Arrival

So we finally made it to Vinh yesterday at about four in the afternoon after an epic three flights to get here. We flew on Cathay Pacific for 14 hours from LAX to Hong Kong, caught a three hour flight from Hong Kong to Saigon, then got on our final two hour flight from Saigon to Vinh. We were warmly welcomed by a large group of students with flowers and a/c taxi cabs. On our way to the Church which serves as both our living and teaching area we stopped to have coconut milk on the side of the road. After freshening up a bit we went out to dinner.


The living situation this year is not the best. Because of logistics we are not able to stay at the Bishop's residence like in Hue so everything was very last minute here. I have to share a room with Hung and Quan which is fine but our bathroom is awful. I think it is actually meant to be a closet...it reeks there's no ventilation, the toilet isn't flushing, and worst of all there is no drain...yet we have a running shower hose. We're going to have to arrange a schedule to share the bathrooms of other volunteers because I don't think they'd be able to just install a drain over night. Also another thing we'll have to deal with this year are blackouts. Apparently everything here is running off of generators because of city power problems.

Aside from the bathroom situation everything else is going pretty well. The city is very different from Hue, much more urban. This makes sense as the city had to be completely rebuilt after the war. It was completely obliterated, hardly anything original exists. Later today we will go explore the city some and find a hotel with a nice a/c wifi cafe. Right now I'm sweating listening to mass from the Church. Unfortunately it's in Vietnamese so I can't understand anything...but the Church is really beautiful. I'll go around later and take pictures to post on here. The Church is another thing I'll have to get used to because they have mass at 5 am and ring a bunch of bells at 4:30 am. All in all it appears as though this is going to be a radically different experience from last year, but nonetheless hopefully a great one.

UPDATE: We're getting moved to a new bedroom tomorrow with a much much much nicer bathroom. They're installing a/c for us today. Our first meal of the trip: