Here in Vietnam, I have been making friends not only with the Pitt students I am traveling with, but also the University of Economics and Finance students in Ho Chi Minh that we are partnered with. This is creating a change of pace to life back home. We all know we have two weeks to get to know each other so things are happening more frequently than they would at home. I am going out to eat dinner with students from both groups most nights or just Pitt students some nights. When we are eating, there is much more sharing than there would be at home. For lunch, we are taken to a restaurant and food is brought out that I have assumed someone on the UEF staff has ordered in advance. This is food for the table, which is different than almost every meal I eat in the states.

Not only are our meals different, but our days are as well. Because we are here for a class, we are touring companies almost every day. That is definitely something that doesn’t happen back home. We are also given most of the afternoon and night off and don’t have homework. So all day is company visits and lessons about Vietnam, and then we have the nights completely off, allowing us time to go out with our new friends.

I have appreciate that our lunches are ordered for us, because I want to try the local cuisine, but I wouldn’t know what to order, and I wouldn’t have the courage to order a dish with pig’s blood in it. To be clear, we had a lunch with soup that had a cube of solid pig’s blood, not just like a juicy piece of pork. I haven’t run into much that I didn’t like, except I am finding a particular common order of fish to not be worth the hassle of picking out fifteen tiny bones to then eat. There have been some delicious spring rolls, stingray, pho and new chicken and beef dishes.

The best activity so far has been visiting the Cu Chi tunnels of the Viet Cong. We entered the museum/park to see multiple destroyed American war machines, which was just impressive, and then we got a tour from an employee of UEF. We got to see some of the things like surface bamboo sticks that protected a village and what a VC supporter’s house would look like. Something I didn’t know about the war was American soldiers would leave a gun or grenade or something of the sort in a home of a Vietnamese person, they would then come back the next day and ask if it was seen. This was a test to see if the person supported the VC or not, because if the item was returned, the villager would be fine, but if it was missing, the villager would be killed as a VC supporter. We then got to see what the tunnels were like and actually crawled through three of them. These have apparently been widened for tourists, so I can’t imagine how tight they must have been during the war. I always knew how complex the tunnel system was, but actually seeing it gives me a whole new appreciation to the hard life these people subjected themselves too to free their country. I also now understand the heat they would have been dealing with while digging those tunnels, and it is not a joke.