May 3 2004 11:14 am Well, here is what I should be doing: replying to a passel of emails (sixteen, to be precise) that I have received and not yet replied to - grading homework projects - lesson planning for this week, in which I will teach six or eight extra classes - or perhaps writing a paper for Wheaton. But so far this morning I have avoided all of those things, and so now I will continue to avoid them, for a little while.
On Friday I met with class 42a2 - well, really, about half the class, plus some boyfriends and neighbors - at 5 am by the school gates. It wasn?t until six that we actually boarded the bus and hit the road for or 200 km journey to the Phong Nha Caves (a UNESCO world heritage site). About 30 km before we got there, a woman on a motorbike ran into the back of our bus. Now, though you might suppose that since SHE was the one who hit us, we wouldn?t be held responsible, but that would be false. Our bus was?bigger?I guess that made us somehow culpable. We stopped and our bus driver accompanied the woman (who was unhurt) to the hospital for x-rays. And we sat. in the sun. for over two hours.
And I experienced the generosity of the Vietnamese people. One family who lived on the side of the road let a few of us come in and lay on their bed to ?rest? while we waited for our bus driver to return. We laid there, we laid in front of the fan, we ate cucumber and pate sandwiches, and we waited.
Finally we were on the road again and made it to the caves. Because it was a holiday, the place was packed with Vietnamese tourists, and so we got to wait another hour and a half to get tickets. This waiting was made bearable by ice cream and seven up in the shade.
To get to the caves, we rode in small, brightly-painted boats for about half an hour until we reached the mouth of the water cave. Inside, we rode for a while and then disembarked and hiked back into the cave a bit. After that, we reboarded and floated over to the ?dry? cave. We had to hike up a couple hundred meters to reach the entrance to the cave, and then we could hike into the cool darkness of the cave.
I got home from the caves around 9:30 Friday night, and left again Saturday morning at 8:30. This time it was to Ha Tinh with Lucy to visit Hallie?s hometown. Hallie?s family lives about 50 km away from Vinh in the countryside. Her father, mother, and younger brother live in a three-room house. The bathroom is a hole in the ground and the ?shower? a cement cube with a low faucet and a basin. Her father is a retired soldier and her mother sells pork meat.
Hallie?s family was very hospitable and made me very comfortable. I spent most of Saturday at the beach with Hallie and her friends from high school. New foods I ate: some kind of clam, some strange small bird, and some thing too crunchy wrapped in green leaves and fried. Foods I politely avoided: the stomach of the chicken and the heart of the pig.
I slept in the bed with Hallie and Lucy and woke early the next morning. Her mother usually gets up at three am to get the pork meat, and then she sells it out of her house from about four until six or seven. After some noodles for breakfast, Lucy and I motorbiked it back to Vinh, stopping on the way to visit a memorial for twelve young girls who were killed by a bomb while they were repairing a supply road during the Vietnam-American war.
When I came home, I was feeling a little under the weather, and I climbed into bed and watched Legally Blond one and two. Perhaps I was in need of a little stupid American culture.
I?ve put some photos from the weekend on my main website.