people group from India who settled most of southern Vietnam a long, long time ago. They were eventually driven out by the Vietnamese coming down from the north, but not before they'd built themselves a bunch of brick towers all over the countryside. This tower dated from the 11th century, and was in quite good shape for being around 1000 years old. The Cham were remarkable for building things with bricks but no mortar. Somehow they fitted everything together so precisely that they didn't need the stuff.

From the tower we circled back around the lagoon behind Quy Nhon and hit the new highway which runs the length of the sandy, deserted "economic development zone" across the water from the city. We cruised along the wide, vacant stretch of asphalt and across the long bridge spanning the lagoon, back to the city and civilization. All told it was a tour I would have been happy to pay $30 or $40 for, which we got instead for the price of a couple liters of gasoline and lunch for our friends. Days like that make me happy to be here in Vietnam, happy to have friends willing to drag me around by motorbike for half a day, happy to be slowly unfolding the history and character of these people.

Rather than just posting a bunch of pictures, I thought a video would be in order to share a little more about this trip, so you can take a look at the link below. (Watch it in full screen for full effect, of course.)

Binh Dinh Exploration from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

Chuc mung nam moi!

Well, a happy New Year to everyone. No, I didn't just awaken from a six week long coma or look at the wrong month on the calendar this morning. Here in Vietnam, the (Lunar) New Year happened just a few days ago.

New Year's is a big, big deal in Vietnam. It's known as Tet, and the celebrations go on for a good week, at least. Traditionally, Tet is a time when families welcome back the spirits of their departed ancestors by putting goodies like fruit, rice wine, and sticky rice "cakes" out on the family altar. They send them off after a few days by burning paper money (which the spirits presumably take back to spend in the afterlife). In the meantime there are fireworks and lots of visiting of relatives and friends.
We're not gonna lie--there are some fairly annoying aspects of Tet. We find that kids are given a long break from school and no one really knows what to do with them. Packs of middle schoolers roam the streets with airsoft guns shooting bystanders who catch their eye (including foreign teachers who happen to be riding their bikes around town at the wrong time). Happy New Year to you too, kids. People also tend to drive their motorbikes with an extra dose of crazy thrown in at this time of year and we hear ambulance sirens with sad regularity.

One of my favorite things so far about Tet, though, are the colors. Vietnam is normally a colorful country (in many ways) and Tet is the colorfullest time of year, to coin a new word. Yellow and red are the main ones, but it seems that, so long as it's bright it's all right. Here are some recent pictures with brief explanations for you.

This is the cay may--a special kind of tree that blooms at Tet. I think they're rather expensive, though, so they're much less common than these flowers...

...which lined one of the main streets in town for a good mile on both sides, right up until New Year's Day, when they all mysteriously disappeared.

Flags are plentiful. It helps, I suppose, that red and yellow are big Tet colors.

There's a Children's Park with rides and playground and such right across the street from the University that's usually fairly mellow and quiet. Not during Tet, though. Balloons are the big thing.

My attempt at a cool shot.

It seems that Wal-Mart doesn't have a worldwide monopoly on silly oversized inflatable holiday characters.

All of the markets close down for three days or so during Tet, so everyone does their holiday shopping the day or two beforehand. Crazier than usual.

Visiting graves, cleaning them up, burning incense...all part of the package for most people.

Of course, the cows continue to do their part in keeping the grass trimmed.

Prettier than any firework, balloon or massive inflatable creature--in my humble opinion.

You have entered...the Economic Development Twilight Zone

This holiday season has been a full, busy, but great time for us as we've had a chance to share about Christmas and our reasons for celebrating it with hundreds of excited students. It's really quite impressive to look at the holiday from an outsider's perspective--just how much effort and money we as Americans pour into Christmas. No other holiday even comes close. No wonder people around the world are fascinated with it.

In addition to trying to explain Christmas to everyone, we've been doing all our 'normal' stuff--teaching classes, hanging out with students, going to the market, meeting with teammates, etc. etc. etc.

We've been busy, so it was with no small amount of enthusiasm that we woke up last Saturday, saw that it was going to be a relatively cool (less than 85 degree) day, and decided to get on our bikes and flee town. The trip we took was one that we had been planning for a long time--one that would only really be possible in cooler weather, due to the time and distances involved. It was, as it turned out, a trip into Utter Weirdness.

