2012 in Review

Hi folks.  Yes, it's been nearly a year since I last updated this.  That's going to change, though.  Promise.  :)

For now, you can have a look at our "Year in Review" slideshow/movie, with pictures from this past year.  Go ahead.  Watch it.  It's only 2 minutes long.  How bad could it be?


Shetterly Year in Review 2012 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.

It's a bird...it's a plane...

What on earth are these people doing?



Beach ballet?


Fleeing from oversized, crab-clawed extraterrestrials?


Ultimate Fighting: Beach Edition?

Here, maybe this picture will help…



That’s right. Not Ultimate Fighting, but Ultimate Frisbee.

What you’re seeing are the first publicly released photos of the Vietnamese National Ultimate Frisbee Team in action. What’s that you say? You didn’t know that Vietnam had a National Ultimate Frisbee Team? Well, they do now. Because that’s what our shirts say, and there’s no one around to tell us different.


It all began last year when I (Steven) took note of the fact that the only sports people seemed to play on the beach in Quy Nhon were volleyball, soccer and a local specialty I’m going to call “throw handfuls of wet sand at members of the opposite sex and run away.” Since I don’t particularly enjoy or excel at any of these sports, I decided—along with my teammate Jason—to introduce something new to the mix.

Jason and I happen to own identical 175-gram Ultimate discs (a sure sign that we would be good friends from the get-go). One day, we pulled them out and started tossing them around with students on the beach at exercise time.

At first, the kids were--to be honest--downright terrible. Many were the Frisbees that had to be fished out of the ocean. There were plenty of near-misses, with wildly-flung plastic discs nearly causing serious injury to elderly folks, young couples and small children alike.

But things slowly improved. Under the patient tutelage of Steven and Jason, the students (shall we call them ‘apprentices’?) stopped hurling the discs willy-nilly and gained some control. They began catching more than they dropped. They learned different styles of throwing. They discovered Rule #1 of Frisbee, which is this: It really isn’t that difficult.


The students—who numbered just three or four at the beginning—enjoyed tossing the Frisbee, but they didn’t really understand what the big deal was. Throw, catch. Throw, catch. Throw, miss, chase into the ocean and retrieve. It got a little tedious after a while.

But wait, we told them. There’s more.

One day, when we had a total of six people out on the beach, we played our first “real” game of Ultimate. As expected, it started off pretty terrible but the students caught on quickly. And they enjoyed it.

Throughout the second half of last year and the first half of this year, we’ve continued playing regular games of Ultimate with the students. The group has grown from three or four regulars in the beginning to seven, eight, sometimes ten students (plus the two foreign coach/players). At times crowds gather to witness the sheer awesomeness unfolding before them. Some of them actually have enough courage to come down and play with us, and a few of those stick around and become part of The Group.

We even have visiting foreign players who put in an appearance now and then—Joelle plays once in a while, and we usually rope most of our visitors into playing at least one game while they’re in Quy Nhon.


Partway through first semester this year, I realized something: These students were good. I mean, they were really good. They were fast, they knew how to throw and catch, they understood the game. And they made me work hard to keep up with them. When others showed up to play, the students themselves were able to explain the game and teach the newbies how to play much more quickly than I could. Hmmm. An important Nugget of Wisdom in there somewhere, to be sure.

We finally reached the point toward the end of first semester this year that we figured our skills (and, indeed, our fame) had grown to such a point that we would have to make ourselves official. And by “official,” I mean we had to make cool shirts for us to wear.


In a time-honored Vietnamese tradition, I went out and “borrowed” a couple of design ideas from various places, put them together, and we had ourselves a shirt design. This is what I came up with.

So, now that we are the undisputed representatives of Ultimate Frisbee in Vietnam we just need some other national teams to contact us and play a game or two. Any takers? Anyone?


P.S. Yes, we're aware that there are already some Ultimate leagues in Hanoi and Saigon...and we're willing to consider taking them on as minor league partners to our franchise.

P.P.S. Thanks to Sylvia for taking some great pictures of the team in action, and to Paul, for being a visiting foreign star player.

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!

Some thoughts about train trestles

This entry was written a couple weeks ago while I had a lingering cold and thus had time to sit and ponder things a bit more than usual. I'm just finishing it up now...

Not feeling well but still needing to get out this morning, I took a walk in the 90 degree heat (a la Vietnam) up the road to Cedar Springs, a beautiful retreat center set at the edge of the Cascade foothills. It does the soul good just to stroll through there--stop by the pond, check out the flowers, and cool off in the shade of the giant cedars which give the place its name.

