The First Week

Okay... it is hard to believe we have been here a week! Hal, being the most familiar with the country, has settled right in and has been off to numerous meetings and will golf tomorrow morning. Everyone but me seems to have adjusted their internal clocks and are sleeping through the night.

We've discovered the local supermarket which does carry a few western products - cereal, granola bars, potato chips and pepsi. We've been advised to purchase milk from Australia or New Zealand in shelf stable packaging - king of like a super-size juice box. We've picked up fruit and vegetables from the neighborhood produce stands. We're still figuring out the meat part of it - we've purchased frozen products from the supermarket but haven't dared to buy anything from the open air. Eggs are not refrigerated here and you can buy chicken eggs or tiny brown and white quail eggs. I'll try to get a picture of those. There are also BLACK eggs, and we'll have to ask our friend Thuy (twee) what THOSE are. There is a good french bakery in our neighborhood as well. I walked downtown during breakfast time one morning and was intrigued to see the locals getting baguettes with vegetables and meat on them from a local pushcart, or sitting down at a cafe for pho which is a type of broth that you add bits of meat and vegetables to. I'll try to get a picture because it is quite different from having cereal or toast. Also, the food here is very inexpensive - 25 cents for a coke, $6 for a sandwich, fries, and a coke, $6 for a cab into district 1. Clothing is inexpensive too - $5 for silk pajamas; $4/meter for silk fabric, $4 for a shirt...

Silas and Clara really like their school. The system they are in calls kindergarten "year 1" which means Clara is in year 6 and Silas is in year 8. So far the only subject they feel behind in is Mandarin Chinese. Of course, Silas at least is far ahead in spanish! Clara has one teacher for most subjects except computer, library, and physical education - just like Dunn School. Silas has a different teacher for each subject. Clara was teamed up with a girl from Korea named Anna, and Silas was teamed up with a boy from Australia and a boy from Vietnam. They are both of great interest in the school since the majority of the students are Asian. For lunch each day they can choose from a western lunch or an asian lunch. Today Silas had shrimp scampi - the asian choice was a fish dish. We received the first school newsletter today. There is a new family orientation "tea" next Friday. The school has chosen a local orphanage as a charity and there is a drive for food, clothes, toys and money going on. The students will deliver the collected items in February. School begins at 8:00 a.m. and ends at 2:45. After the Tet holiday there will be an afterschool activity from 2:55 - 3:55 Tues. - Thur.: homework lab, computer club, science club, tennis, flag football, dance, art, or a bookclub. There were 28 new students that started school this quarter! There are about 350 students in the school. Last year (year 1) there were 150. To give you an idea of the growth in this country, they expect to have over 1,000 students within two years.

Our apartment is lovely and maids magically arrive to clean it EVERY DAY! We tried to send them away one day but they insisted that they must clean. The kitchen cupboards are positioned very high! I'm not especially short and it is difficult for me to reach the top shelf of the cabinets. When the air conditioning in one of the bedrooms wasn't working they came to fix it immediately. Also, the first sofa we had was made of some sort of fake leather and it started peeling, for lack of a better word, two days after we got here. We showed it to the office manager and they brought a new one the next day. We weren't really asking for a replacement, we just wanted to note the flaking on our inventory sheet so that we wouldn't be charged for the sofa when we left but that is how it was handled. This doesn't bode well for my own home maintenance this spring. I'll be very disappointed when I dial 0 and find my problems aren't fixed IMMEDIATELY, it will be even worse when my feet return to earth and I realize I have to fix things myself!


One thing that we've rapidly learned is that everything has a system that MUST BE FOLLOWED or there will be BIG PROBLEMS. For example, I went to Gloria Jeans to purchase a french press so we could have coffee, and included three bags of coffee - columbian roast, mocha java, and bena bena. Well, the guy rang up 2 columbians and one mocha instead of one of each and you'd thing the world was coming to an end. I told him "no big deal" since the bottom line was that the charge was correct, but he said "oh no, BIG PROBLEM with bank!". My mother, Silas and Clara were waiting for me outside and thought I'd been taken hostage. Since I mentioned it, there are few american chains here - Gloria Jeans, KFC, and Pizza Hut are the only three I've seen. There are many american apparel labels however - my Mother picked up a Chanel purse for $7.00 (120,000 VND), and we've seen copious quantities of Louis Vuitton, Ambercrombie, La Coste, Timberland, Banana Republic, etc... DVD's can also be had for a song though they don't always work in US machines apparently. The woman at one DVD stall said they do work in US computers, usually not on DVD machines. A lot of the movies currently out at the movies are on DVD here. So, let me know if you are dying for a designer label and I'll see what I can do for you... and as a special note to Sandy McDonald - how about copious instead of plethora for a change?

Ho Chi Mihn is divided into districts. Our neighborhood is located in Thao Dien Ward, District 2. Much of the central shopping and high-end hotels are located in the adjacent district 1. We went to dinner in district 1 last night at a place called Bun - there should be a symbol over the "u" but I don't know how to do that. Anyway, bun means rice noodle. We've managed to cook or eat primarily western meals up until then. I'm quite proud of Silas and Clara for trying new foods, though entire crabs came in the dish their grandmother ordered last night and we weren't sure what to do with them. We ended up setting them aside - Silas had a dish with duck - he had to take the duck off the bone to eat it. Clara loved the rolled noodles and the bean sprouts.

We're going to the pagoda tomorrow so keep watch for those pictures along with notes from Silas and Clara.