Hittin' the streets

Well, I finally had enough gusto to take out my bicycle. The streets here are absolutely insane and it took me about two weeks to get up enough courage to join the constantly heavy stream of traffic. I'm happy to say that I made it back to my guest house alive and well, although my pride feels a bit bruised; apparently it is HILARIOUS to see a white girl riding a bike. I noticed a lot of pointing and laughing, but none the matter, it was incredibly fun. Felt a little less like a tourist, which is always nice, and it was really nice to pedal along and get to the backpacking district in a fraction of the time it normally takes me. So now that I have that conquered, my next feat to tackle is the successful use of a tape player...
When we do our practice teaching, we have listening exercises that we have to play over and over again to the class. We record dialogues back in our classroom then try and teach it to the volunteer students. But when it comes to actually playing the tape in class, I have not yet accomplished this seemingly simple action. The outlets at the school are pretty sketchy, and either emit too much electricity or too little. This means that tapes won't rewind, won't play, won't stop playing, etc. Our teachers seem to have a handle on maneuvering the tape players, but I haven't yet gotten the hang of it. The students love to watch the practice teachers struggle, so my fussing with the tape recorder is just another instance of Vietnamese people laughing at me. I've gotten pretty used to being a source of entertainment here...