We started by riding across town to the Thi Nai bridge--currently the longest bridge in Vietnam at about two miles. The bridge was built across a big lagoon which lies behind the peninsula that Quy Nhon occupies. It was constructed for the express purpose of connecting Quy Nhon and its port to another, larger peninsula on the other side of the lagoon which is slated to become the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone (take a look at the map below, if that helps).

Since real estate on Quy Nhon's narrow peninsula is in short supply, it made sense in someone's mind (or pocketbook) to encourage industrial development on this other peninsula in an area resembling the Sahara desert, with towering sand dunes and little else. The result was a kind of weirdness which seems unique to East Asian countries with centrally-planned economies.

The best way I can describe it is as a cross between the setting of a 1960s "last man on earth" sci-fi movie and Alice in Wonderland. Roads that go nowhere, creepy deserted warehouses, concrete animal statues--this place has it all. Upon reaching the far side of the bridge we found out that our camera batteries were low, so we weren't able to take very many pictures. But take a look at what we did capture, and I'll try to let the pictures do most of the talking.

Here we see the Thi Nai bridge in the background and a fit young man with a sweet steel-frame bicycle. (No it's NOT a girl's bike. All the bikes in Vietnam have the angled cross-bar like that. They really do.)

Our first discovery when we reached the far side of the bridge was an exciting one. At the base of the bridge, some sort of resort was under construction. And as anyone who's been to Southeast Asia knows, no high class resort is complete without a menagerie of concrete animals to "enhance" the natural landscape. In this case, the animals were dolphins (apparently being launched into the air by an underwater explosion of some sort) and seals...

...harpooned seals...

...with holes in their heads...

...and giant swans.

Leaving our animal friends behind, we moved further into the Nhon Hoi Economic Zone, past a huge (deserted) gas station, and a (deserted) strip mall with billiards tables, a cafe, and a karaoke bar. We entered an area with big roundabouts and massive six- and eight-lane, newly paved roads...

...many of which dead-ended in sand dunes...

...all of which were almost completely deserted and half covered with sand.

In fact, the only economic development we saw in the Economic Development Zone (apart from the deserted gas station, half-constructed resort, and empty strip mall) were some big warehouses that must have taken a beating in the two big storms this year; the majority of their roofs were lying in pieces scattered about on the sand beside them.

After some further biking on deserted six-lane highways through the dunes, we came to the little fishing village of Nhon Ly. To reach the village you have to bike past a massive graveyard that's probably as big as the village itself. Graves stretch across the dunes for perhaps a half mile before you actually come to the village. Kind of creepy.


Nhon Ly village was a friendly little place with narrow, winding streets and some nice-looking (though not-so-clean) beaches. But it's a long ways from nowhere.

All told it was a good, worthwhile trip--if not for its scenic beauty then for its sheer oddness and its glimpses of another side to life in a quickly-changing country.

Local adventures

For a more complete set of pictures relating to this story, check out our photo album.

So far this year our schedule hasn't allowed for any far-ranging trips into the hinterlands of Vietnam. (We'll save those for when we have visitors here with us), but we have been able to get to know the area around Quy Nhon a little better and that's been a very good thing.

A random encounter with a Dutch tourist looking to explore the surrounding area provided the motivation for Joelle to organize a trip with a couple of the girls she tutors. They headed about an hour out of town to a 'natural area' called Ham Ho--a river with some cool, sculpted rocks--and then hit up some Cham towers on the way back to town. The Cham people lived in this part of Vietnam long before there was a Vietnam--they were a Hindu culture from India that once ruled a good portion of Southeast Asia. The area encompassing Da Nang, Nha Trang and Quy Nhon was their main center of operations in Vietnam. There are still some hilltop towers left in the area to remind us of what once was. (Not quite Angkor Wat, but still pretty cool.)

The next day we hopped a bus with our friend, Phung, and headed out to her hometown in the same general vicinity as Ham Ho. Phung lives in the hometown of a guy named Quang Trung (or Nguyen Hue), best known for driving the Chinese out of northern Vietnam and uniting the country under one ruler back in the late 1700s. There's a museum in his honor, which Phung was proud to show us.

