a weekend of culture and class...

saturday evening found most of our team at a nearby restaurant to celebrate liz's birthday. we had the chance to stimulate our tastebuds with a very popular vietnamese dish called banh xeo (pron. "ben say-o") - it's an egg crepe cooked with small morsels of meat (you can also have shrimp and chicken with it), beansprouts and other vegetables that you wrap up in a lettuce leaf and dip in pepper-filled fish sauce (think lettuce-wrapped springrolls). yummy! i also had my first opportunity to try soda chan (pron. "soda chahn") - a pleasant concoction of limejuice, sugar, ice, and soda water... kinda reminded me of sparkling lemonade (read: "LIMEonade" - they don't have lemons here in vietnam!), which was refreshing and oh-so-yummy!

sunday night, the gals all got decked out in our beautiful custom-made au dais and headed out to the opera house for a bit of ballet, symphony, and vietnamese opera. for a little history-check, the opera house (properly known as the national theatre, or the municipal theatre) was built in the beginning of 1897 under an original architectural design by french architect ferret eugene. over the years, the opera house was restored and renewed. the style and design of the opera house was done specifically with the aim to bring a feeling of french style to the french and pro-french vietnamese people under the period of french domination in the south in early 20th century.
our tickets (which were center row, orchestra ;oP) only cost us a nice 80 000 dong each, which is equivalent to just a bit under $6.00 US. in canada, if i were to pay for decent seats at the theatre or opera in toronto, i'd be looking at a whopping $80 bucks or more! the opera portion was composed by various vietnamese composers in response to the celebration of hanoi's 50th anniversary of their liberation day. my vietnamese comprehension skills weren't good enough to understand what the soloists were singing about, but the passion and pride for their country was more than evident. i was very impressed with everything that i saw and heard, and when they were joined by the ho chi minh city choir, the symphony orchestra and ballet company, you just really couldn't get any better than that. after the intermission the ho chi minh symphony orchestra performed their own rendition of mozart's symphony no. 40 - quite breathtaking, actually. for one night we were dressed to the nines, among ho chi minh city's elite and completely lost ourselves in the culture. simply wonderful... :o)

also, to help fit in more into the vietnamese culture, our teaching team decided to take vietnamese lessons every friday afternoons. i used to consider myself pretty good with languages, but learning vietnamese has proven itself to be quite the difficult task. vietnamese is a tonal language, meaning that different voice inflections on any word will change the meaning of that word... there are 5 tones in the vietnamese language, plus one mid-level non-tone (the way you'd normally say things without the accents). i've come to learn that it's absolutely crucial to say things the way they are supposed to be said, because you could easily say the wrong thing without knowing it. for example: the phrase for "stop right here" is "dung le dai". if you pronounce the word "dai" as "day", you are saying it correctly. however, if you pronounce "dai" as "die", then when you tell someone "dung le dai", you are telling them to "pee right here"... a mistake that i've come to experience first-hand. *ahem* it helps a lot when the person you're speaking to has a sense of humor about these things :oP ... nonetheless, my goal is to be able to carry a simple conversation in vietnamese by the time i have to head back to canada :oP

in other less-culturally stimulating news (well, depending on which way you look at it), we've got ants in our pants... well, not really in our pants, but our kitchen has seemed to have been invaded by an army of red ants. jeremiah named it "the ho chi minh trail" - from one corner of our kitchen wall to another, there's a small trail of red ants that make their way down diagonally back and forth across the surface of the wall. well, after a few sprays with our trusty raid can, they seemed to have gotten the hint that they were uninvited in our kitchen... however, last night while eating dinner, i noticed that the army hadn't retreated, but instead migrated to the other side of the kitchen, making a nice path from the garbage can, up the wall, around the door, up into the corner, and finally disappearing into a hole in the wall... yeesh. i actually found it more amusing than disturbing... until i opened the fridge door and saw a pink smartie walking away from its bag.

... yep, always an adventure here in ho chi minh city ;o)