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I found a maggot crawling around in my chom chom this morning. I have no idea how many chom choms I've eaten without even checking inside first. It's a scary thought. A chom chom is like a grape in a hairy shell with a big seed in the middle, like in a peach. It's some kind of Vietnamese fruit. When driving along the highway, if you look on the side of the road you can always see the shells from people eating them on buses and chucking them out the windows. One of the kids in my class is called Tram (which you pronounce like 'Chum'), so I call her Chom Chom. Anyway, enough about chom chom...
Last weekend was pretty crazy. I found myself cruising around Saigon in a limo for a double-birthday. It was insane how much attention we drew; people were stopping to take photos. We were leaning out the windows, high-fiving random people on motorbikes and shaking hands while practicing a bit of crude Vietnamese. We even gave one guy a drink while he was driving alongside. But the driver wasn't very happy when we started climbing out the windows and onto the roof. Good fun, gotta be one of the best birthdays ever. If someone tried to tell me two years ago that I'd be cruising around Ho Chi Minh City in a limosuine, I would have thrown a chom chom at their head.
I FINALLY found a new house (can't remember if I already wrote about that...). I've been living in what essentially amounts to a large closet with a TV and attached bathroom for the last five months. The new place is spaztastic, a mansion compared to this place. Its a big house new-ish house, four floors and with a cool walk-on roof which will be great for rooftop house parties. It's very cheap to rent a house here. The new house is around $800 a month, for the WHOLE HOUSE, to give you an idea. I'm moving in this Sunday with a bunch of friends. It's in District 10, a convenient ten minutes away from my school by motorbike.
Next week is my school's first excursion, for the end of schooling year. We had the graduation ceremony thingy last Friday (my kids sang Twinkle Twinkle Little Star, very cute). The school hasn't quite decided yet, but we'll be taking the kids to the zoo or arcade or something; I'll be sure to bring the camera. I haven't been on a school excursion for sooooo long! Only this time I'll be going as a teacher of course, with a dozen three-year-olds in tow.
We had a full-day blackout at the school yesterday, which meant a day of no teaching (way too hot). The kids made fans, which I tried to have them use to fan me. Unfortunately it didn't really work. Instead they just used them to repeatedly whack me in the face while climbing all over me and pulling my hair. As usual. I don't know how people survived in this city before aircon...
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