Teacher's Day

Today was teacher's day! I was told you get tons of presents from your students, but I only had one class scheduled so I didn't get too much. Two ties, a nice pen, flowers, and a bunch of cards. Pretty cool, though, nonetheless. We also had a party in the office with an awesome buffet and wine! Here are some pics!

Life's been good lately. I don't have pictures of my apartment ready to upload yet, but they will come soon. On my way to work today I had another realization that I'm starting to get used to the craziness of this place. Some things have become routine, like driving my motor bike to work, wearing my face mask to filter out the polluted air, ignoring solicitors on the streets, drinking beer with ice, etc. etc. I'm starting to realize the affects of communism here as well. Of course it's not as radical as Cuba or anything, but I'm not allowed to even mention anything about the government or religion in class. The Vietnamese way of thinking is also very relient on copying eachother's ideas rather than being original. What I consider "cheating" on a test, for example, my students see as merely helping out a friend. And when we do arts and crafts in class, I'll walk around the room after five minutes and see that everyone has drawn the exact same designs or patterns. Even on the streets you see repetition of the same stores over and over and over again. One person I talked to who has been in the country for a while told me that when one person thinks of a new idea for a business, a month later you'll see ten more of the same pop-up. Copy-right laws don't exist here either. Copying DVD's, books, clothing labels, hand bags, shoes, and much more is a common way to make a living. And since there are no regulations, they are able to do a really good job at it. When you buy a fake book or DVD, you can't even tell it's fake besides it's low price. Many book publisher's won't even allow their books to be sold in Vietnam cause they know the second it enters the country, it's going to the copy shop!  

Anyway, everyone in the office is going out for karaoke this afternoon so I've gotta go! Keep commenting.