Today's walk also took me to an old railroad bed and out onto a trestle which spans a deep, forested gorge. Normally I'm in such a hurry to get somewhere that I walk across it without really thinking about it. Today, I stopped. And looked down. And felt a bit dizzy.

It really is a strange thing, being suspended a hundred-plus feet up in the air on a timber structure that was built over a century ago by people long dead and buried. To be clear: I'm not one of those weird railroad-obsessed guys who spend all their free time putting together model trains and watching documentaries about the specs of different sorts of steam engines. But when you stop and consider for a moment, you really do have to be impressed by the sheer engineering and logistical feat that is a train trestle. The fact that people using little more than some pulleys, maybe a steam donkey (whatever that is) and a lot of elbow grease could build something so massive and structurally sound is astounding.

One of the most impressive things about a trestle is the number of relatively small support beams that hold the whole thing together. I'm no engineer, but I would venture to say that, by itself, a single beam can't do a whole lot. I suppose you could toss it across a ditch and ride your bicycle over it if you were so inclined, but I wouldn't try driving a train (or a tricycle, for that matter) on it. Yet as the individual beams are bolted to the structure they become part of a system that, a hundred years down the road, still serves as a pretty dang good bridge.

I didn't linger too long on the trestle (lest someone see me and think I was a weird 'railroad guy') but as I walked home I was struck by how this was an object lesson for the work Joelle and I have been doing in Vietnam.

As I've supported cross-cultural workers in the past, I've sometimes wondered if my individual prayers to the Father or the small amount I'm able to give them each month really make much of a difference. Perhaps some of you have wondered the same thing as you support our work in Vietnam. From my vantage point now, I can answer that question with a resounding YES.

Just as a train would never have been able to cross that gorge at Cedar Springs without the support of those hundreds of individual beams, so Joelle and I would never be able to work and serve in Vietnam in our current capacity without the prayers and financial support of so many of you. Your petitions to the Father on our behalf and your sacrificial giving are not only appreciated--they're absolutely essential to the work that's being done.

As we prepare to return to Vietnam in just a few days now (August 19th!) we are very conscious of that, and thankful for the support we've received from all of you. Thanks!

Living the Good Life

As I write this, there is a man in flip-flops pounding on our bathroom wall with a chisel and sledgehammer, removing broken tiles and making an incredible racket. He and his partner just finished destroying part of our floor (also due to a whole row of tiles which broke rather alarmingly all at once one day). Our apartment and my lungs are covered in a fine dust of concrete and tile fragments, and the weather outside is gray and soggy. Some days are like this.

But as much as we might try stir up sympathy by making everyone believe that we live a life of deprivation and hardship here, the secret is getting out--most of you (especially those who have been able to visit us) understand by now that Quy Nhon isn't exactly the armpit of Southeast Asia. It is, in fact, amazingly beautiful and largely undiscovered by international tourists. In recent years, though, there are a few who have begun to recognize the tourism potential of this area and thus we've started to get the first really nice, world-class resorts being built along this stretch of the coast.

Somehow this past week we had the opportunity to visit not one but two resorts a short distance outside of Quy Nhon. The first, called Life Resort, is a small, comfortable place about five or six miles south of town, sharing a beach with a fishing village. If I were in the practice of giving out stars to such places, I might give it four or so. The beach is clean and the rooms nice and spacious; it costs about $100 a night to stay. The day before our 3rd wedding anniversary we rode the city bus out to the Life Resort and met the new manager there--an Australian fellow who we'd heard was really nice. As it turned out, the reports were correct; he let us into the resort for free, gave us some complimentary cold drinks, sat down for a chat with us and then let us use one of the guest rooms to shower and change after we'd gone swimming at their beach. So we swam, enjoyed the beach, had a good dinner and headed home. A pretty sweet evening.

Four days later we were at it again. This time, our personnel director Susan was visiting from Hanoi and all of us (the Fizzards, Susan, Joelle and I) got into a taxi and headed a little further south to a place called Bai Tram Hideaway Resort. "Hideaway" is an apt name in this case, as it's located off a spur highway at the end of a 3 mile stretch of what is quite possibly the worst dirt road in Vietnam. The jostling, bone-jarring ride was worth it, though, as we were greeted with our very own pristine, private beach and clear, turquoise waters.

