Bride and Groom
A very happy bride and groom at the wedding party in Bến Tre.
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June 09, 2008
Rice wine?
One of many offers for rice wine Terry received while at the wedding party. He politely declined all.
Wedding Party Guests
These are two very happy wedding party guests. Happiness could have been due to their kind disposition or perhaps their drink of choice.
Vietnamese Wedding Party in Bến Tre
When I was preparing to take this trip to Viet Nam, I would have never guessed in a million years that we would be invited to a Vietnamese wedding party. Wow, what an experience it was.
We met the LRC library staff of about 30 at the University on Saturday morning at 8am and all poured into two air-conditioned vans. Terry and I were in the smaller of the two along with about 10 others, including Mrs. Trang, the Library Director and some students from our class.
The trip was 100km (roughly 60 miles) but because there is just one main and very crowded road to get places, it took close to 4 hours each way, but the journey was well worth it. Because we were in a university van, we had priority when we got to ferry boarding areas and could cut the long line, which saved a great deal of time. We boarded two car ferries on our way to the southern province of Bến Tre, situated in the the Mekong delta, where the groom’s family is from.
Vietnamese weddings frequently have 3 days of celebrations. On the first day, it is a chance for the parents of the bride and groom to gather together and share a meal. The second day is for the bride and is held at her family’s home and the third day is focused around the groom and his family. The groom is a security guard at the LRC so Mrs. Trang was able to get us invitations to this party.
On the ride there, we learned that it is customary for the eldest daughter of a family, after marriage, to move in with her in-laws and husband and take care of everybody. In Mrs. Trang’s case, she is the youngest daughter and her in-laws live with her and her husband, so she takes care of the entire family. It is quite an interesting arrangement. Apparently if the newly married couple is able to buy their own house after they get married, they do not have to move in with the in-laws but I am not sure how frequently that happens.
We arrived to the groom’s family’s home and learned that they own a beautiful pagoda which is the site of the wedding party. There is an area behind the pagoda where tables were set up and a band was playing. The bride and groom greeted the guests as they arrived and walked under the arch to join the party. We were seated at 2 large tables and quickly received iced drinks. The day was extremely hot so this was very refreshing.
The first course consisted of very tender pieces of pork served with delicate coils of rice noodles. It was absolutely delicious. Next came chunks of beef in a sauce meant to be soaked up by the pieces of bread at the table. It was divine. Next arrived rice mixed with veggies and what looked like a type of salami sliced thinly on the top of the plate. Seafood was next and consisted of a hot bowl of broth which simmered in the middle of the table as fresh shrimp, squid, and white river fish were added to cook. The level of freshness of this entire meal was absolutely amazing. The soup was served with a few spoonfuls of rice and the seafood was cooked perfectly.
During the many courses, we met the very kind parents of both the bride and the groom as well as some of the other guests. The very inebriated ones seemed to be drawn to our table offering us small tea glasses full of rice wine. We kindly refused since from the look of these guests, this rice wine was quite potent. Many of the men were very interested in talking to Terry and trying to coax him into drinking. They must have picked up on his kindred spirit vibe. Terry resisted and did not drink, but it was tempting. I got some really great photographs of the beautiful bride and groom, along with many of the guests, in different states of sobriety. There was also some karaoke fun with the band as a few of the library staff members serenaded the guests with some songs.
Fruit was brought out for dessert and I had my first taste of durien. The strong scent is off-putting to most but the fruit itself is just lovely. It is quite hard to describe but is very sweet and soft. The smell did not bother me since the fruit was so tasty.
One of the drunk men launched into a conversation with me, with Mrs. Trang translating. He told me how his mother lives in California and when I asked what part, he could not for the life of him, remember. A few minutes later, he clarified that it is his mother-in-law who lives in CA, not his mother, so that was a little more reassuring. Mrs. Trang said that it was probably lucky that he was able to recollect even that much information in his “special state.”
After the meal, I had planned to walk around the grounds and take some more photos and ended up going into the simply stunning pagoda with Mrs. Trang. We removed our shoes and went inside. We were given three sticks of lit incense at each of the altars and I followed her lead. She placed the incense up at her head and fanned up and down in a sequence of three times. Then she put the incense in the vase in the center, still glowing, and crouched down in front of the altar in reflection. It was a very moving experience to be a part of and I felt really blessed to be there at that moment. The groom’s family is very lucky to have such a this pagoda on their land.
The whole wedding party was a really amazing experience. We were welcomed with such open arms by all of the guests and the families of the bride and groom. I really felt so humbled by everything and felt lucky to meet everyone and be in their presence for a couple hours.
The ride back to Can Tho was fairly uneventful, except the women in our van were on the lookout for durian but the price had to be right. We stopped at several roadside fruit stands before finding one that suited their needs and bargaining skills. The van itself was not massive but now consisted of 10 people plus many, many bags of durian wrapped in newspaper and placed in plastic bags. The scent was not very overpowering but the windows were left open for the ride home to keep the air clean. Just a quick reminder, it was a very warm day so the ride back was on the hot side but the breeze felt nice.
The plan was to visit the floating market early Sunday morning with a few of the library staff members but Terry and I decided to spend the day prepping for the week ahead and will visit the market next weekend instead after teaching is over.
The magic basket in my hotel room is still working like a charm. I leave laundry in it and when I get back from class, everything is hanging washed in my closet. Amazing.
Also, I have a roommate named George. He is very shy but has made an appearance a few times walking sideways on my wall and darting to hide in the lights. He doesn’t bother me and I don’t bother him so it is quite a perfect arrangement. George is a small gecko and while I am not normally especially fond of lizards, I do have a soft spot in my heart for George.
Second week of teaching has begun and we have a busy week planned for the students.
More soon.
~Linnea (& George)
June 06, 2008
Terry Plum teaching students at the LRC
Terry goes over the install process of setting up Moodle locally on the workstations in the training room.
Computer training room in LRC
Students are working hard in the training room at the University of Can Tho LRC on a group activity involving designing a course in Moodle.
Teaching Begins at University of Can Tho LRC
After a delicious buffet breakfast, consisting of fresh fruit (small bananas, melon, & other local Can Tho varieties) vermicelli noodles with veggies, chilled soya milk with ice, and a petite gyoza dumpling, at the hotel on our first morning in Can Tho, we were picked up by a taxi to head to the university. We arrived at 7:30am and even at that early time, there was a massive line of students waiting to get into the library right when it opens. This is not something I have ever seen back in the States and just really emphasizes how heavily the library, and especially the Learning Resource Center, are used. This was wonderful. They were many signs welcoming people to our Emerging Technologies in Libraries Workshop in the LRC, which was very neat to see.
The class has 30 participants from a variety of public and academic libraries across Viet Nam as well as IT and LRC staff from Can Tho, so it is a great mix of people. Some have robust IT setups while others are just getting started. We have 4 translators from the university and their level of english proficiency is just astounding. It was not much of an adjustment to adapt to this new way of teaching that involves stopping after a few sentences in order for the material to be relayed to the students by the translators.
We covered the goals and outcomes for the two weeks, the structure of the class involving lectures and hands-on activities, and then I talked about workstation security and management using the Tech Lab as a real-life example, which worked quite well. Students were engaged and their introductions told us that they were coming from a lot of smaller public workstation spaces (under 40 computers) and some that did not have a space to call their own so the Tech Lab made sense to talk about. I brought up the future plans including the dual and tri-boot summer upgrades and it generated a 45-minute discussion with lots of very relevant and thoughtful questions from the participants. The structure of the course involves a 2.5 hour lunch break at 11am where the participants go home to eat with their families and nap, while Terry and I eat lunch and prep for the afternoon sessions. I told my mother about the daily lunch with family and she promptly replied, laced with italian guilt, “that must be nice.”
We headed into the computer lab after lunch for some hands-on activities involving installing and configuring imaging, antivirus, and anti-spyware software. We ended the day with a group activity where the participants were separated into public, academic, and Can Tho (since they have the largest contingency of attendees) libraries and they worked out designing an ideal pubic workstation space for their individual audiences. It turned into a very interesting discussion and was a nice end to the day.
