This week passed like the last, with typical school things though today was geared more towards prepping for the Mid-Autumn Festival. As the weather has turned more to fall, we've been experiencing frequent rain and unfortunately, the Ecopark does not have a good drainage system. On Tuesday, the rain came down hard and the path to school was covered by huge puddles, some nearly 3 inches deep! Though I knew it was raining and brought an umbrella, I had not expected such a wet sidewalk so I padded through as quickly as possible. I still managed to soak my shoes though and spent the rest of the day with wet socks and shoes. Next time it rains, I'll be wearing sandals. Later that day a thought occurred to me; with nearly 1000 students to feed each day at lunch time, how much rice do they use every day? In the afternoon The Anh asked the chef and he said they went through about 300 kilograms a day! That's over 650 pounds!! Consequently, The Anh and I spent the rest of the afternoon speculating about the size of the school's rice cookers... In the evening, my grandmother made me a traditional drink that they make for the festival with ice, longan, lotus juice, and shaved coconut. It was very good but was so sweet that I couldn't finish all the longan.

On Wednesday, Ms. Thuy asked The Anh to make a decoration on the bulletin board for the festival. Since I helped him create the original surround for the start-of-school event, he enlisted me to help with the addition. We ended up taking time on Wednesday to get the poster started because though it was much smaller than the surround we made, it was more abstract and colorful. When we proudly finished, Ms. Thuy responded by saying that she wanted more color - she's very critical about these things - so she gave us time during her classes to add more pattern and color. While we colored, the rest of the class hung up decorations and cleaned the room. With all this preparation, I'm excited to see how the festival goes. There's definitely nothing like it in the States so it will be a totally new experience. The treat for the festival is the moon-cake - Dung gave me one to try though I'm going to wait until this weekend to eat it since it's a symbol of the festival.

I'm off to finish my math now. Thanks for reading and have a great rest of the week!