A few bizarre and unusual things over the past week.  The first was relatively painless and docile.  Namely, the fact last week I more my black, silk ao the in public for two classes and virtually NO ONE reacted to it.  I have a YouTube video here of it in case you're interested.  I got worked up for nothing.  I didn't make a video of the time on Friday because I anticipated a lack of a reaction, and, sure enough, NOTHING.  If anything, I got some uncomfortable looks from students I know. 

What happened to the above mug?  It first must be said that was the commemorative 50th anniversary of the English department at Viet Nam National University.  It was a normal evening, except what sometimes happens of the power going out.  So, I was already boiling water and preparing for a cup of tea (Grandma, the green tea y'all got me; it's good!), and got the mug and sachet ready.  As I was adding the water I heard a *creek*, and just looked around, wondering what it was.  All of a sudden, the counter was wet, I was confused, and then I saw the mug.  It apparently WAS NOT a mug from such a company as this. 

Yes . . . This morning, just as I was stepping out of my home to teach, I saw a shape in the corner where I had my coat rack.  I snapped a few pictures, knowing it was a big spider, then went to class.  It wasn't until I returned, loaded the pictures from my camera, and touched up the picture that I saw how . . . creepy it was.  Those section of tiles are maybe 3-4 inches in length, so that spider spreads out well over the palm of my hand.  I'll be going about my day as normal, but . . . ugh.  It's not there anymore, so maybe it's gone. 

I just randomly remembered something that happened a little over two weeks ago, I think.  First, the school usually has a lady who cleans the grounds of the school also go into the foreign teachers' rooms and "clean" them.  When I say "clean," I really just mean sweep the floor, and mop with water that may or may not have cleaning solution in it.  It's all perfunctory, almost like they're saying, "Here, my presence has made your room clean."  There are times I wonder whether the average Vietnamese person approaches cleaning that way, then this random memory I'm having causes me to think otherwise. 

It was the normal time during the week when the lady comes in to clean my room, but then another lady was there, too.  She was new, and it wasn't made apparent just how new she was until she started cleaning.  By cleaning I mean cleaning.  She was seriously scrubbing the surfaces, moving objects around on the furniture to clean the surface better—she was doing a good job.  That was, until the original cleaning lady saw what she was doing.  Now, what she said in Vietnamese meant little more "no, you don't need to do that," but ultimately amounted to "stop or you'll clean it!" 

I never have seen that new cleaning lady since then . . .

It's finally AUTUMN!  I've been waiting for it for over a month now.  There were times where it seemed like the weather wanted to become Autumn, then it returned to more Summer-like weather.  However, the weather for the past week has been much cooler, and the forecast for the coming days is much of the same.  The big signifier was this, though:  students were bundling up while I continue to wear the exact same thing. 

At some point, I might actually NEED to wear long-sleeved shirts.  Imagine that? 

I'm normally pretty neutral about months.  Unless there's a holiday or event planned on a particular month, it's just another way of measuring time.  However, me and the month of October need to work on our relationship some.  We've been fighting over work and trying to make-up from missed opportunities in September.  I kind of feel like we're married, though I'm a really poor judge of what that means, really. 

On the other end of the spectrum, there is November, which isn't October (astute observation, I know).  More importantly, though, is it'll be my 27th birthday on the 27th of November.  I would love to say "and it's on Thanksgiving," but the status of mashed potatoes, gravy, stuffing, cranberry sauce, pumpkin or sweet potato pie, and turkey are all . . . dubious likelihoods, let's say. 

But it's not October. 

I get the distinct impression there must be a lot of new people working at the university this year compared to last year.  After a month of school starting back up, at least one person each week has come by the foreign teacher guest house and will do at least two of the following:  peer into my window (if open), knock on my door, and/or open my door before I am even near the door to open it myself.  A guy just did that a few minutes ago. 

