Create the scene in your mind. During a break, I am standing in the room checking my notes. One of my students is standing outside the door, when I hear:
“Teachuh. There is somebody here to see you.”
I dutifully go to the door, and there is nobody there.
Gales of laughter and giggling from the students as they yell “April Fools!”
I laughed with them, and felt honored they were comfortable enough with their big foreign teacher to pull an April Fools joke on me. But - - the ringleader added a uniquely Vietnamese twist. She approached me with head hanging, wringing her hands - and respectfully apologized.
I love my Vietnamese students.
As I posted earlier, we’ve had problems with our Internet connection. Seems we have a bad phone connection – somewhere. During the past week or so, we have had long periods with no dial tone on the phone. Sometimes it would work – sometimes it wouldn’t. Now that I know its our phone line, that problem may also account for the problem we’ve had connecting to the Internet. Some days it would take 8 to 10 tries, and then we’d be kicked off in a few minutes. It may also account for the very slow connections we’ve had.
Frustrating.
Thursday morning, the All American Efficient Manager in me awoke from a deep slumber. We had been working so hard on being acceptable outsiders, but I’d had enough of no phone and no air conditioning. So, I wrote one of those crisply worded business notes I used to write so often, and hand delivered it to the head of the college. He wasn’t in his office, and I checked twice, so I left it on his desk. By the time I returned to our room, he had called and talked to both Cindy and our team mate. The deal was that there would be a technician at our room by “this evening.”
Five o’clock came, and with it came the Three Blind Mice. The leader tried desperately to impress me with his supervisory skills, the other with his electronic skills (he had a Compaq PDA), and the third went outside to look at the air conditioner. Of course, they brought no tools of any kind, and had to borrow someone else’s phone to try to call ours.
The outcome? They will return on Sunday morning at 9 AM.
New topic – some of you have mentioned bird flu. To the best of my knowledge, there has not been any bird flu in our province, nor have they confirmed any person-to-person transmission of the flu in Viet Nam. As long as we don’t drink any raw duck blood, or go playing around in chicken feces, we should be okay.
I admit it is strange, though. The news is full of bird flu stories, yet you see live poultry for sale in the markets all the time. I dunno.
We had a real treat the other night. We had clean mosquito netting. As you know, Martha Stewart recommends washing your mosquito netting whenever there is an accumulation of dead bugs readily visible.
Are you tired of checking the blog each day, only to find I’ve been too lazy to post? I recommend an easy remedy. Go to www.bloglines.com. On that site is a nifty little “notifier” you can download. Here’s how it works. When you log onto the Internet (or if you have a high speed connection, when you turn on your computer), it will automatically check to see if I have updated Virtual-Doug, or any other blogs you choose. If I have updated, a neat little icon appears on your desktop. If I have not posted anything new, there is no icon.
Finally - tomorrow will mark six weeks in Hue.
Unreal.