As much as I love and miss my new friends in Ninh Thuan, it was really nice to see my friends at the guest house again. I haven't stopped jabbering on in English since I got back, it's just such a relief to be understood by everyone I'm talking to. That's why I kind of appreciated that it was just the Americans venturing off on our own today. Our first task was to find food for Alex and Molly. We ended up in the really touristy part of town where everything was written in English (always a bad sign). They got food at a California coffee place and we high-tailed it out of there. They ate in the tiny park in front of the Notre Dame Cathedral, which was full of tourists like us taking pictures with the pigeons in front of the church. Our companion during these escapades was a street girl (who was most pushy [literally] towards Ming) who knew very useful bits of English for her line of work: "buy a flower?," "why not?," "bad man," and my favorite, "number one bad man." It's becoming increasingly difficult to just ignore all these kids and I'm not sure exactly what to do in that kind of situation.
After the girls were done eating, we went into the cathedral. We were greeted at the door by two Vietnamese nuns wearing stunning ao dais (traditional Vietnamese dresses with slits in the sides and trousers of the same material worn underneath) made from beautiful white silk. Inside, you could clearly see it was modeled after Notre Dame in Paris, with lofty ceilings and the stations of the cross in little alcoves off to the sides of the aisles. Molly noted how odd it was that many of the saints represented here were made of plastic, some even accompanied by there names in neon lights. There wasn't much stained glass, but what was there was beautiful. I did however notice that the Virgin Mary was more frequently represented than images of Christ. (It reminded me a little of the controversy involving the Catholic Church in certain parts of South America, where some believe Mary is worshipped as more important than Jesus, clearly a hot-button issue.) Nevertheless, the whole church was truly beautiful and I did feel a rather strong sense of belonging, being Catholic. Catholicism is a part of me and my upbringing and it was nice to find a piece of that here in Vietnam. It was comforting and made me feel even more at home here.
For dinner, we went to a fabulous place in district three where we had a small rice pancake (resembling a disk about the size of my fist) with toppings including shrimp, pork, quail egg, chicken eggk, and squid. The food was incredible and the whole group had a lot of fun (thoguh I think the highlight was when Kendra accidentally dropped a bit of fish sauce in her tea and continued to drink it anyway...I tasted it our of twisted curiosity and it really wasn't too strong). Later that evening we went with a couple of our Vietnamese roommates to a park facing a side of the cathedral. There's a very efficient system in place there - you pick a spot where an employee of a coffee shop across the street gives you a sheet of newspaper so you can sit on the ground then takes your drink order and brings it to your patch of sidewalk. I had a very nice conversation with My and Hanh while drinking my cafe sua da and just enjoyed watching the city at night.
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