I Gladly Admit My Defeat

I have a confession to make.

Someone asked me this week what I most look forward to in my everyday occurences here. And this morning it has dawned on me:

Coffee. Yes that is right. To be more specific, iced coffee with condensed milk and sugar. It is how people drink it here and I love it. After fighting it for all those years in Seattle where I lived within a mile of no less than 8 different coffee shops, it took moving to Viet Nam for me to finally give in.

As always, there is a context that my surrender to the coffee gods fits into. As I mentioned, Calah and I are taking Vietnamese these days. Each class is 3 hours of mostly failed attempts at speaking a language that has yet to make much sense to me. We can't even seem to get the pronunciation of the alphabet down, but less whole words! Although maybe it is at least progress that when I see a word, even if I don't know how to correctly say it, I know how not to say it. My newest realization is that tr makes more of a ch sound. I guess it's coming, just slowly. In our barely two weeks of class, we've had a variety of teachers, although normally we have one for tuesdays and thursdays, and a different one of fridays. This tuesday we had a sub and she was SO hard. Good, but challenging. Vietnamese people tend to just laugh at you, whether you have said something correct or not. But this one, she looked at you and said, "wrong" and you would have to try again. Then she would cover the words and we would have to memorize conversations. So hard! But I guess that is the point...

ANYways...during this forever long reminder that I cannot communicate with people here, we get one break. And in the kitchen downstairs they make us delicious coffee. We have even learned to fairly successfully ask for it in Vietnamese. The order contains what may be my favorite word yet, sua (which means milk and has an accent mark over it that I can't do on this computer but makes it really fun to say). It makes the first half of class much more enjoyable knowing that it is coming and second half benefits from actually having my new found love in front of me.

And on that note, I should get going to class. You can bet that in about 3 hours I will be thoroughly enjoying my defeat. Coffee, you have won. I hope we can begin to foster a long and delicious friendship.