I love it here!

I'm guessing some of you are wondering what I do when I’m not working during the day. Well, my time is filled with working with my church. On Mondays I run the Family Home Evening program for the young single adults.  This calling has been a huge blessing in my life while living here in Vietnam. The people are so great and so real.

The pictures below are from this past Monday at the mission home in Hanoi.  We had a meeting combined with the Relief Society (or women of the church) because there is construction at the church building. The missionaries are so great at bringing new young adults to meet all of us and learn more about the gospel. We had a great lesson from a young single adult on dating. Then we played ninja and ate yummy food! The Relief Society ladies made a traditional Vietnamese cake which is made out of a form of rice, sugar cubes, and a type of small seed on top. They are then boiled and served hot to everyone. It's really good!

It's good to be immersed in a culture that is totally different from the United States. When you go on vacation you really don't get the whole feel of the country, you only get a taste.  I feel like in America you care about what you wear, what you have, and a whole list of things like that. But here, from what I have seen, they really don't care. They care more about what is inside, than what is on the outside. It's refreshing to be here and to really get to know the people.

Every Wednesday I help teach English at the church and I love it! The people who attend are so eager to learn and want to speak better English. I have met many amazing people through this program. The last video is of us teaching the participants parts of the body by singing Head, Shoulders, Knees and Toes.

                                         

Being a member of The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints has been such a blessing, and has helped me make so many good friends.  I love hearing all of their life stories. I'm going to miss everyone that I have become good friends with. I love how the culture here is opposite from anything in America that I have experienced so far in my life. It's funny that this really is my first time out of the United States (except the Caribbean).


It did take me a little while to get used to living in a city. There is always something going on here no matter what time; this city never sleeps. I have loved living here in Hanoi and it's going to be really weird going back to America in a few weeks. I look back and try to think about what it was like before I came here and it's hard for me to imagine. I have fallen in love with this city and the crazy traffic. I will be sad to go back home and a not as exotic lifestyle.

Rodents

A few weeks ago I kept on smelling a disgusting odor whenever I would leave the house. It kept on smelling and it was getting stronger as a few days passed. We found out we had a dead rat somewhere in the house! How gross is that?! My aunt said that it's hard to keep rats or other insects out because of the open windows and doors. But also there are just so many of them here, on the streets you can see plenty of sewage rats all over.

We were looking for the rat in one of the showrooms downstairs but we couldn't find it. We didn't think to look up at the ceiling! It had climbed into the walls and had gotten stuck in the Air Conditioner. So GROSS! We were all down there just laughing because just its tail was sticking out. It had been up there for at least five days. It grosses me out to think that I had walked under that rat so many times and had never seen him.

The past couple days I have seen a lot more rats late at night or dead on the streets. I have never seen such big rats before and I hope to never see them outside of Vietnam! I also hope to never see a mosquito again, but Chicago is full of them.  

Warehouse

I was able to go to a warehouse that we work with. It's about two hours away from downtown Hanoi. The people working at the factory are the same workers that work at the lacquer factory. They were packaging items and filling up a huge container on a truck. They had a lot of pieces like boxes, baskets, and trays to ship out to America.

 

As I was on the way to the bathroom I came across these two men sleeping on the job. One was on a portable cot and the other was on a hammock a few inches above the ground. They were dead asleep and were not moving to let me pass to the bathroom. I was pretty loud too and they weren't moving an inch, I had to crawl under the hammock to go to the restroom! They weren't too happy when I woke them up later!

Grandpa I ate frog legs!

I went out with Thang to eat frogs legs! I ate frog legs before in January of this year, back home with my grandfather. We went to Hugo's Bar and Grill in Naperville to have frog legs, but they didn't look like the ones I ate this week.

 The yellow sticks above are baby bamboo! I thought they were okay, a little of a weird after taste.

 I loved these mushrooms! They tasted really good. I feel like everything I eat is new!

The restaurant where we ate was in the old quarters. I was the only foreigner eating there that night. It seems like I'm always the only foreigner is most food places I go which I love because to understand the food you have to go with someone who is Vietnamese.

This is the skin of the frog, it actually wasn't the worst thing in the world even though it does look a little gross.

There are many ways to eat frog legs here and we ate it in a hot pot. They have a bunch of vegetables including carrots, mushrooms, tomatoes, and others. I love mushrooms now! To eat the frog legs, you turn on the hot pot and put the frog legs in even through they are already cooked. I loved the frog legs! Again I'm so surprised that I'm eating all these odd foods! They were much bigger than the ones I ate in America. It was kind of hard to eat because it's just like eating wings - the bones are all still there. I was eating with chopsticks which I'm still trying to master. It was very hard to eat the frog legs; I'm just not talented yet at eating with them, but I hope to get better.

The frog legs had a lot of meat on them which was delicious! They were really fresh! I couldn't get over the fact that I was eating frog legs because you could make it move just like a frog moves when it was alive. But it was SO good! It did kind of surprise me that they would leave the feet on when they serve the legs. I ate the small feet bones! I will definitely come get them again before I leave next month!