We headed back to the hotel and then to the Mekong restaurant which came highly recommended by the gentleman at our hotel’s front desk, and I can understand why. It is traditional Vietnamese cuisine and is slightly geared to foreigners but is not a tourist trap in the least. We got fresh spring rolls with shrimp and fried vegetarian spring rolls to start and then shared river fish in a clay pot and tofu with veggies, everything was excellent.
We got back to the hotel to do a little prep for the next day of teaching, but quickly discovered the trying nature of the wireless network. It is deceiving since it will look like it is a very strong signal, you will join, and within a minute or so, you are booted off. I had hoped to be able to use the evenings to finalize materials for the next day of teaching but this little snag made that a bit tricky. There is a slightly better signal in the hotel lobby but not by much. We set up shop literally a few feet from the wireless access point and the booting offline continued but slightly less frequently. This was a bit of an unexpected wrench in the plan but we deal with that all the time in the world of IT, so we just shifted gears a bit and worked things out.
A quick funny story, there is a wicker basket in my hotel room and I was using it to store laundry with the plan to take care of the clothes later in the week. When I got back to my room from the first day of teaching, everything from the basket had vanished. For some reason, I assumed it had all been thrown out and called the front desk to verify my fears. They sent someone upstairs who opened my closet and there was everything neatly hanging-up and freshly laundered, all for a whopping bill of $54,000 dong (~$3 US). I want to take the wicker basket back to Boston and try it out in my apartment.
More soon.
June 05, 2008
Traffic Jam in Can Tho
I took this at a slight traffic jam right as we arrived to Can Tho after the 4 hour drive from Ho Chi Minh City. It had been raining so the roads were a bit flooded.
Limes and Peppers from Ho Chi Minh City Market
There were so many wonderful and fresh fruits and vegetables at the market in Ho Chi Minh City. I had to capture some of them digitally.
Outdoor Market in Ho Chi Minh City
I took this on our first morning as we walked through an amazing outdoor market in Ho Chi Minh City on June 1, 2008.
Chào from Viet Nam!
I arrived on Saturday evening May 31st in a very busy and hot (27 degrees celsius at midnight!) Ho Chi Minh City airport where I met Terry Plum, who had been waiting patiently for me at the baggage claim. I had been in San Francisco for a wedding so my flight left directly from there with a 3-hour layover in the quite elaborate Seoul airport. We found the infamous taxi desk, per Pat Oyler’s recommendation, and we were taken to the Liberty 4 hotel. I did not realize it at the time, but having a fast and reliable wireless connection in our hotel rooms there was really a blessing in disguise. More about that in a bit.
We got up early and had a lovely breakfast at the hotel which had quite an extensive buffet spread consisting of fresh fruit, eggs cooked to order, meats, cheeses, and lots more. We then took a stroll down the very busy street to explore our surroundings. The streets swim in a sea of motorists with cars, mopeds, bicyclists, and pedestrians weaving in and out in waves. It really is organized chaos with an ocean wave theme. Quite impressive since the aggressive Boston road rage is left by the way-side here. The Vietnamese motorists are quick to honk but it is light and friendly quick tapping, alerting each other of their presence as they maneuver around in the very busy streets. There is something pretty spectacular about a rotary containing motorists entering and exiting in a multitude of directions and angles but they definitely make it work. We snaked through a very hectic outdoor market but did not bargain on anything, although it was tempting.
We were picked up at 10am by a former GSLIS student, Phuong Thi Truc Huynh, it was really wonderful seeing her again and so kind of her to accompany the driver to pick us up. The drive to Can Tho was about 4 hours and the sights and sounds as we drove through all of the different towns was fascinating. Countless roadside places advertising Phở (noodle soup) and Com (rice) lined our long drive. We stopped for lunch at the halfway point and I had my first authentic Vietnamese meal, consisting of delicious sour soup with a white river fish that only be described as decadent and fresher than any fish you will ever have in the States. I also tried a green, stalky vegetable called morning glory for the first time and it was wonderful.There was a squid and veggie dish, and I did not hold back and sampled a little of everything. I am glad that I did because it really confirmed my love for the cuisine here.
We took a large car ferry over to Can Tho and arrived to the Ninh Kieu hotel area. It is made up of several hotels appropriately differentiated with numbers and we are in #4. It is right on the main drag and walking distance to lots of restaurants.