Bai Tram is still very much under construction. At this point it consists only of a restaurant/reception area and seven villas (out of a planned 150 or so). We didn't mind, though, as this meant that we had the place almost entirely to ourselves. A former Quy Nhon student and a good friend of Jill and Jason's is the Guest Relations Manager and was able to get us in and show us around. The villa she took us to--a single bedroom house with a separate living area, private pool and beach view--goes for around $700 a night. Sheesh. We swam in their pool, took a dip in the ocean, climbed around on the rocks and generally made believe we were fabulously wealthy for the better part of a morning.

As I floated in the cool water and took in the scenery I quietly contemplated the lifestyle of a volunteer English teacher in Vietnam. Visiting two gorgeous resorts for free in the space of a week wasn't exactly what we had anticipated when we signed up to come over here, but hey--we'll take it.
And even as the sound of chisel on bathroom tile continues to reverberate around our apartment, I can honestly say that our entire time here in Quy Nhon (not just the time spent at 4 and 5 star resorts) has been far beyond what we could have asked for or imagined.

To see some pictures from our pair of resort adventures, click here.

The Year in Review...

Exactly one year ago today, a plane out of Hong Kong touched down at Noi Bai airport outside of Hanoi and disgorged two very tired, rather disheveled and discombobulated Americans. These travelers' names were Joelle and Steven and they weren't coming to Vietnam to take pictures, buy a few silk scarves and leave. Like a stubborn case of athlete's foot, they were going to be around for a while.


In the twelve months since then, we've seen a fair bit of this here country. We've tasted its food (even some of the stuff that looked gross), swam in its seas, hiked its mountains. We've made friends, embarrased ourselves on numerous occasions, had close calls with pickpockets and purse snatchers, been hit by a speeding motorbike, and somehow gotten a newly-purchased wardrobe stuck in a tight spiral staircase. We've ridden on planes, trains, basket boats, xe oms and elephants. We've watched mold grow on every single piece of clothing and furniture we own, battled hordes of giant cockroaches, sweated more than we ever imagined possible, and witnesed our bus driver getting punched in the eye by a rival bus driver. More than that we've laughed till we cried with our Vietnamese friends, had deep conversations in broken English over strong iced coffee and wondered how on earth a place so different from our home could still be so dang beautiful and sometimes feel so much like...home.


It hasn't all been easy. There have been broken bones (two of them), miserable nights spent in the bathroom, and tears (lots of those) over loved ones so far away. There have been birthdays that we've couldn't make it to (including several literal days of birth, with babies back home popping out like to make Orville Redenbacher throw a fit). There have been hikes we could have gone on, massive snowstorms we missed, foods we have longed for, and people on the other side of the ocean that we really wish we could have just sat down and had a burrito with once or twice.

Has it been worth it? Yes. Absolutely.

Are we excited about coming home for the summer in a few months? Yes. Absolutely. As wonderful as they are, Skype and Facebook are no replacement for a real chat, and we're so looking forward to being able to see many of you this summer. We're also incredibly thankful for the support, encouragement, emails and blog comments y'all have given us over this past year. We miss you guys.

As a parting gift for our one year anniversary, we now present to you the Shetterly timeline--a few key pictures from the past year in Vietnam:

Spring 2008: Encountering the joys of learning a tonal language, our first six months in Hanoi were focused largely on language study. Here we are with one of our tutors.

April 13, 2008: Approximately 8 seconds into his first basketball game in Vietnam, Steven blocks a bullet pass with his right thumb, which promptly breaks. Here he is awaiting medical care at the clinic in Hanoi.

May 2008: The weather grew warm. Uncomfortably so. The logical course of action was to stick a big fan up the back of one's shirt and look like a body builder for a while.

May 2008: 90 degrees in the shade with 70% humidity and somehow she still manages to look good.

June 2008: Ninh Binh, our first escape from Hanoi without the aid of someone who speaks Vietnamese. We survived, and saw a rice harvest in full swing to boot.

Summer 2008: East meets West. The pervasive influence of punk culture extends even to this young, impressionable Vietnamese caterpillar.

July 2008: A scenic shot of the historic battle site of Dien Bien Phu...and Joelle's forehead.

September 2008: A bird's eye view of Quy Nhon, our new home, confirms that yes--this is indeed a dang beautiful place.


October 2008: A class of Vietnamese students goes to the beach for a picnic and invites some foreign teachers along. A good time is had by all.

