Day, the fifth. The day commenced as usual, with a hot shower and a decent breakfast in the hotel. At UEF, we had a guest speaker (who happened to have the same name as one of the UEF students, Tuan Nguyen) who talked about the Mekong Delta in general, getting more and more detailed as the hour went on. He talked a lot about the culture and the agriculture of the Delta, hoping to give us insight before our daytrip tomorrow. In our language class, we reviewed how to pronounce numbers in Vietnamese, which lead into learning the days of the week and months of the year.
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| Lunch at UEF |
Our company visit today was to ACDI/VOCA (created by the merger between Agricultural Cooperative Development International and Volunteers in Overseas Cooperative Assistance), an NGO that assists farmers in Vietnam and other countries around the world in cocoa production through the Success Alliance Vietnam program. They went through a slideshow that explained the process of planting, growing, gathering, fermenting, drying, and selling cocoa in the Mekong Delta. They were also nice enough to give each of us a Success Alliance Vietnam hat and bag. It was another good segway between today and our trip tomorrow.
After leaving ACDI/VOCA, we took a taxi to a karaoke club called V-Box. We purchased a private box for the 17 of us (all of us from Pitt and two UEF students), which ended up costing about 150,000 Vietnamese dong, or around 7-8 US dollars for two hours of karaoke and some food. We sang everything from N*Sync to Queen to Mika to LMFAO; it was a great time. They don’t have clubs like this in the US, probably because Americans don’t karaoke near enough to warrant building and maintaining them.
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| Walking past the Opera House on the way back to the hotel |
Because we have an early start tomorrow morning (we leave the hotel at 7:30, an hour before normal), I decided not to go out to explore the city tonight; rather a few of us (Comer, Nikki, Austin, and I) decided to stay in, blog, and watch Mulan. Hell yes Disney movies in Vietnam.
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