After unpacking we took a taxi over to the University of Can Tho, specifically the Learning Resource Center in the beautiful library where the class is taking place, to investigate the training room computers and network. We quickly learned that downloading and uploading files was restricted to after-hours only but luckily it was Sunday and we were able to get some things done but at a snail’s pace. The university network itself is far from zippy, but we made due.
We were met by Mrs. Trang, the library director, and Duyen Thi Huong Lam, another former GSLIS student (who wanted me to tell everyone in Boston how much she misses GSLIS), and headed to dinner with them. I had my first soda chanh which is sparking water mixed with sugar (they is no shortage of that here), fresh lime or lemon juice, and ice . It was incredibly refreshing. We had steamed shrimp cooked right at the table in coconut milk as one of our courses, more morning glory but this time cooked with garlic, river fish in an orange sauce, rice, fried soft tofu in a very light batter, and another dish of a river fish, spine and all, which salty but tasty.
It was great company, delicious food, and a very nice welcome to Can Tho.
Teaching began the next day, more about that in my next post since this one has gotten quite long.
~Linnea
June 04, 2008
Linnea and Terry in Can Tho, Vietnam
After a busy week I left the US through the Bradley Airport in Hartford, Connecticut on Friday morning, May 30, at 7:00 am. I caught up with Linnea in the Tan Son Nhat International Airport in Ho Chi Minh City at midnight on Saturday. Her flight was an hour later than mine, and we met at the baggage claim. A taxi took us to Liberty 4 for the evening and then we were picked up in the morning to go Can Tho by van. Ho Chi Minh City is separated from Can Tho by the many branches of the Mekong River. Phuong Huynh, a recent GSLIS alumna, accompanied us for the four hour drive. Once in Can Tho, we went to the LRC and surveyed the 30 plus workstation computer lab where we would teach, and uploaded various software clients into a shared space. We then went out for a wonderful dinner hosted by Mrs. Huynh Trang.
This project is at the invitation of Mrs. Huynh Trang and Ms. Duyen Lam at the Can Tho Learning Resource Center. We are contracted to teach two weeks of IT classes to a group of IT staff and librarians working in the LRCs at the four Universities involved with the original Atlantic Philanthropies grant, that is, Can Tho, Hue, Da Nang and Thai Nguyen. Also at the workshop are IT staff and librarians from other academic libraries and from several public libraries in the central Mekong. The workshop covers many topics of interest to working librarians in Vietnam, including workstation management, the organization and design of Moodle, proxy servers, linux, VMWare, Greenstone, Drupal, Eprints, metadata, the productino of audio and visual curriculum materials, and assessment. It is an eclectic mix of topics but all by request. The 25 participants this week are enthusiastic, although with widely varying levels of IT experience. Some are working in the Can Tho LRC IT group and some have no technology training at all. The agenda taught by Linnea and me is not the way to begin one’s technology training. Next week it appears that 35 staff and librarians have signed up.
Already we are learning new technologies from the Vietnamese. Instead of Moodle, the University of Can Tho is going with Dokeos for the University learning management system (http://www.dokeos.com). Another competing system which at least one university in Vietnam has adopted is Claroline, http://www.claroline.com. The over-riding criteria for choosing one system over another for many of the universities in Vietnam is response time, and Claroline is very fast.
We are emphasizing activities and experiential approaches in our teaching, so XAMPP and localhost installations are playing a large role in the computer lab. Unfortunately, we have installed so many applications that the workstations no longer function very well. We hope that they can be revived before Monday.
The network is a struggle. There are rules set by the University of Can Tho IT group that there shall be no downloading or uploading from roughly 8:00 am to 5:00 pm, when we are attempting to run IT workshops. At our hotel, the Ninh Kieu 4, the five wireless access points are misconfigured so they constantly knock each other off the network, and any device attached to them. It is hard to work in the hotel, and one cannot download at the LRC. We are becoming analog.
The workshops have begun and the classes are taking on some momentum. There is a wiki site for the participants. Cindy brought up six practice Moodle courses which we used today. It is wonderful to see the many Simmons GSLIS alumni in Vietnam, and some are enrolled in the two week IT seminar, which makes the teaching doubly rewarding.