Successful communication and face pats.

We've had a couple of laid back days here in Vinh. Yesterday, after my Vietnamese lesson (Toi ten la Frances. Toi hai lam tuoi...), I checked my email briefly and then I walked back to the hotel by myself.
The road to the school is lined with Bia Hoi shops (beer shops) and pool halls, which means lots of stares as we walk. Yesterday, however, I was walking and one of the women who works at one of the pool halls waved me over, then dragged me into a chair and started in with a barrage of Vietnamese. So I answered that I didn't understand (in Vietnamese no less!) and she laughed and continued talking. One of her friends came over and there was a whole lot of patting of my face, and me answering their questions with "I don't understand". I finally told them my name, and they laughed and patted my face somemore, while I sat bewildered between the two little Vietnamese women. Finally I said goodbye and walked off to the hotel.
Thanh made lunch for us yesterday - good stuff. So we ate well and then cleaned up, doing dishes while squatting on two bricks by the faucet on the patio. Let me tell you, doing dishes sucks, but it especially sucks when you don't have a sink. After that, Eleisa and I went off to the supermarket. We went downstairs and asked the women who work at the hotel to call us a taxi. This took a lot of English, responses in Vietnamese, and then eventually writing down "Taxi. Maximark." on a sheet of paper. That they understood. In a matter of minutes, there was a taxi out there and Tum told him where to take us. We did our shopping (bread, cheese, noodles, and spaghetti sauce - we're a li'l homesick), and then summoned another cab. We showed the driver the keys to our hotel rooms and he understood that we wanted to go there.
Successful communication is always a cause for celebration here.
After the groceries were put away, Eleisa and I went to buy shoes. The guy at the shoestore was a super cutie, but on the short side. He found shoes in my size - the man is a genius, he just looked at my feet and came out with size 36, which is exactly right. I bought a pair of cute black sandals which I needed because my black flip flops fell apart after the torrential rain in Hanoi the night we took the train to Vinh. Anyway, the shoes cost me 120,000 dong - don't be put off by all those zeros, that's about $10. I was really proud of myself because I was able to understand the guy when he said my size. (I have so mastered my Vietnamese numbers.)
We had two team teaching sessions last night, from 5:45 to 9:30 pm, which is tiring, but we also had three fifteen minute breaks in between all that. Oh, and I got my first motorbike ride on the back of Tum's motorbike (she works at the hotel). Afterwards, we were wiped, so we sat out at the nuoc mia stand out front and enjoyed some sugar cane juice while we chatted with the lady who owns the shop and her son.
I can't even tell you how happy it makes me to be able to sit with people and make conversation when we can only speak bits of eachother's languages. There's an art to that, a beauty in communication, in the repetition, the hand signals, the laughter as we make mistakes.... Language is a powerful thing.
Today we went to Vinh market and bought fabric for some ao dai (ow zai - zai rhymes with "guy"). I got this great green fabric with flowers down the front. We then went to the tailor so that we could be measured, and in two weeks I will have some traditional Vietnamese clothing. Ha, ha. :) The crazy thing is that it will only cost $20 to have it custom made for me. That is just unreal.

I've made friends with the little boy whose grandfather is in charge of building maintenence. He's fifteen but looks like he's about eleven. He saw me crying at the computer one day when I was crazy homesick, and since then, he's been all smiles with me. It breaks my heart because the other kids don't really talk to him, because he's poorer. He doesn't speak much English, but I'm seriously in love with this kid. He takes care of a couple of younger boys and sometimes sneaks into the office and plays ping pong online. Yesterday he gave me a piece of dried sweet potato because I asked him what he was eating.

Oh! And today we had lunch with Andrea's student, Thuy and Tum and her ex. It was fun, all of us trying out our new languages, Thanh doing a lot of interpreting. And the food was delicious, so that was a plus.

Anyway, I'm going to be teaching soon, so I'm off.