Lele_Wanders

Arrived at the airport ticket counter...

where are you going Miss?

Ummm actually no idea someone else booked my ticket and the airport city is not my final destination.🙄

One of my favorite people I got to speak with while in Singapore was actually my taxi driver BACK to the airport. He was so friendly and really wanted to tell me everything there is to know about Singapore. The best description I have of Singapore came from him. He said, “People used to describe Singapore as a city with many gardens in it. Now people say it is a garden with a city inside.” It is really true although it is a massive city the architecture highlights the true beauty of the city. Even the buildings incorporate nature and the designs are beautifully sculpted with the Chinese element of feng shui. Anyways here is my photo dump of some of my favorite pictures! Enjoy!

Last weekend I had the opportunity to travel to Singapore to take part in a yoga workshop series with Talia Sutra. I was so excited when I found out that Talia was coming to Asia as I have been using her online videos for training for a while now. I don’t think I need to go into to deep of an explanation to say that rarely in the past almost 6 years have I been in a situation where someone I follow has come to my corner of the world so when I learned she was coming within two hours that's basically the same as her coming to Hue itself!

The workshop was everything I could have ever dreamed of. I really enjoyed it and learned so so so much! 

This picture is one I posted online and the quote is one that Talia said to me directly during the training. One of the challenges in yoga is after holding a pose for a long time your mind almost begins to panic it is just thinking about how it can do anything to not be still. So after a hard pose, she saw me adjusting my shirt which is something I wasn’t even thinking about and this is what she said to me. (I posted this because I know my mother and aunts are not on Instagram)

Talia and I (besties) talking about her plans to come to Vietnam next year and being in Asia for a year with her whole family. Apparently, this was more of a scouting trip for her to see what type of interest there is in the region for her classes and workshops.

My friend that I made from Japan during the workshop. I thought I was committed coming all the way from Vietnam but she flew over six hours and a WAY more expensive flight! There were also people that traveled in from Bangkok and Brunei.

Some beautiful pictures from the evening walking tour I gave to visiting ELFs after the conference. Hue is a beautiful city with so many historical sites. It was fun to see how much everyone loved the city and wanted to take a look around!

This past weekend I participated in the Hue Half Marathon! Attracting 800 participants from a few countries between the 5km, 10km, and 21km races. I ran the 21km race (no surprise there). It was a beautiful race through the city and several of my students were volunteers along the race course so they were cheering me on which was a nice surprise. Anyways at the end I was soaked in sweat 💦! It was about 95 and humid. They started the race at 5am to help and I was up at 3:30 drinking my pre-race coffee... needless to say being that it was 7:15 when I ended and the awards ceremony wasn’t until 9— something and I’ve never placed in a race I didn’t even give it a thought and went home.

It was to my surprise then when I started getting some messages around 9:30 saying congratulations! I thought it was a response to my Instagram story saying I finished the race. A few hours later when the results posted I learned I came in 2nd for women! So I made the podium and I wasn’t there for it 😭😭😭

However this evening the race organizers came to my house with this amazing framed certificate and a few goodies!

Loving this historical moment hahaha! My students keep interrupting my classes to confirm that they heard my name announced at the awards ceremony but I wasn’t there haha!

Last week I went to Quang Ngai to hold workshops for teachers and students of a university there. I took the bus from Hue after my Tuesday class and the bus driver was uninterested in getting off the main road to drop me off in a small town so he dropped me on the side of the road 🙃

I sent a picture of the road to the person from the school in charge of moving me to my hotel and he soon found me. Off we went to a restaurant to meet some officials from the school.

The trip was quite interesting as I had planned for a 4 hour workshop for teachers and then a 3 hour workshop on American holidays for students. The school however saw this more as an opportunity to convince me that I should be an ELF at their school next year (which I have no say in). So my first morning I was taken to a fancy conference room and given gifts of flowers and 3 canisters of tiny dried fish 🐠

Then they took me on a tour of the classrooms and dropped me into actual classes asking me to teach students which of course is complicated since I had no plan. I just winged it talking about how students can practice stress in conversation.

After that I went for coffee with a bunch of teachers again with the conversation largely geared towards why they need me to work there. After that we were off to my workshop for teachers which after 10 minutes they asked if I could make it 2 hours from 4 so they would have more time to show me the city for my enjoyment. Sure super convenient haha. Then mid way through they brought in 30 random students asking me to also help them with their English in the teaching methodologies workshop. At this point I started to feel a little tired and just had students interview their teachers and then we left for my tour of the town.

The school even had my name and title playing on the banners of their conference center... I’m a big deal haha!

The food tour was a lot of fun and many teachers came out. I can’t say I enjoyed the duck fetus eating but I gave it a try much to everyone’s excitement.

The next day I had the students and that worked out wonderfully. We did a mummy wrapping competition and thanksgiving turkey hands (celebrating Halloween and thanksgiving)

There were over 200 students and faculty that attended. My maximum for workshops according to the state Dept is 35 hahahaha! But it worked out fine and the space was great. Afterwards I had one more lunch where again the president of the university discussed why I should move there and I just smiled and said great talk to my boss.

The school was very kind and provided a car for me to take to Hoi An an ancient city about 2 hours from their school. (In the direction of my city) I spent the night there and then two nights in Danang a big beach city near where I live. There is another fellow there so it was fun to meet her and enjoy beach time!

Today I facilitated my pre-pre-conference workshop on professional presentation skills for new conference presenters. Around 20 people showed up and it was a great experience. Students and teachers were present and all anxious to work on their skills to prepare for VietTesol Conference. Now I have follow-up appointments lined up with different presenters to do run-throughs with me of their presentation. It’s challenging enough presenting at a big conference for your first time but when it’s also in your second or third language there is a whole other level of nerves involved!

