Food, Furniture, Football

Sunday rolled around and I made myself quite the busy lady; finally took the time to head to furniture street. The furniture gets cheaper as you drive down the street, so my friend and I drove a nice ways along before stopping to get a bedside table. We loaded the wooden cabinet between ourselves on the motorbike, and drove down the street that was in a pretty awful condition. Traveling with large things on bikes is part of the Viet Nam experience, so I felt pretty satisfied. After dropping off the lovely new cabinet at my house, I headed to the market to replenish my spring roll supplies. After frying and rolling about 30 spring rolls, we brought them over to Flip's house for a pre-soccer meal. After enjoying my rapidly improving spring rolls, we walked towards the Hanoi Football Stadium to watch two Vietnamese teams play. There were an absurd amount of people, as well as two large bands and many, many banners. Giant drums were being banged from beginning to end, and then some. We had a lovely time, even though neither of the teams scored; it was a very scrappy game, and over six players were carried off the field in stretchers. The young med boys running to and fro seemed to be working harder than the soccer players themselves. The most intense part of the game was trying to leave. The road was mobbed, and since the concept of space here is almost non-existent, the pushing and shoving got pretty incredible. After making it around the corner, we finally managed to break free and get to our bikes. Definitely a very accomplished Sunday.

The Talent Show at SIS was, um, a good effort. All the little kids sitting under the hot sun for 3 hours made behavior take a turn for the worse... the 10 different girls singing dated Whitney or Celine Dion songs didn't help the case either. The most enjoyable part of the show BY FAR were the five 5th graders doing a hip hop dance. They even had an "mc" to pump up the audience with things like, "Yo Yo! We poppin' hip hop. Check this out Yo, Go!" (this is an 11yr old Vietnamese boy with a "gangster" hat and necklace, mind you). The dancers were considerably good, with one boy pulling out some incredible Michael Jackson moves, along with poppin' and lockin'. Unfortunately my camera died, but I probably wouldn't have been able to hold the camera steady due to my consistent laughter.

There is no school for the rest of April for some King's Birthday, so my weekend starts tomorrow. Although the kids are off for another week, I have to go to school every day, since I am new and not able to use my leave days yet (or some other sort of absurd reason). So I have to go to the school and sit around for a week. I plan on doing some extensive classroom cleaning, and putting a lot of time to into my list of potential Architecture Graduate Schools. I'm not too bitter, because at least I'm getting paid for not doing too much, and that is never a cause for complain.