Quick Thought

Today I went to the supermarket with another volunteer and while we were leaving one part of the store, we turned around to a women holding an iphone up to snap our picture. Being one of very few foreigners in Tra Vinh (when we see white people we also stare) I've adjusted to getting a lot of looks and a lot of "hellos" but this women did neither. She just held up her phone in our faces, didn't make eye contact, didn't smile and didn't say anything, she just snapped a photo. In our shock and also lack of Vietnamese my reaction was something of a mix of a glare and a arm waving of "what the heck" as we walked away but the whole experience felt rather degrading. I am already conscience of not snapping photos of people without their permission but this really made me reflect how people must feel when someone sticks a camera in their face like their in the zoo. 

Adventures

I just got the afternoon off to wait for people to come and clean my air conditioner so I decided to post a  few pictures here. 

This is me outside of a Khmer pagoda, of the Khmer people who are descents of Cambodia, in Tra Vinh, there are many pagodas in the city of a variety of types of Buddhism but the Khmer pagodas are definitely the most elaborate. 

This is the weirdest (and most disgusting) thing I have eaten so far in Vietnam (and I think my life). It's an egg with a partially developed duck fetus inside. I've been eating meat while I'm here in keeping with trying everything. With this egg however I met my match. The taste was ok but the fact that there was clearly a duck in the egg was more than I could handle. I've always had a bit of a fear of those funny bloody bits you sometimes find in eggs so I wasn't too surprised at how gross I found this delicacy. 

Here I am participating in a tug of war competitions that the departments at Tra Vinh University participated in to celebrate Teacher's Day. It was pretty funny and my team won our first time but lost the second. 

This is a decoration in Ba Om pond as a part of the celebrations for Ok Om Bok - a Khmer festival to celebrate the moon and a successful rice harvest. The festival was to me something of a mix between a country fair and something I've never seen before. There was paper lanterns, a parade, a concert, a parade, a ladyboy performance and more. Being the only foreigners there we got interviewed for television twice (supposed to air tomorrow morning) and generally a lot of stares and hellos.

Later on in the evening of Ok Om Bok some of us decided to try and find the pagoda where the paper lanterns were being launched from. We did and when we arrived (quite late in the evening, maybe 11pm) they were almost finished but invited us to help launch the final lanterns. It was an amazing experience that I will never forget. The monks were very welcoming and made for a magical end to an already very cool evening.

This is all of the "volunteers" (we're all here for different reasons but it makes it easier) except for Cherry wearing our ao dais for Teacher's Day. From left to right: Lisa, Alica, me, Vincent, Laura, Tayce and Ashlee. Everyone is from Canada except for Vincent and Laura who are American.

Wearing my "ao dai" for Teacher's Day celebrations, with my supervisor. 

New Fashions.