At the end a student gave me my first freshly made moon cake that I’ve ever had! And it was finally a tasty moon cake! These are made for a special holiday which I think is this weekend or last weekend or who knows really!

Yesterday the VietTesol organizing committee came to Hue for meetings to ensure everything is running smoothly. The U.S. Embassy also sent a representative. I was thrilled to be invited as a pre-pre workshop host, a pre-workshop host, a workshop host, and a research presenter to the lunch!

This was a special occasion for my school since they are hosting the conference so they went all out. First we took a car outside the city to a lagoon where they do fish farming and then we took a boat to the middle of the lagoon for our lunch. All freshly caught that morning!

The fish pancake was probably my favorite part... strange and yet so delicious!

I had class at 3pm and by some miracle made it by 3:02pm! The group was amazing as they are all accomplished faculty and staff at universities across Vietnam. They know everything going on currently as it relates to the teaching English as a foreign language field. It was great to get to know them and understand a bit more about what will be going on in just a few weeks.

Outside of that adventure it’s been a whirlwind of a week and I am about to teach my final official class. However tomorrow morning I will be running the pre-pre conference workshop for first time presenters and it seems some other random people that have decided to join. The workshop is basically presentations 101... please don’t whisper, elevator speech, parts of a speech... ect!

Next week I will head south for my first big multi-day workshop. The school is handling my logistics which so far seems to be going smoothly. I will have 20 teachers the first day in a training and then they’ve decided I’ll present on American holidays for 200+ students... so got to figure that part out this weekend. My workshop menu says max 35 people as it’s supposed to be hands on activity based. Perhaps we will celebrate Halloween early and everyone can make a mask?!?

So not all the rules were followed but I would say this “extreme sports” focused class went well... the video above highlights a popular ESL activity that can be called many things but for today’s sports focus I chose “the relay race”. Around the classroom are pieces of paper each with parts of a story written on them. Each relay team has a writer and 4-5 runners. The runners have to go read what’s on the papers and try to communicate to the writer verbally what the slip of paper says. The target vocabulary was about marathon running so that was an easy one for me to write a short story on 😁. Anyways lots of fun in the classroom today. Even with it being 98 degrees outside we still managed to have fun but we were all sweating. And to clarify 98 outside means it’s even hotter in the classroom since there is no a/c and the fans can only do so much! The warm-up was a ball toss so I just really got into the theme...

Today was the day I was determined to get my room decorated with lots of pictures of friends and family. It had been on the calendar since I arrived but let’s be clear there is not a Walmart or Snapfish and I had forgotten all my normal pictures in D.C. or maybe Burundi??? Somewhere over the summer and the six countries I traveled between things got a little misplaced. Anyways when I couldn’t find scissors at the largest grocery store a few weeks ago I had decided to put decorating off a bit.

After a decent amount of Google-ing I found a printing shop so I went there first thing. Everywhere I’ve lived there are typically photocopy shops that act as your one stop print store so I was pretty certain that I had this under control. I walked in and everyone started nervously giggling as we all knew a linguistically challenging moment was about to take place. My friend google translate (app on the phone) tends to help me in these moments. So I translated can I print photos and everyone starts laughing and they just say no no. And a guy stands up and says “ONLY PHOTOCOPY HERE” very loudly thus my capitalization. So I’m like okay I guess this is funny thanks so much.

And so I decided at the very least I would try and find this frame shop I had recently seen as I wanted to put together these Starbucks labels that I had saved from the roasters from the family trip.

Those labels in the front... Micah did not destroy them and my parents carried them back to D.C. for me and I brought them to Vietnam with a certain decoration in mind. So I took off to go find this tiny spot that I thought I had noticed sold frames during one of my walks. As I entered the shop success greeted me at the door! The shop did sell frames that weren’t necessarily amazing but they would do the job. The lady helped me find one and then I saw 4 printed super faded photos with sizes next to them. So I decided to try and ask her if she does printing. What do you know the frame lady also does printing. So I gave her my USB and some money and she told me to come back in a few hours.

I went home to begin working on my DIY art project. Now the problem with the frame was the background was this weird gold and white thing so I didn’t think the labels would look good with it so I decided to repurpose a bag that my school used to give me a gift into the background. For that I would need scissors... so I left my house again and soon realized that scissors was not being translated well by google translate because everyone just looked confused. Instead I just kept making scissor-cutting gestures with my fingers and eventually a kind very pregnant shop owner smiled and looked under a pile of stuff and voila I had scissors!

So I went back to my house and cut up this bag and realized I would have to use multiple colors to make this work. And after lots of tape it uhhh... did not match what I had in my mind but I’ve hung it up... when I find a place that sells just plain black paper I’ll give it a redo but for now it works...

Too busy and a hot mess but it’s something!

I also cut up pictures from this magazine I had brought with me from the states to add some additional excitement until I find some more art. If you have OCD you might go a bit nuts looking at the slight tilt of it all but sorry not sorry works for me!

I also went back and sure enough y’all my photos were printed out so I got them hung up which really livens everything up nicely.

Definitely gives it a much better feel! But the best picture is by far the one of Camden. I know words of affirmation are all the rage and it seems to be quite popular to put these photos by a mirror. Anyways I now have Camden giving me a big —- you’re alright each day!

Lastly... during the process of writing this post I noticed my land lady walking back and forth back and forth by my room. Yes she can get access to the balcony and she started moving my laundry around outside. All very normal. She suddenly noticed me looking at her so she came running to the door and started going on and on in Vietnamese. I decided to try out my google translate voice system. It records what someone is saying and can translate it into English. She saw me pull out my phone and immediately tried talking on it. But quickly she realized what I was doing. All she had been saying was: it has been raining a lot... it rains so much... the rain will stop and then the cleaner will come... hahaha so that’s good to know!