November 2008: Steven makes a fool out of himself by singing "Stand By Me" with his teammate Jason in front of 500+ students. Joelle continues to look really good. Both receive flowers.

December 2008: Christmas parties and excited students. Fun.

Christmas 2008: Visitors from distant lands arrive to celebrate the day with us. We are blessed.

January 2009: Three Iblings siblings and Steven make their way through southern Vietnam on the way to Thailand for classes, a conference and elephant riding.

Those who sow in tears
will reap with songs of joy.

He who goes out weeping,
carrying seed to sow,
will return with songs of joy,
carrying sheaves with him.

-Ps. 126

Anyone still reading this thing...?

Wow. I wouldn't blame you at all if you had stopped checking our blog. As it stands it's been well over a month since we last updated.

To employ a much-overused phrase: It has been the perfect storm of busyness, travel, computer problems and laziness that has kept us from updating you all on our lives in a timely manner. Sorry 'bout that.

As I write this, I sit overlooking a city street from a cafe in Chiang Mai, Thailand with a brand new HP laptop at my fingers. How did we get here? Where did the new computer come from? What on earth has been happening the last month and a half? I'll try to give you the quick-and-dirty (or not so dirty) explanation below:

• December flew by in a blur of activities, visitors, celebrations and extra classes. As a team, we wanted to make the most of the season with students, so we had several things planned each week. From cookie making parties to Christmas movies to a big party with around 120 students AND Santa Claus himself, we did our best to communicate the meaning of Christmas to anyone and everyone who would listen.
• Partway through December, Joelle's brother Will and our friend Carissa arrived in Vietnam to celebrate Christmas with us. We had a great time showing them around Quy Nhon, traveling with them, introducing them to students and enjoying the season.
• After Christmas, Carissa headed back to the states and Joelle's younger sister Bethany arrived from Egypt where she's been living for the past several months. After a few days in Quy Nhon we picked up and traveled to Saigon via the scenic route (hitting up the coastal city of Nha Trang and the highlands city of Da Lat on the way).
  
• From Saigon, we flew to Bangkok and then Chiang Mai where we've been for the past few weeks. Steven took classes for his MA degree in TESOL for two weeks while Joelle, Bethany and Will gallivanted around the area.
• Sadly, our time with Bethany and Will came to an end. Will headed back to the States while Bethany returned to Egypt. We had a couple days of down time, then started our annual conference with our organization.
• For the past several days we've been hanging out with some 600 other teachers from all across Asia taking teaching workshops, fellowshipping, learning a lot from the Word and relaxing. In another few days we'll be returning to Vietnam and a period of relaxation before the next semester begins. Whew!

As for the new computer: If you'll recall, I (Steven) got pegged by a speeding motorbike a couple months back. In addition to a cracked shoulder blade, our poor HP laptop was part of the collateral damage of the whole incident. It had been riding in the bike basket and landed hard on the pavement when I went down. Though it didn't die instantly, it slowly grew less and less usable until it was finally apparent that a new one would be needed.

One of our teammates offered to have her parents bring us one from the States (they were coming to visit her in Thailand). We took her up on the offer and a few days later, lo and behold, we had in our posession a newer, faster, and cheaper laptop than our old one. Sweet.

So we are back up and running with the technology stuff again. If you've tried calling or emailing or checking our blog or pictures lately and haven't seen much, our apologies. We're a bit backlogged now on getting pictures uploaded, but hope to have that done soon. Check our photo album regularly to see if anything new has been added.

Thanks for being patient with us. Really, we're alive and we're glad you guys care about us!

Thanksgiving: Better late than never

If you're more of a picture person, you can click here to see the album from our Thanksgiving weekend adventures.

Our first Thanksgiving in Viet Nam has been a good reminder of all that we are thankful for! Life, health, friends, being loved first, so that we can love others…..

It is a good time to say, even in the midst of a broken scapula, we are doing well and loving the city and new friends we have been placed with. We are very thankful this year that we are finding ourselves in the middle of exactly what we have been challenged to do for this time in our lives. Thankful to a Father who calls us by name and gives purpose in life.

The preparation started off with Jill and me (Joelle) working together to create our first Thanksgiving meal ever! And not just for our families, but for 10 of us in total. Our old teammate, Susan, joined us from Hanoi. And also, we were blessed by the presence of 4 of our long distance teammates for the weekend. These 4 girls are teaching in a city about 7 hours away by bus. They are with our same organization and it was a fun time of reuniting, laughing, sharing and encouraging. I myself was greatly encouraged by getting to see the hearts that our teammates have for their students. One more girl, our neighbor and coworker here at Quy Nhon University, joined us also, making the 10. She is from Belgium and experienced a first also – her first Thanksgiving meal!

