Central Viet Nam

The ten days spent in central Viet Nam can only be described as beautiful, even then I feel as though that word does it no justice.

Quieter streets, great food, and very pleasant people made it extremely hard for me to leave. Before coming to central, I was going through some things about my grasp of the Vietnamese language. I guess I was really discouraged being in Ha Noi and feeling as though I wasn't improving... Coming to the central and hearing people who sounded like me, made me feel so much more comfortable. For once since I came to Viet Nam I felt like I was able to communicate with a local. A random night in Da Nang, Lan and I went to get some mien ga around 3am and had a long conversation with the man who owned the stand. And here I was amazed with myself. I didn't know where this vocab or confidence came from, but I was able to talk about something other than "what did you do today?"
I just hope I can carry on with this in Ha Noi :)

Glimpse into this week

Being here for a month has been the fastest and slowest times of my life. Viet Nam has taught me how to slow down and soak up whats good around me. Realizing the time we have left, I feel this anxiety that I won't be able to live it up as much as I want to. Recently I've been really beginning to understand the limitations on my Vietnamese. Although I can speak it quite easily with my family, I realize the barriers that exist for me and these barriers in which I have to break down. This week's assignment was to ask a local about the widening gap between the rich and the poor. While I couldn't understand everything the taxi driver said, I was able to get the jest of it. But during this time, I just wanted to be able to ask him more questions and make a real conversation. It was like this lump in my throat where my Vietnamese belonged.

Next few months I gotta reach my goal of getting better!

Reflection on Interview

This week we did an interview on a sales purchasing manager of a refrigerator company. The interview went really well. He was a previous UCHANU student so it made it easier that he understood what our project was about. Something that stuck out to me was that he was reflecting on his time at school and he told us something that i thought was very interesting. He said that many students are very studious, and they spend their time reading and studying. In books, worlds are perfect, but if we get stuck in those worlds, we're not really experiencing life. I think that's what stuck out to me most during this interview.