That also happened twice yesterday by the same guy.  The second time he asked if I spoke Vietnamese, I did, and he said he was trying to get to building A5.  I already guessed that because he, like the rest of the newbies, didn't know there are two A5 buildings:  one at the College of Foreign Languages campus, and one at the larger National University campus we're a part of.  To be honest, I didn't feel like explaining that to him.  I just told him this is the foreign teacher guest house (also one of the A5s), which he repeated back a little puzzled, and I said, "Correct.  That's the reason I'm here." 

I probably could have been a little bit more patient and polite, eh?  Maybe I should go the other route and throw them completely off by having my small tea kettle ever-full of green tea, and, whenever one of those meandering people comes by, mistake them as people REALLY wanting to sit and drink tea with me.  THEN I'm sure they'd figure out they're at the wrong place. 

Simply funny.  I don't think it's actually politically motivated, which is nice.  Both candidates get a laugh. 

A curious phenomena had been (and is) taking place next to me at the foreign language high school beside the foreign teacher housing.  Many students, mostly girls, are reciting what sound like cheerleading cheers, obscure alterations of Queen's "We Will Rock You" (they seem to have confused Hans and Franz there, singing "we will pump you up"), or what sound like crowd-led cheers at different sporting events.  It's the anti-sporting event:  cheering for yourself. 

Perhaps the temptation is a familiar one, but when there's no "other" to be cheering and encouraging, who's all the noise for?  Probably just kids being kids, but I wonder where they get the idea from. 

I am slow to admit the fact I receive HBO and Cinemax (based in Singapore, but with Vietnamese subtitles) on my television here, and how the school pays for it.  I admit it that makes me a little pampered, so am not picky if the cable goofs up now and again.  However, something a little beyond the normal quirks has been happening this week, and with one movie in particular:  The Good Shepherd. 

Now, I know it's a story about the formation of the Central Intelligence Agency, and Matt Damon's character' has the name Shepherd, so the title is kind of a play with words with a more well-known Shepherd.  When I first noticed a couple weeks ago it was going to be on HBO, the Vietnamese subtitle for the title was translated for the literal religious meaning, not the movie application.  I didn't think much of it, but, come this past Sunday at 8 PM when it premiers, I flip to HBO and I get these multicolored vertical bars and no movie. 

I didn't think much of it then since I knew it was going to be showing again different times in the week, so I waited until another showing.  Come the showing on Monday, it's the same thing, as I'm greeted with vertical bars 30 minutes before the movie and throughout the night.  The same thing on Tuesday, as well as just now at 6 PM.  However, the repeat showings of The Running Man on Cinemax are always showing each time. 

Now, maybe someone is really a big fan of Arnold and wants everyone to see him help Buzzsaw work on his splits, or . . . I hesitate to say.  Let's just say this isn't a coincidence anymore. 

[Correction:  I realized Matt Damon's character wasn't named Shepherd, but he did at a point refer to himself as a gatekeeper, hence the shepherd correlation in the title.  Minor, but important, difference.]

Today was the day for my final class of the school year . . . in theory.  True to form as some bits of news find their way to me, there was no afternoon classes today!  None!  All there "was" was a stony-silent classroom building with nary a soul there, except for me and a few random straggling students (probably just as ill-informed as myself).  Will there be any class to make up for the one missed today?  Doubtful.  Instead, what I found myself doing was correct the Course Outline (basically it's a big syllabus) to be used the next school year for the first-year students arriving then, which I'm taking a break from at the moment. 

I guess you could call this the least-sentimental final class I've ever had, given, well, nothing sentimental was ever shared because there was no class.  Sentimentality isn't something I go hunting for, but it happens sometimes.  At any event, I'm done for this school year, and all I need to do teacher-wise is turn in all of my grades for this semester and administer a final exam or two. 

That's life, eh what? 

