Falling into place

I've been busy this last week and I love it! I have always been the type of person who loves being busy, even thrives in it. With too much down time I get restless. At home I was(eventually) able to find a balance somewhere in between being crazy busy to the point of never sitting down and being bored. It's nice to feel like my life can maybe fall into that same balance here.

Work picked up this week, which is great. I'm glad to feel like I'm doing something. But most of my busyness came from things I did with friends, which was fantastic! Thursday night after dinner with my host family, Calah, Hannah and I met downtown at a cafe and walked around "the" lake (it's the official downtown area, Hoan Kien). Some of the cafe's here are really neat, you have to go down a skinny alley way between two shops and then up steep flights of stairs and then its just there. Kind of like Harry Potter. Haha, yes, I did just reference Harry Potter.

On Friday night we met a couple of people from church for dinner, again downtown. Calah and I took a bus straight from language class, during rush over. I don't think I've been with that many people in that small of a space...maybe ever before. It was SO crowded! And kind of a confusing bus situation. But we got there and it worked out great. I feel pretty confident using the buses here, which is great because it enables me to arrive places not drenched in sweat with helmet hair. Although I can only take the bus if I have an extra hour before and after whatever it is I'm going to.

Saturday Calah and I had an extra language class to make up for a day when our teacher was sick. We had a lot of language this week. But I've started to really enjoy class. We have just the one teacher every time now and she is a lot of fun (Giang-remember that gi is z, so her name is said kind of like zong). She is around 30 and wears a lot of glitter and is very trendy. We talk about her husband, our families (both Vietnamese and American), old boyfriends, work, Hanoi, anything. The class is more conversational now that we have a few more words to use. And I'm beginning to feel like I can piece together a few questions and phrases, so that is exciting!

Saturday night I hung out with just my little sister, Vang. She is funny and still doesn't talk to me at all, in either Vietnamese or English. But we played card games for 2 hours. She even taught me a new game. Oh the beauty of non-verbal communication. Essentially she played my hand for me the first time, then I would attempt to play and whenever I did something wrong she would just hand my cards back to me. I lost something like 9 times in a row, but then I figured it out and won twice! yay! We had quite a good time together.

Today my family is out all day. I went to church this morning, had lunch with friends, and now I'm in a cafe, sipping my coffee and realizing that I think I really like life here. It's definitely not home, I don't think it ever will be. But it's good. Really good actually. I feel as if things are beginning to fall into place. What a beautiful feeling.