How nice! You can speak Chinese!

I finished my eight week long Vietnamese class at the Southeast Asian Summer Institute in Madison.  After innumerable glasses of iced Pete's Coffee, an exciting fan dance at the SEASSI talent show, and a quick few days in Missoula packing and enjoying Biga Pizza, I boarded the plane for Vietnam.

Vietnamese professors and students, SEASSI 2012

My trip to Vietnam left something to be desired. . .the ticket was over $5,000, and I paid $275 for my luggage, yet I had trouble with my bags at every stop, maybe in part because the flights had been billed separately to save money.  The highlight of the trip was spending an hour or so in the Seoul airport, where they have a Korean culture area.  Despite my jet lag and exhaustion, I managed to paint this woodblock folk picture, which was a very zen experience in the hustle and bustle of this ultra-modern airport!

After perhaps 30 hours at airports and on planes, I reached the Hanoi airport and took a taxi to a small hotel near the airport.  The next morning, I walked to a nearby bar/restaurant and managed enough Vietnamese for the most important question, "Where is coffee?"  Though the bar keeper didn't have coffee there, she walked me across the highway and down the way to a small cafe run by her niece, where she prepared me my first delicious and VERY STRONG cup of Vietnamese coffee!  It is shown in this photo, dripping through a little fliter into a glass with sweetened condensed milk in the bottom, being heated by sitting in a tea cup full of hot water.  Very cool!

So, I got coffee using Vietnamese!  Yay!  But my language skills apparently leave something to be desired as, after I told the hotel manager in what I thought was intelligible Vietnamese that I would be working as a professor at Can Tho University,  she said in English, "How nice!  You can speak Chinese!"  Apparently I really am nearly unintelligible as the taxi driver, thinking that I was flying to Guang Zhou (Canton), China, took me to the international departure area, not the national departure area where I can fly domestically to Can Tho.  Sigh. . .

After a short two hour plane ride, I reached beautiful Can Tho, in the Mekong Delta south of Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon).


A river in Can Tho City, from the plane



Boat with view of the longest bridge in Southeast Asia
taken in front of my hotel