We also had a chance to visit with her great family. Phung's grandparents, who spent 14 years living in Louisiana, are now back in Vietnam living with her mother and younger brother (Phung's father passed away in a motorbike accident several years ago, prompting their move back to Vietnam). One of the first things her grandpa did when he saw us was to shuffle into the other room and return with his green card and Louisiana driver's license, which he was evidently very proud of.
Older Vietnamese people--with their pajama suits and comb-overs and beautiful smiles--have a way of just charming the heck out of you and these two were no exception. We loved them pretty much instantly. Now we've got a date to return and celebrate Tet (Vietnamese New Year) with them, which should be a hoot.

Oh yeah, and while visiting Phung's hometown, Steven had to ride around on a ridiculously small bike, much to the amusement of Joelle, Phung, and everyone else on the street who saw him.

Peanut butter and jelly, Vietnam style

Sometimes life in general just takes a lot longer in Vietnam. While it's true that we don't have the distractions of TV or cars or Wiis or iPhones to make life complicated, sometimes even really simple things--like making a peanut butter and jelly sandwich--can get complicated here. Watch the video below and see what I mean.

How to make a peanut butter and jelly sandwich...in Vietnam from Steven Shetterly on Vimeo.

(If you're reading this on Facebook and the video isn't embedded, try this link: http://www.vimeo.com/7093323 )

Not quite summer camp

Time for a little snapshot of Vietnamese culture. A visit the other night from one of our friends—a fourth year student that Joelle got to know well last year—provided the insight and pictures for the entry you’re about to read.

One very big difference between Vietnamese college students and North American college students is how the two groups spend their summer vacations. Reaching back into the fog of my distant past, I can recall that an average North American college student might get a summer job, mooch off of mom and dad for a few months, work at a summer camp or perhaps go on a road trip with their friends. While Vietnamese students might take part in similar activities (with perhaps a bit more emphasis on the family side of things), every couple of summers they get to do something quite different from their American counterparts: military training.

Upon graduating from high school, Vietnamese have two choices: They can either continue on to some sort of post-secondary education or they can enlist in the military for two years. Not surprisingly, most of the students whose test scores are high enough choose to continue studying. But those students who do go on to higher education don’t get to fully escape the military. In a sort of accelerated “see what you missed” tour, each class of students has to attend a few weeks of training at least a couple summers out of their university careers.

While the words “military training” might conjure up images of crawling through mud under bands of concertina wire while drill sergeants shout obscenities at terrified trainees, we have been assured numerous times that military training is actually good fun. “We spent most of our time talking and playing cards,” one of the students assured us. “It was a good chance to get to know the other students in my department,” said another. In other words, it’s kind of like summer camp. Except instead of learning how to paddle a canoe or build a good campfire, students might instead learn how to disassemble and clean an AK-47 or successfully spot enemy aircraft at great distances. Merit badges are not awarded, unfortunately.

In the Vietnamese educational system, classes are formed the first year of university and remain the same throughout the four or five years that a student is in college. In keeping with this tradition, classes attend military training together as well. They sleep in the same barracks (at least two to a bed, no doubt), eat the same lousy food, and avoid the same outhouses. Though it might not do a whole lot to prepare them to repel invaders, it builds community and deepens friendships within the students’ classes and departments. And that’s not a bad thing.

From here on we’ll let the pictures—provided by our friend the 4^th year student—tell the story.

Military training lasts from a couple weeks to about a month. Students do morning exercises together, have a couple of instructional sessions and have a bit of homework they need to do each day, but for the most part they've got lots of free time.

If you're observant, you might note that there are a lot of girls here. Boys and girls do train and study together, but this is the Foreign Language department which is about 95% female.

This is Joelle's friend, showing off the sweet barracks where the students stay.

The trainees have to buy their own uniforms. Some of them complained that the military-style pants were too big for them and thus were allowed to wear jeans.

Judging by all of the pictures Joelle's friend showed us, posing for photos in front of the chalkboard was one of the more popular ways for students to pass time at military training.

Students meet each day for "class" under a fig tree. Taking pictures with the figs was also quite popular.

This was the base laundromat. Students wash their own clothes by hand (just as most of them do at home) and hang them up to dry outside. Groups of students stand guard in 1 hour shifts at night to keep anyone from coming and stealing their clothes hanging up outside.

Getting ready to head back to Quy Nhon after an enjoyable couple weeks of training.

We hope you, too, enjoyed this brief glimpse of life for Vietnamese students!