Monday began as most days seem to recently, with rain. Perhaps the rain was just conveying many students dismay of it being the first real day of school but whatever the reason, it was the cause of the cancellation of our usual school assembly. Instead, we had a relaxing free period in the morning which I filled with Sudoku and conversation. Following the free period we had English and then two new classes: history and physics. I find the scheduling for history interesting; though there's 1000+ years of history in Vietnam, we have one class period of it (45 minutes) in an entire week... Anyway, this week's history period was spent with an introduction to the class and our school year. Physics followed history; we learned about movement and I was happily able to understand the content by the teachers diagrams and my rough translation of notes. I had physics again on Tuesday and I think it's my favorite class because it 1) makes the most sense and is 2) the most engaging.

Tuesday seemed like a late day for everyone, I was running a little late in the morning and at least half of our teachers were more than 5 minutes late to class. Literature and physics started on time but when we got to soft skills, no teacher showed up for 20 minutes. Eventually a substitute came in and we played a trivia-roulette style game for the rest of class - my team won by a landslide. After trivia we had geography where we learned about how to read legends on maps and how to decipher symbols. I tried to take notes from the writing on the board but the teacher's handwriting was so sloppy that I knew I wouldn't be able to decipher each word. Instead I just listened and looked at the maps in the book. Following geography was lunch and naptime and the late trend continued. Or rather, got worse? The "Military/National Defense" teacher was a no-show so it'll be another week until I find out what we do in that class... Instead, we had another virtually free period where the P.E. teacher babysat us. Anytime a student was too loud, she would hit the wooden desk with a meter stick to startle everyone into being quiet again. I had started to think that maybe it was a planned lesson to introduce students to the military and our National Defense class. Either way, I certainly sat quietly the whole time, our P.E. teacher was quite intimidating. When she left, we had biology which started with a lecture on evolution. I was able to understand a little through the notes we took but the teacher used a discouraging amount of (Vietnamese) acronyms which made it difficult to translate. Luckily The Anh wrote the words out instead of the acronyms and I was able to figure out what the teacher was writing. I've certainly gotten better at figuring out what accents are most commonly used by this method of note taking..

Wednesday was unexpectedly good. We started the day with soft skills and our cheeky teacher was back from whatever absence he had taken on Tuesday. He talked about the meaning of the abbreviation for the class, "KNS" and some of the topics we would cover like philosophy, religion, and leadership. English was next with a new foreign teacher from Ireland. I had a nice time talking to him as another native speaker - and one with a great accent. We also had two periods of chemistry - split by lunch - where we did review of the elements and compounds. I actually remembered a fair amount about chemical compounds, acids, and atoms, but the Vietnamese use slightly different names for each element and word, (axit=acid, notron = neutron, etc) so it was difficult to follow the teachers notes if the elements weren't represented by their symbols. In the last two periods of the day we had a class called "Computers" which is the equivalent to computer science in the US. Like physics I was actually able to understand a lot of what the teacher was saying as well as the concept we were learning with coding. Hopefully we'll actually get to use a computer at some point to practice this stuff but with the way science is working (no labs), I don't think we can expect to be using a computer anytime soon. Anyway, I think everyone was in such a great mood because of the sun.

Today was the first day since I've been in Vietnam, that the sun has truly been out. The sky was blue, it wasn't overcast, there were beautiful clouds, and I could actually see the city from my apartment! Usually a hazy smog makes it hard to see very far around but today with the blue sky, I saw buildings and landscapes that I hadn't seen before. It was also the first day in more than a week that it didn't rain at all. So, everyone was in a good mood which made the day a lot better. Lunch was delicious, we had fried chicken (which is different than American fried chicken, but still quite good), greens, spring rolls, and rice with a sweet chili sauce. Snack, which is served in the afternoon, was a soup similar to Chinese egg drop soup, and was served with baguette. The other option - the main option which most people chose - was pizza, but I've learned my lesson there.

After school I paid for my English books for class and then went home to finish packing. I'm going to close the blog now since I have to wake up at 3:45 tomorrow morning to catch our early flight to Quy Nhon. I know I said that I would be posting tomorrow with pictures but then I realized that I might not have internet access. I still plan on posting something tomorrow but if I don't, you know why. Goodnight and thanks for reading!