That's what I ate last night.  It's taken me a full 24-hours--and a very nice breakfast at the fancy Sofitel Metropole--to recover from the experience.  I thought my food eating experiments would come with Vietnamese people, but these were foods prepared by the two male teachers from China and Egypt (he bled the cow himself to make it Halal).  Three Vietnamese students who ate with us even cringed and forced bits of each down.  On a sad note, this morning I didn't get to eat the special eggs I so love, as they didn't bring them out until too late and I was heading out the door.  Maybe . . . I'll need . . . to go back there . . . sooner . . .

I like the custard.  We eat also the ice cream on a warm day, my friends.  Do you like Trang Tien ice cream?  I think so.  What you do is the in the sun today?  I like the sun.  It cause me to feel warmth in the Summer.  Animals like the sun.  If it was cold, I'd to feel some the ice.  Do you like the ice?  Ice tastes not like the ice cream.  Ice cream is sweet.  Do polar pears like ice cream?  I think not.  Maybe they like to eat penguins maybe?  Penguins are like the dogs.  They play on the ice, not the lice the warrus.  Who are fat.  I knew a boy who was fat.  Do you know him?  I think so.  You would like him.  By the way he smiles.  I smile sometimes.  Do you want to see me smile?  It is very the beautiful.  Like the sun.  It shines.  :D

As occurred last semester, it's probably going to be a long night for me, and not because I want it to be.  I've been greeted again by the . . . pleasures, of living on-campus, and the school is hosting an apparently three to four hour music event on the playing field across from the foreign teacher housing.  Last time, it didn't end until, oh, 2 AM???  Mental note:  make strong coffee for when I teach in the afternoon. 

In somewhat quieter news, I will now NEVER eat any stir-fried banana so commonly served in Viet Nam, no matter the costs or how much I like it.  My reasons are I had some recently, and did what sometimes happens with food of a piece slipped and fell on my pants.  Now, the sauce for stir-fried banana is dark green in color, yet I now realize that could be for any number of reasons.  After I wiped off some of the sauce, it left a dark green stain on the inside of the left inner-thigh region of my pants.  No problem, only it looked like I hadn't done number one in about a month and had a slight . . . dribble recently, let's say.  What shocked me is once I actually tried to clean it. 

Usually just a little soap applied to most stains gets them right out without having to put them in the laundry.  I did that, and suddenly the stain went from a dark green to a medium-brown without the slightest hint of green.  "That's a little . . . odd," I thought.  I was about to do laundry anyway, so I threw it in with the load, and put a generous amount of detergent specifically over the stain.  "That'll do it," I confidently thought.  Not quite so much. 

Instead of being medium-brown, by the time I took it out of the wash it became a neon yellow.  I no longer gave the impression I had a lack of the number one's, but now it looked like I had poor bladder control.  Of course, that all changed once I ran some water over the stain, added detergent to the spot, and physically hand-scrubbed it.  Now, the stain is a faint candy-apple red!  What in THE WORLD causes that???

NEVER AGAIN will I put those things into my body. 

It's a few days until I bounce over to Thailand, but I'm having the curious experience of "the in-betweens" for me. 

As I entered this week, I was already mentally-prepared for visiting the somewhat familiar cityscapes of Chiang Mai and being in my students' shoes for two weeks as a graduate school student.  My lack of a readily available Internet connection this weekend concealed that my week would be a teensy bit different.  Nothing catastrophic, but different. 

Simply, there was a misunderstanding about when I'd leave, which was perceived to be on the 7th.  I felt I'd clearly said the 12th, but communication is always a two-way street, greeting the coming and going of everyday exchanges.  That's why, after a casual early morning breakfast out, I was at my computer with its now-functional Internet sometimes after 10 AM and learning my second-year students had their first day of class for the second semester today--with me. 

After scrambling for some information with the head of the department and getting some much needed material, I decompressed a little bit on the normally casual first day of class.  Besides the times in class going over misunderstandings from the previous semester (leaving my brain a little loopy and tired), it was good to see them again, and we already have a make up class tomorrow for the three weeks I'll be away.

