As many pictures as I can post in 15 minutes...

Thai Nguyen & Vinh Trips

We visited Thai Nguyen, a smaller city about 60km north of Hanoi and the city David and Nancy, our team leaders, lived in previous to their life with the Vietnam Teaching Fellowship. It was hot and more rural. I liked it.

Visiting the city of Vinh, around 120 km south of Hanoi and near the coast, was the real joy. It was amazing. We passed mountains on the way in by train. The streets were wide and
relatively calm. People smiled at us everywhere we went. The university there houses around 30,000 students and its sprawling grounds have athletic fields, a tall and majestic baby-blue library, and a lively campus with students congregating for games, martial arts, and even ballroom dancing out on the quad! I made friends quickly there (Huyen, Dinh, Hin, and more) that were so hospitable, even showing up on our last day there to walk us from the guesthouse to the front gate to see us off by taxi. They were legitimately sad to see us go. We ate weird foods and climbed Mount Quyet, the former site of an active anti-aircraft battery during the war. The mountain still showed the scars of intense bombing.

I spent an afternoon with Ann and Deena visiting Huyen's room. It was amazingly simple. One bed for her and her roommate. One desk. One broken CD player (which she described as a "stupid CD player!") she used to try to play some of her favorite VN music on, giving us twenty seconds of cultural experience before shorting out or suffering some other electronic malfunction. It was for the best though as she sang for us. I was so blessed to hear the words she sang. And I shared with her my own rendition of "Danny Boy". She might have been significantly less blessed by me.

But this was it. This is why I came to Vietnam. To meet people a world away and find all that we share in common. To build friendships. To see new things. To smile and to be smiled at in return. I have not found this yet in Hanoi. Things are busier and the students are more wise to the world. Being a foreigner does not get you nearly as far.

Yet, I hope to use Vinh as an inspiration. Vinh University is a big public, "land-grant" university that one might compare in some ways to my alma mater. I am currently at the small, urban liberal arts school. I will not experience here what I experienced there. However, I can show my students what the Vinh students showed me. In a word, hospitality.



As the giant statue of Ho Chi Minh shows, they really like "Uncle Ho" in Vinh. He was born outside of the city.