Day 9: Lush

Our day started off with culture class at UEF. We learned about the life-organizing culture in Vietnam, which contains aspects of fertility worship, natural worship, human worship, weddings, funerals, performing arts, fine arts, food, clothing, and housing. Fun fact: 80% of Vietnamese are Buddhist. Also over history, Vietnam’s culture has been significantly affected by India and now by westernization. This class was two hours long and dragged on, but thankfully we had language class after. We learned more conversations in Vietnamese today, and we have a mall test on Friday. On Friday we will be tested on how well we can speak/ hold conversation in one of the topics we have learned this week. I am so glad we got to learn Vietnamese even though it is a very difficult language. Despite having the same grammatical set-up as English, Vietnamese is difficult to learn because every word could be pronounced with six different tones, which denote completely different meanings to the word. Lunch was at UEF again, but I had rice, some tomato slices, and a few bites of pork. They also served beef with French fries and shrimp with yams.

                                         View of part of Ho Chi Minh City from Glass Egg

In the afternoon, we went to a company visit to Glass Egg Digital Media. This company creates and produces video games. We got to tour the offices and see some of the workers designing characters and coding the programs. The two CEO’s that talked to us were really cool. They started the company themselves after working for Vietnamese companies for some time. They were saying how they do not make any extra profit when a video game them produce for someone sells millions, but this is also okay to them because 1/3 of the companies they help go bankrupt at some time. They also said they started their company by designing car racing video games because cars are easier to make. Later, they started making video games with imaginary figures because this required more designers. The companies also own Lush, the club we went to on Saturday. They said Tuesday’s are ladies’ night with free drinks and they would hook us up tonight, so we are headed out soon to go there, which is exciting!

For dinner the group went street-vendor hopping, but I did not want to eat this plus the dessert we were all planning on getting after. Elliot and I then stayed behind and practice soccer in the hall to get ready for our game on Friday against the UEF students. I learned a trick and am excited for the game. Then some UEF students came and picked us up from the hotel, and we went to New York Dessert Company. I got a double, chocolate ice cream cake slice, so good! We then went across the street and looked around a really expensive mall with our UEF friends before returning to the hotel. Well that’s all for now!

                                                               Millions of Dong!