I wrote a quite long journal yesterday, but when I wanted to upload it, someone in the family had unplugged the connection and I lost it all trying to copy it to a word document. Great.. Well.. This will be even longer, then..

Yesterday was a long day too. I met up with Chinh, who works for Saigon Children’s Charity (SCC) and is the person I knew through my work in Maersk , at 10AM to go around and explore the city. My first stop was getting a helmet of my own.. Apparently, my head is WAY smaller than any Vietnamese head, so I can’t seem to keep the helmets on top of my head.. It makes me look like I am trying to be cool, but just makes me look ridiculous instead. In the end we managed to get a nice helmet for me, which became my size after attaching some extra pads inside. The helmet chase was quite long and tiresome, so we went for an early lunch in a fantastic restaurant. I had some rice paper rolls with barbeque pork – so delicious – and only paid 65000 dong (18 DKK) for the meal, juice and water.. Not something I can do everyday according to my budget, but a nice little treat!

I experience so many things that it makes yesterday difficult to remember, but the absolute highlight of the day was when I went with Chinh to a school in District 4 to teach a class of children who have difficulties following their English class in the normal school. I got to teach three boys who almost couldn’t speak a single word of English. I tried using sign language to make them understand what to do, but I had to ask Chinh to translate for me. After a break I found some cards with pictures of everyday things on them. We played a game, where the boys had to tell me the name of the thing in the picture before they were allowed to get the card. It was a lot of fun, but very difficult as their pronunciation was terrible. I think they had fun, and I think they learned a little bit.

After teaching we went to the Binh Tan market. A very famous market in Ho Chi Minh. It was the first time I saw so many tourists in the city. I had been around meeting Vietnamese and didn’t realise that the city centre is full of them.. However, the market was crowded and in the end, around 7PM I was dead beat and went home. One last challenge was that they Honda Om guy didn’t know the way and kept asking me where to go (in Vietnamese) and I couldn’t answer as I didn’t know where to go and as I didn’t understand what he was saying. We made it, though!! SIGH!! 🙂

Today was an early start. I got up at 7.50 to go swimming with three lovely girls, Thao, Dien and Thu. Dien means angel and Thu means autumn.. But I am gonna try my best to remember their real names. The hard part is pronouncing them correctly. Well, Thao and Thu couldn’t swim, so we tried to teach them how to move their legs and arms – I keep forgetting how privileged we are in Denmark. We HAVE to learn how to swim, basically! The rest of the day has been shopping, eating and drinking coffee and then – very proud – I managed to guide Dien to my house with only one mistake on the way!! Next time, I got it! I will now start finding word to remember in my newly bought Vietnamese-English, English Vietnamese dictionary..