Herding Cats

A lot of events have happened since Matt and I last wrote, and we'll do our best to update the blog accordingly; but we thought we should start with the most recent and probably the most memorable: Week Without Walls, an experiential learning trip with 63 9th and 10th graders. 

The trip was hilarious, exhausting, and overall a fantastic experience.  We got to know a lot of new students and see new sides of kids we already had relationships with.  The kids had fun too, which is saying a lot considering how utterly chaotic the week was.

  

Our trip started at the airport with a yelling match between one of our teachers and a Chinese tour group that kept cutting in the check-in line, followed by a delayed flight that had us arriving at our hotel around 11:30 p.m (We met at the airport a 4:30).  By the time dinner wrapped up (half of our kids ordered steak!), our kids had a healthy 3 hours of sleep before our 5:30 wake up call, ensuring everyone was awake and enthusiastic for the packed day ahead.

 

Our first day we visited Angkor Wat and a few other temples.  Lacking both a guide and energy, the kids were unimpressed by the ruins, and most hung out by the food vendors buying smoothies (both the lack of information and our students' constant quest for food were real themes thoughout the trip).

In the afternoon the students went zip-lining, which sounded awesome.  Sadly, there were not enough spaces for the chaperones to go on the zip line, so we all grabbed a few beers and went wandering around some nearby temples.  This was fantastic. 

The next day things really started to fall apart.  The whole point of experiential learning is to get students outside their comfort zone and exposed to people, places and ideas that they normally wouldn't interact with.  The organizers had planned (though using the word planning really implies there was forethought) on providing this exposure through one morning of teaching at a local elementary school.  Not as much service learning as I would have liked, but at least they would be in a challenging situation.

Two things interfered with this plan.  One, the week we were in Siem Reap was a national holiday, which had all of the schools closing early.  It's really too bad they don't mark these things on calendars.

The second interfering factor takes a bit more to explain. To make sure our kids were able to teach, we scheduled another obscenely early wake up call for 5:30 and had our young educators ready to go by 6:30, a feat we were particularly proud of.  But then...the buses didn't show up.  For over two hours!  By the time we arrived at the school, the photographer had just enough time to snap a picture of everyone...before we were hustled back onto the bus for ATV rides!

That afternoon was filled with a cooking class that 1.) the hosting venue was entirely unequipped for and 2.) had our students cooking essentially Vietnamese food.  The true highlight for our kids was the convenience store next door.  From the moment we arrived we had students defecting to the air conditioned haven to buy cup noodles and cans of axe body spray.  Another popular and inexplicable item for purchase was cans of milk.

The only sensible reaction to the heat

Our third day was even less coherent than the day before.  We spent the morning at a "sports complex" where students played in the debilitating heat of Siem Reap (which truly is the hottest place in the world) before gathering around for a first aid demonstration. 

Look at that stellar engagment

 The barbecue lunch, which consisted of a single hamburger per person, was served at 10:30 and cooked by a bald Eastern European man with a cigarette constantly hanging out of this mouth and eyes obscured by sunglasses.  It was at this venue that our principal finally broke down and screamed.

From our fun sports party (which our itinerary called "campsite time") we squeezed onto a very poorly airconditioned bus. A mere hour and a half and one flat tire later, we arrived at a fishing community.  There we were ushered onto boats without any sort of explanation, and then boated through a floating village.  Understandably, our heatstroked students used this as nap time. 

We later learned that this floating community had a sizeable Vietnamese population, and that our school had actually donated money and supplies to the only school in the floating village.  This would have been a perfect thing to discuss with students had, again, there been any forethought put into this trip.

Nonetheless, we got some good pictures out of it, which I'm pretty sure was the whole point. 

 

That night, after returning to Siem Reap, we saw a circus performance that was really wonderful.  It involved, as many of our students repeatedly pointed out, hot guys.  Like, really hot guys.  After the circus we took our kids to the night market for a bit of shopping.  The plan had been to walk back from the night market, and it was only as we started walking back that we realized not a single chaperone knew the directions home.  Here's us blocking traffic as our group of 70 tried to figure out a plan.

The last day was probably one of our favorites.  It was completely unstructured so obviously it turned into a pool party where almost everyone on the trip was thrown into the water with their clothes on.  It was around this time that we gave up.

