Students Say The Craziest Things

I hear crazy things every day from my students. Last Friday I asked my class what they were going to do on the weekend. This is the conversation that took place with one of my shiest students.

SHY STUDENT: I'm going to take my wife to meet my little friend.

BEN: That's very exciting. Where does your friend live?

The student smiled and pointed at his crotch.

My Cousin Justin

(From left to right: Me, my brother, Justin, my cousin Adam)

My cousin Justin is visiting this week and we're taking a bike trip out to Mai Chau. My cousin is know to, how to say this nicely, sometimes have his head in the clouds. There are about five thousand family anecdotes about Justin with the most infamous being the time he was almost left in Israel because he went to the bathroom at a restaurant while his tour group boarded a bus to the airport. A waiter had to rush Justin to catch the flight while everyone else was already on the plane.

Anyway, the last three times I was supposed to meet Justin he was an average of seven hours late. Last night he kept up the pattern but was only a couple hours late. He was supposed to arrive at my house around midnight, but at 2AM he still wasn't there. I told Huyen we should jump on my bike and go look for him in the streets of my neighborhood. We did just that and shockingly didn't find Justin. As soon as we got back to my house my phone rang -- it was his taxi driver and he couldn't find my house. Huyen talked to him and told him to drop Justin off. Three minutes later we walked to where Justin was and sure enough he was standing in the middle of a t-section taking pictures...

The first thing Justin said to me is, "Is a bill that says 5 followed by five zeroes five hundred thousand or five hundred?" I told Justin that was five hundred thousand. He said, "I think I gave a few of those to the taxi driver." Turns out Justin went to the ATM at the airport and ended up giving ALL his withdrawal money to the taxi driver -- roughly $120. That's $104 more than I told him it should cost from the airport to my house. Oh well, live and learn.

It's great to have Justin here and we're gonna have a heck of a trip. However, I have a feeling that on a few occasions we're gonna be in the same stance as the picture above: me looking pissed as Justin stares of into the clouds.

Happy Birthday, Mom!

One of the hardest parts of living so far away from home is that I can't give my mother a hug and a kiss on her birthday. However, I can still make her a video. I love you, Mom!

GHOST!

As you may recall, I think my new house is haunted. When we first toured the house -- which was in the middle of being built -- there was a doll facing a wall in an empty room. Yeah, Blair Witch Style. I tried taking two pictures of the doll and they both came out fuzzy. Maybe it was the weak camera battery or maybe it was spirits.

It turns out that there was another huge box of dolls in the house which used to belong to the owners daughter and for some reason they want to store at our house. They put the dolls on our fifth floor, in an empty room in front of the balcony where we hang our laundry, and wrapped them in a plastic sheet. Why they need to store the dolls here, I don't know. I also haven't seen THE DOLL that was standing in the corner. No, I'm not joking.

Well, since we've moved in there have been lots of little signs that there is a ghost. A few strange things:

1. The window in my bathroom randomly rattles all the time when I'm in my bathroom.

2. One day I came home and my door was open. This is odd since I always lock it before I leave the house. What was weird is that the door handle was still locked but the door was open.

3. A few times I've been doing work in my room and have heard a knock on my door. I get up thinking it's Ryan and well, nobody is there...and Ryan isn't home.

4. Yesterday I went upstairs to hang my clothes to dry and about a dozen of the dolls were scattered across the floor in the room they're stored in. Somehow they had gotten out of the box and moved about ten feet away from it.

There's only two explanations for #4: a) The construction was so strong yesterday that it shook the box open and scattered the dolls. b) A ghost did it.

Lets just hope the ghost is friendly.

The Tide Has Turned

They say that boys like girls like their mothers. Well, you're gonna want to take a seat for this one. Huyen is a lot like my mom. No, Huyen isn't a suburban Jewish mother. And no, my mother isn't an unemployed Vietnamese woman.

However, they do have a lot in common including great mothering instincts (Huyen is phenomenal whenever kids are around) and the knack for firing off 100 questions at me in a span of five minutes. But there's something else I found out this week. Huyen has grey hairs...and a bunch of them! They're all nestled in a little spot on the right side of her head. For those of you who know my mother, she's got a grey hair or two also.

If you've been reading my blog for a while you'll recall the video where Huyen plucked the grey hairs from my head. She loves coming up behind me when I'm doing work and yanking my colorless hairs and telling me, "You're so old." Well, the tide has turned. This week I got to pull Huyen's white hairs out.

Vaccines

After hearing for the 94th time how Japanese Encephalitis could turn my brain to mush if I was unfortunately bitten by an infected mosquito, I decided to get the vaccine.

The cost of vaccines here are exponentially cheaper than getting them in the states. The Jap E shot in America is $150 a pop...and since you need three of them over a month that's a lot of dough. Here the shots cost $7.00, plus a nurse's fee. Since I was paying the nurse's fee anyway, I thought "Hell I might as well get the Rabies vaccine too" (this decision was helped after seeing quite a few dogs I assumed to be rabid up in Sapa). And since I was getting those vaccines anyway I thought, "Hell, I might as well get the flu vaccine too."

For those of you who are interested I've now had Hep A, Hep B, Typhoid Fever, Tetanus Booster, Jap E, Rabies and the flu shot. What I'm trying to say is, I'm sort of a super hero.

Foreign Languages Are Hard

"Me fail English? That's unpossible."

Ralph Wiggum

Learning another language is really hard. Last week I asked Huyen to start teaching me Vietnamese for 30 minutes every day. After three days I still can't pronounce five of the eleven vowels.

However, this blog is really about Huyen. She speaks English really well but once in a while has little lapses. There was a great exchange the other day that I thought was absolutely classic:

RYAN: Huyen, do you think your English has gotten better since dating Ben?

HUYEN: Thank you.