Still, it's like a non-class experience.  When you're mentally juggling other things and not anticipating a return to the routine (however enjoyable it can be), it's a case of the in-betweens while already transitioning.  My lesson for tomorrow's class is already finished, but it's a curious experience to feel yourself entertaining two mindsets.  One side is arranging luggage, the other is ordering PowerPoint slides. 

Common fare on any given day. 

It appears I'd been so ill-adjusted to having any real free time that, now that I find myself with some, I'm unsure of what to do!  I've noticed that a little on my weekends, but now the semester is coming to a close and my schedule is a little lighter, though my students don't have a shortage of work.  Feels like I should be doing more, right? 

So, it's Wednesday, and I guess I'll do . . . something?

I got to wondering about my tendency to want to clarify things with people.  Often, I've done it just to see if they understand something, or if I've made a mistake somewhere.  Something I realize is how that can be a bit annoying when it comes to friends, and how such revalidating isn't often needed.  A part of me wonders if that's because of curious ways I try and express myself, or if I don't simply place doubt in relationships. 

There is the need to put one's weight into a friendship and just trust the one on the receiving end of things. 

As I entered the cafeteria to eat dinner, I noticed the people there in rapt attention towards what was on the television screen.  I glanced and noticed it was something like Cops, so paid no mind to it.  After I got my food and sat down, I began to hear gunshots (not too surprising if like Cops), then a woman's excessive crying and wailing.  I turned and saw this male cop crawling on the ground, bleeding, and in pain.  I returned to my food, then, some seconds later, heard more crying, looked up to catch the one guy at the edge of this large ship.  What does he do but take a 100 foot dive off the edge, followed up by a prolonged shot of this woman crying as she looks over the edge.  That confirmed what I assumed a minute or so before:  this was Korean. 

I was told a week or two ago that the mark of most Korean entertainment is that it often ends with something tragic happening.  An example a foreign teacher gave me about this was in one movie where this couple meets each other in the beginning of the film at a hospital (a foreshadowing of things to come???), and, over the course of the film, their relationship grows and blossoms.  Then, near the end of the film, they see each other at opposite ends of a street.  So, they both run across the street towards each other, embrace, only to get hit by a bus and killed!  When I first heard that I laughed because it sounded like some dark comedy, but then I realized this was just a mark of the genre.

Can anyone fill me in on why that's a common thread through most Korean entertainment? 

Someone I know gave me a piece of dudu the other day.  It wasn't her dudu, mind you, nor was it very big, but she'd been given a lot of dudu herself the other day from a friend of her's.  I was given it at the end of an observation that had been done of my class, which I was completely unaware that there were bags of dudu in my classroom, but that didn't seem to be a distraction to the class. 

Now, I do know she actually gave another teacher who was observing me a bigger piece of dudu, but that was alright by me.  Personally, my life is not marked by the passage of dudu into my body, which leads me to my present predicament:  how do I get rid of the dudu I have?  I can't very well walk up to a complete stranger, saying, "Please, take my dudu."  They may not even like dudu, much less want mine. 

So, I'm keeping it in my fridge because I don't want anyone to know it's here, else they may think, "Hey, he likes dudu," and get me more.  What then?  Dudu build-up, that's what.  Exactly what I don't want. 

Man . . . anyone want my papaya?  I mean, seriously . . .

(Hey, I've been sick, and my mind is loopy now.  I can write what I want!)

Curious bonding experience, being a foreigner.  The university has some 100 Chinese students studying Vietnamese here, many of whom are housed across from the school cafeteria.  I'd gotten to meet one student randomly during lunch, and also randomly met her and her friends during dinner.  It was a curious conversation then, where they confessed that when they tried speaking English it was intermingled with Vietnamese, and when I tried speaking Mandarin is was also intermingled with Vietnamese. 

Despite that, I needed to tell them even though we were all laowai ("foreigners/outsiders" for my non-Mandarin speaking compatriots), they would still get a better price at the market. 

Oh well.  Chung ta shi laowai.