Check out those mad teaching skills

We made it back to Vietnam Friday night without losing a single kid!  So we're calling the trip a success and, actually, are looking forward to another trip next year, if for no other reason than I can dress like this and no one bats an eye. 

 

To end our post, here's a few photos of our kids doing what they did best:

 We have like fifty more of these.  The entire school has narcolepsy. 

Hanoi and Halong Bay

It feels strange to take a vacation when our day to day life (conducted in a city that is itself a tourist destination) often seems so foreign to us.  But when, for reasons beyond our understanding, our school went on holiday for a week, we jumped at the chance to explore more of the place we live.  We were looking for the easiest possible vacation, something that minimized difficulty and stress and maximized eating and lounging around.  And man, we hit the nail right on the head with this one: a week up North in Halong Bay and Hanoi.

We headed to Halong Bay first, and a day after leaving our home, we found ourselves on a luxury cruise, drinking hoarded bottled waters on our balcony that overlooked the breathtaking limestone islands of Halong Bay.  About a day and one hour after leaving our home, we found ourselves being served a 5 course lunch, while staring out a giant window.  The next two days were basically repeats of the last two sentences with some swimming and kayaking thrown in for good measure.

  

Despite being on a fairly large boat, half the passengers were a Taiwanese tour group that did their own thing, meaning that for most of our outings and meals there were only three other couples to explore with.  Of those three, all were expats and all were exceptionally interesting.  One couple was living in Singapore while the husband did something for an oil company, one couple directed and coached for Cirque de Soleil, and one couple (which included another CC graduate!) was living in Indonesia working for USAID.  We felt greatly outmatched in terms of interesting careers and life achievements, and communal meals were often very humbling and one-sided experience.

While there were a few experiences where we felt truly isolated, often we were surrounded by other boats and tours, leaving us to wonder where we could go that actually felt untraveled.

After our ridiculous cruise we headed back to Hanoi for three days of exploring.  Hanoi was, in a word, wonderful.  It's been a city for over a thousand years and its history is palpable in its architecture, winding narrow streets, hidden temples, and, in terms of more recent past, ubiquitous communist statues.

Hanoi's slower pace and cooler climate provided a nice counterpoint to the crazy bustle of Saigon.

Our first night there, we took a walk to find a restaurant recommended by our hotel and pretty instantaneously got side-tracked by a street vendor that was jam packed with people.  We couldn't tell what was on the menu, but luckily a surprise English speaker was there to save the day (thankfully this happens with some regularity).  This time our surprise English speaker was the ten year old child of someone who worked in the stall.  With his assistance, we actually learned what we were ordering was snail soup.  It was delicious if a bit chewy.

We cook for ourselves most of the time so one of the best parts of our trip was getting to go crazy with the food.  With one notable exception, (when the coconut pudding we thought we ordered turned out to be hot, salty rice mush with some sort of salty meat jerky shredded on top) we really lucked out with our meals.

The above photo was taken at a lunch place with great food and beer that cost 35 cents.  We had some incredible people watching (ie large groups of men getting wasted at noon) and some fun street vendors as our entertainment.   Our favorite was a woman selling banzais from her bike.  A similar thing would happen at lunch in Colombia: people would wander by selling trees and occasionally hammocks. We've always wondered who buys these things on impulse (probably the large groups of men getting wasted at noon).

Aside from the meals other highlights of the trip included walks around Hoan Kiem Lake, a very well used lake near our hotel. We visited there about two or three times a day and each time it had a different feel to it.

 

These women are cutting the flowers with scissors. 

In addition to walks around the lake, we spent most of our exploring the city on foot somewhat aimlessly.

 

 This helped us find surprise temples down random alleyways.

 

One of the only sights we actually made it to was the Temple of Literature - the first university in Vietnam, which was run by the Chinese and has a pretty strong Confucian bent to it.  Apparently, it's a tradition to go there upon graduation from university in Hanoi, a fact we learned when we showed up and the temple was overrun with well dressed men and beautiful girls in their ao dai.

This photo sums up Matt's experience in Asia perfectly.

Final highlight, street cat. A poor substitute for our own kitty, but great nonetheless.

You guys, it's really worth clicking on this picture to enlarge it.