Our first one shows Micah's first experience with chopsticks (albeit a pair of training chopsticks with Thomas the Tank Engine on them). Our teammates got us a set while we were all on a visit to Hanoi in April. Micah loves them and figured out how to use them remarkably fast. The other people in the video are ELI Vietnam folks; we were all in Hanoi for some leadership team meetings.
Video numero dos is Micah falling asleep at lunch one afternoon. For some reason the kid can't help waking up at 5:30 in the morning, so by lunch he's usually more than ready for his afternoon nap. This time it was a little more extreme than others...
And finally, a sweet one of Sedakah cracking up at Micah. She smiles at everyone, but doesn't really laugh for anyone except her big brother. We agree with her that he's a pretty funny kid.
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?
So it's not quite Christmas yet, but we thought we'd post this video Christmas card for those of you who keep up with us. Last Friday, Steven and Will (the other foreign teacher at Quy Nhon University) had a party (or actually a series of parties) for all 200+ of their students at our house. We invited each class of over 50 students to come, one per hour, throughout the afternoon and we had different activities for them to try--games, songs, card making, snowflake making, cookie decorating. In all, about 120 of the 200 showed up and we had a blast. An exhausting blast, to be sure, but a blast nonetheless. You'll get to see some of the party, along with just some pictures of our family getting ready for Christmas. Maybe post-Christmas we'll post a follow-up video as well. In the meantime, Merry Christmas and enjoy!
(I apologize for the "squished" look of the video. Apparently my video editing program is having some problems distinguishing between widescreen and not-widescreen. We'll see if we can get that fixed.)
Well, it's about time isn't it? Here are some highlights from the last few months in video form. Thanks for your patience with us. Somehow there just isn't as much time as there used to be for making videos and writing blogs. Hmmm. Curious.
For those reading this on Facebook, click here for the video.
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).
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.)
On Monday, November 2nd, Tropical Storm Mirinae lumbered ashore in central Vietnam, bringing a surprising amount of wind, rain and waves along with it.
Having recently survived Typhoon Ketsana (a Category 2 storm which hit about 200 miles north of us) we weren't really expecting too much from a puny tropical storm like Mirinae. The main difference, however, was that instead of hitting 200 miles away, Mirinae slammed into Phu Yen province, just a few miles south of Quy Nhon. We weren't the only ones surprised, as this article makes clear. While the wind in Quy Nhon was definitely stronger than Ketsana due to the storm's proximity, it was the rain that we couldn't believe. 600 mm of rain fell in our province in a 24 hour period. That's 23 inches in 24 hours, the heaviest rain here in about 60 years and far above and beyond anything we ever saw in "rainy" Washington State. Since the bulk of the city is built on a fairly sheltered sand spit far from any large rivers, Quy Nhon itself was unaffected by floods but many of the low-lying areas in this part of the country were inundated. So far, 98 deaths have been blamed on the storm, with 20 people still unaccounted for. Despite everything it threw at us, we stayed safe and dry in our on-campus apartment here (except for the occasional foray outside with ponchos and video camera). Through the entire storm the power never went off and we never ran out of water. The same can't be said for much of the rest of the city, which is currently going on 5 days with no running water. Everyone seems to be taking it in stride, though. Life is basically back to normal in the city, with students attending classes and people back at work. A friend of ours who had returned to her hometown (about 40 miles from Quy Nhon) to weather out the storm with her family brought back this random and kind of sad story: An old man who lived down the road from her kept 100 pigs on his little farm. As the rains started to fall, he didn't pay much attention--this is Vietnam and it rains a lot here, after all. But by 9 PM the water had risen quickly and washed all of his pigs downriver. A single sow was saved by a man who somehow either hauled it into his boat or towed it to shore. He took it back to the old man and sold it to him for 200,000 VND, or about $12.
And now, if you're not tired of storm videos yet, here's what things looked like from our perspective...
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.
A short video of Typhoon Ketsana as seen from Quy Nhon--before, during and after. Not quite CNN quality, but you get the picture. (If you're reading this on Facebook you probably don't see the video. Click here to go to it.)
In order to show folks what we've been up to for the past 15 months or so, we put together a short (5 minute) video with pictures and some interviews with students. It's focused mostly on the teaching aspect of our work over there, and though you're hopefully aware that our focus is broader than simply teaching English, we hope it gives a good glimpse of what we've been doing and what some of the students are like.
So, click and enjoy. Also, please note that there should be a new blog entry with more information about our summer directly below this entry, published just a short time before this one. Two entries in one day, you ask? Yes. That's what happened.
We had our teammates and some students over for dinner this evening, and after dinner someone pulled out a couple packages of Pop Rocks that Joelle's mom had sent to us from the States. Having nothing even remotely resembling this fabulous candy in Vietnam, the students were (needless to say) flabbergasted, befuddled and beguiled. It was kinda funny.
Since moving to Quy Nhon about a month ago, life has sort of settled into a routine. Granted, it was a great routine—full of spending time with students and fun teammates, finding new coffee shops in town, and preparing to teach come October—but it was a routine nonetheless. Thus, when the opportunity to participate in a really weird group activity came up last weekend, we took it.
The event was called "The Basket Boat Race" and it was pretty much what you might imagine a basket boat race would be like. A little background information first, though, for the uninitiated: Quy Nhon has a sizeable fishing fleet—squid and many other squishy, fishy delicacies are plentiful in these waters. Rather than going to the trouble of constructing a marina, though, the fishermen simply anchor their boats in the shallows near shore and shuttle back and forth in small, round boats that look like baskets.
Combine this background information with the fact that Quy Nhon also plays host to a frequently-changing group of Peace-Corps-ish volunteers from New Zealand and you end up with an official Basket Boat Race. The Kiwis of Quy Nhon took it upon themselves to give all comers—not just Vietnamese fishermen—a chance to experience the glory of the basket boat. And, like true Westerners, they went and turned it into a competition.
Starting at the unconscionable hour of 7:00 Saturday morning, a random group of foreigners and Vietnamese began to gather on the beach across the street from the university. By 8:15, after only a few miscommunications and troubled translations, everyone was ready to don their bright orange life jackets and paddle their hearts out in groups of three. Everyone, that is, except for me (Steven) since I chose to be the official group photographer/videographer.
The resulting chaos (and fun) is chronicled in the video below.
