Vietnam Day 42 (7/19/09)

Today I got much more of the lazy weekend day I was hoping for. We did have one outing in the morning but it was just around the corner. We took a tour of the factory that makes coconut candy, tasty toffee-like chewy candies that are sure to rot your teeth (you can literally feel the tooth decay as you chew). The factory ended up being only two rooms, one with a furnace for burning old coconut shells and mechanized mixers, then another room where a few employees cut the candy into squares while a number of women sitting around two cramped tables wrapped the candies so fast I could hardly see their fingers move (it reminded me of the scene from "Willy Wonka" where Mr. Salt's entire factory is busy unwrapping candy bars at lightning speed). The women wrapping all seemed very nice and smiled sweetly at us as we watched. We got some free samples then bought some sweets for ourselves and biked back to the hotel.

I should have spent the rest of the day journaling, but instead I took it easy with everyone else and just watched movies the whole time (using the projector we brought from the CET office). We ate way too much of our coconut candy while we were watching, but I still managed to have room for dinner. Today Sarah Trent from DukeEngage and Jocelyn from CET arrived to observe our operation. Presumably in their honor, the food served at the hotel was especially good. We made rice paper wraps with excellent char-grilled beef cooked on a skewer wrapped in a special leaf. When we first got the food, the hotel cook didn't give us the traditional fish sauce that goes with the dish because she thought it would be too pungent for our delicate foreign senses. It took some convincing but eventually she brought us the right sauce which ended up being worth the trouble and the smell (which I actually didn't find as bad as everyone else did).

After dinner, everyone gathered to practice the two songs the whole group will sing in the performance - the English song is Michael Jackson's "Heal the World" and the Vietnamese one is "Ngẫu Hứng Lý Ngựa Ô" (which I can't pronounce very well). We're all picking up the Jackson song pretty quickly but the Vietnamese song is a little more challenging for the Americans. The song is sung quite fast, but at least the Americans are only singing the chorus (though that's pretty rough in and of itself). The roommates keep clapping when we sing but without just cause in my opinion. At least we have a little less than a week to practice still.