the love story of a dragon and a fairy and also pronoun struggles

Yesterday marked the first day of the new semester. Fun, fun, fun! Every morning we walk to the University of Economics at Ho Chi Minh City. It is about a five minute walk and on the way it is imperative for me to get my cafe den da (black coffee with ice). The only problem is it has too much ice, not enough coffee. But then again it only costs 40 cents so it is okay if I get more than one every day. When I go back to the states I don't know how in the world I am going to adjust to paying 2 or 3 dollars for a coffee. America= failing on the whole money situation.

We didn't have Vietnamese class yesterday, instead we finished up our SIT orientation. There were two presentations, one on the University and one on the city in general. There was a section on traffic. It went exactly like this:

Things to remember while crossing the street:

Cyclos do not give way (never)

Motorbikes do not give way (never)

 Cars do not give way (never)

Truly, words of wisdom. Then the Chief of Public Affairs from the U.S Consulate came into our classroom and talked with us. It was really interesting to hear how he ended up working for the Consulate. I guess anyone can take a test, for free, and if you pass then you have an oral examination– basically a series of interviews. Then they do a background check and if you are clean enough then you get a job. He has worked in some really cool places. This is his fourth location and he has only been here for three weeks. It almost sounds like my dream job. After we said goodbye to him we had a group lunch at a restaurant across from the University. Co Thanh has been showing us a lot of good restaurants to eat at since we are responsible for finding our own food from now on. I definitely am going to return to some of them, but I also want to keep exploring and finding my own favorite places.

Even though we didn't have Vietnamese yesterday we did have a lecture in our History and Culture of Vietnam class. It was fairly interesting. We talked about the legend of Vietnam, which our professor repeatedly called bullshit but a nice story. This is the story in a nutshell: A male dragon from the ocean and a female fairy from the mountains fall in love, have 100 sons, get divorced, decide not to have joint custody and just divvy up the sons, the dragon returns to the sea, and the fairy hightails back to the mountains with her fifty boys who become the first people of Vietnam. Boom.

Another weird, but true, piece of history: the Chinese Emperor named Vietnam. It was after the Chinese were defeated for probably the millionth time by the Vietnamese and the King of Vietnam wrote a letter to the emperor of China being like, will you please give our country a name. I like Nam Viet. What do you think? And then the Emperor was like no, that is a terrible name it should be Viet Nam. A little bit comical.

After class a few of us went to the Ben Thanh Market. It was an adventure per usual. I got exactly what I was looking for: a leather (supposedly) messenger bag. I wanted a bag that my laptop would fit in but it wouldn't be obvious that I was carrying around an expensive piece of equipment. After we were done our shopping we went and found a place to eat. There were a lot of locals sitting outside the "restaurant" so we decided to go for it. I had noodles with shrimp and squid.

This morning was our first Vietnamese class. Just riding the struggle bus. There are 8 ways to say "you." 8. As in how many legs a spider has. That's not normal. And there are 5 ways to say I. Omg good thing I get to sit through 2.5 hours of class every morning so maybe by the end of the semester I will get it right.