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Tết Trung Thu


My first holiday in Viet Nam, the Mid-Autumn Festival. Even though I had another long day, I ventured out to District 5 to get special chè (sweet soup) and this little fried treat. It was basically a Chinese doughnut filled with some sort of green bean paste that strongly resembled custard. At any rate, the most amusing part of it was that the food was wrapped up in what was essentially trash. I've been told that it's the Vietnamese way of "saving money and saving the environment" at the same time. I'm still deciding final thoughts on this... 

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Some of the teachers, myself included, have asked our students, "If you could have superpowers, what would you want?" Of course I'd love to be able to teleport and control the very fabric of space and time, but there are other, more practical powers that I'd also like to have. One such power I'd love to have is the intellectual capacity to absorb and comprehend all that is around me. I'm talking about Sherlockian powers of deduction, where I could notice every little thing about a person and accurately guess everything about them. That would really come in handy right about now. I can't believe that even after a year, I'm still experiencing jarring culture shocks. This one's got to be the most upsetting, too, mostly because it involves family. The ball's in my court now, though, and what happens next could really define my eventual departure from Vietnam. Walking on eggshells now...