Our visitors came a few days before our Thanksgiving celebration, so we had a chance to show them around the city, go bowling with them, take them to class and generally have a lot of fun.

The day of our celebration (which was on Friday due to teaching schedules) was a mixture of the traditional and not-so-traditional. In true Vietnamese style, Steven lashed half of our furniture to his bicycle and pedaled over to Jill and Jason's with it. Since it makes him more visible to (and thus less likely to get pegged by) speeding motorbikes, he's considering carrying around a stack of plastic chairs everywhere he goes now.


Even though the “turkey” (roasted chicken) was served with chopsticks, we managed to put together a very American food experience. You know all those recipes that call for canned this, or pre-prepared that…. we stared from raw veggies sold in an open market and ended up having quite the feast! Many hands make light work. Many hands also take up a lot of the counter space, so some of the prep was done on the kitchen floor. That errs on more of the Vietnamese style than the American, but worked just the same in getting everyone involved in the great afternoon.

And yes, everyone took part. Steven made everyone pumpkin coffee and also made whipping cream from scratch (using a whisk). Vigorous whipping may have reinjured his scapula, but we had really good whipping cream to go on top of our pumpkin pie! Meanwhile, Jason washed all the dishes and we women sat and relaxed after the meal. It was a great time. Like eating Thanksgiving meals at home, there was far too much food and we all did our part in eating it up.

Pizza, Bowling, Dance Competitions and Halloween Parties

Well if that title doesn't sound like the most random assortment of activities, I don't know what does. But that's been our life for the past few weeks. I've been meaning to do something fun like make a video, but haven't found the time to sit down and focus. So instead you'll get a quick blurb on what's been happening and a link to our latest pictures. (If you want to skip right to the pictures, click here.)

Pizza: A couple weeks ago we invited a few of the students we've gotten to know the best to come to our place and make pizza with us. It ended up being a blast--it was only the first or second time any of them had had pizza. One of them told us the next day that she had been so excited she stayed up until 1:00 in the morning writing in her diary about the pizza-making experience.

This group of students has been pretty great. They're funny, they enjoy each other's company and their English is at a level where we're able to have deeper, more meaningful conversations with them. We felt like this was a "breakthrough" night, in that the students didn't just come over to have a semi-formal English conversation time with us, but felt free to just hang out and be themselves.

Bowling: A few days later we invited some of the same students (and some others) out to the Quy Nhon bowling alley. That's right--the bowling alley. Though it only has 8 lanes, the feel of the place is 100% Americana, right down to the stale cigarette smoke in the air. Well, maybe 95% Americana, due to the lack of chili cheese fries and the fact that Steven had to bowl in his socks (size 13 bowling shoes in Vietnam? Are you kidding me??). Joelle whooped everyone soundly.

Dance competition: Next in the parade of wackiness was the campus-wide dance competition. Each class participates (in VN students stick with the same group of students for every class through all 4 years of college, so they grow pretty tight-knit). We went to the competition just for the foreign language department and there were a good 400 onlookers. They took their dancing seriously. Tomorrow are the finals, in which the best teams from each department go up against each other. Will there be any halftime entertainment, you ask? How about a couple of off-key foreign teachers doing their best to sing "Stand By Me" to several hundred students? Yeah, that sounds about right. We'll let you know how it goes.


Halloween: American holidays are big here. We went to no less than three different Halloween parties, two of which were organized by us. We run an English club with Jill and Jason that meets alternate weeks--one week with 1st and 2nd year students, the next week with 3rd and 4th year students. We threw a Halloween party for both of those groups, and both times it was crazy-go-nuts. With a trivia competition, word search, "see who can make the most ridiculous costume out of common household items" competition, bobbing for apples, and plenty of Vietnamese candy, how can you not have a blast?


Things were made even crazier by the fact that Steven invited his 1st year students to English club for the first time this week (since they started classes a month later than everyone else). All three of his classes showed up almost in their entirety, plus several 2nd year students. We figure we had somewhere around 65 people packed into our one-room apartment. A little tight.

Well, that's been life for us lately. The year is going by fast, and we're looking forward to Thanksgiving, Christmas, and visitors from home for the holidays (woohoo!). Good times. Good times.