Happy Independance Day! If you are not as fortunate as I to be in Vietnam and are instead some place else I suppose you can still celebrate, though you may be wondering why you are celebrating. As far as I can tell September 2 is the anniversary of the day that Vietnam gained it's independance from France. People here celebrate by staying home and doing very little. I spent some time this afternoon in the touristy "Old District" and was underwhelmed by the number of people milling about. The streets were quite dead compared to what I have gotten used to.
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| Some wonderful Soviet architecture gracing the historic "Old District" |
On Tuesday I began learning how to speak Vietnamese. Ever since I learned that I was going to Vietnam I have been recieving condolences from those with linguistic knowledge. They all claimed that Vietnamese is a notoriously hard language to learn. While it may have a Romanised alphabet (as opposed to Chinese characters) which aids in learning how to read, Vietnamese has six distinct tonal possibilties for all of the twelve vowel sounds. What this means is that a single word can have six meanings with the exact same spelling (not counting the tonal markings above vowels). Complicating this further is that the tones are both difficult to pronounce, and hear. During my lesson on Wednesday I was asked to write down what tone was being used as the teacher rattled off the same word, but in different tones. It was incredibly difficult to differentiate between several of them.
It's come to my attention that people are graphically oriented and like lots of pictures. While I am not one of those people, I have manages to cobble together a few of the meagre pictures that I have taken thus far. What follows are just a few of the things that I have seen recently.
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| My fellow SALTer and co-worker at The Gioi, Nathan Morrow |
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| The view from my balcony |
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| A gaggle of school children on a trip to visit Uncle Ho's former house |
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| A One Pillar Pagoda |
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