7th Day

It's almost been a week that I'm here, and I am already dreading the flight home, I don't want to leave !!! Today at noon we had some sushi (Melanie, Carlijn, Xuan Minh - my host sister, and me) in a really nice sushi restaurant !! We even sat on the floor (a very common thing here), the reason why we always have to take off our shoes when we enter a house or so (I think my brother would love to live here, as he always walks bare feet everywhere and it upsets everybody because you usually don't do it in the Western countries). And I was really happy because you could drink as much green tea as you wanted, for free !!

After the meal we went to our favourite coffee place at Ben Thanh Market to brainstorm about one of our workshops, and then we had to be in a whole other district at 5 pm for a cultural training with a lot of the AIESEC members (not only from our project), so we were waiting for the bus (there were 4 busses we could take to go there) but apparently there was no way we could get there on time if we had waited longer, so we bargained with some of the motorbike taxis and they finally accepted to take us to the meeting place for 100'000 dongs (a bit more than 1 euro each), so we enjoyed a nice and funny motorbike ride !!

The meeting was really nice, I thought there were going to be a lot of people and it would be a bit anonymus, but on the contrary, we were not more than 30 people and they really did great presentations about the two main projects we have currently (the "Living with HIV/AIDS project" which I am part of, and an other project - I don't remember its name - about helping orphans to have a proper education so that they will get better jobs as adults), and about culture differences between the Easterners and the Westerners. We also got to meet a lot of the other interns and members of AIESEC in Ho Chi Minh city, they were all so friendly !! But it is just impossible to remember all the names, unfortunately. The names of our project's members are : Nhung (the project leader), Melanie and Carlijn (the two other exchange interns), Phu, Long, Uyen, Chi, Duyen, Ainguyen, Dung, Khoa, and Hieu. I might have confused some last names with the first names, and I might not know exactly who is who yet, but it will get better after a while I hope !! After the meeting, those who had the time came along to have some dinner in a local restaurant, where we had two different hot pots (one with shrimp and fish soup, and the other one called "thai hot pot", which had some thai spices and a fish in it). As desert we had some moon cake (a traditional chinese cake, which they usually eat during the Mid Autumn Festival, but I really can't describe it, sorry !!). I was happy to finally taste it, after having heard so much about it !!