Another day, another town

Today we left Ho Chi Minh city for Tra Vinh which is a smaller town farther south on the Mekong delta. It was several hours of driving and we took a ferry across the Mekong River. I will be based out of here along with half of our original group of 40 for the next five weeks or so although we will be visiting an island for a bit of a relaxation trip and I will be spending several days at the home of one of the Vietnamese students. Our Vietnamese friends have been able to find bicycles we can borrow for transportation here and I can't wait to start exploring. According to wikipedia there are over 100 000 people living here but it feels like a bustling country town. It is refreshing to be out of the city and everything is so much cheaper here. It is the hometown of the students we are working with so we have 10 guides to show us the great places to eat and hangout.

The last couple days in HCMC were a lot of fun. After our last day of training at the university the students there held a celebration night for us. We were told to prepare a cultural presentation as per usual but other than that we did not know what to expect. Turns out that it was hosted by a guy who could have been running a game show who started us and about 150 students off with the chicken dance and a game of simon says. It was a bit odd but fun. Then we split into teams to do a relay race of sorts. Finally we did the Canadian line up of bilingual O Canada, the moose campfire song, and degeneration - a Québécois song followed by tons if dancing. We were all sweaty, tired, bug happy at the end.

Yesterday we went sightseeing. First we watched a documentary about the girl in the famous picture after a napalm bomb attack in Vietnam. She is the young girl running down the street after her clothes had been burned off along with much of her skin. Over half her body suffered third degree burns and after over a dozen surgeries she was left with painful scars. She be became a spokesperson for Vietnam and was even forced to quit school (she wanted to be a doctor) in order to serve the government as a public speaker. She now lives in Canada and amazingly she personally forgave one of the Ken responsible for the bombing. She sounds like a remarkable woman.

Next we visited a Cao Dai temple which is a unique Vietnamese religion that combines Christianity, Buddhism, and Confucionism. The temple was brightly colored withstatues carved into all of the columns and the ceiling was Harry Potteresque with stars and clouds on a blue background. We also watched a ceremony. Everyone was in white cloaks and positioned in some sort of age hierarchy and went through what looked like a series of prayers with chanting and bowing. It was really interesting and I had never heard of this religion before.

The last thing we visited were the Cu Chi tunnels which is a series of tunnels over 250km long. There are three levels and the first level is 3m below the surface. There were used by the communist Vietnamese first against the French and then again against the Americans. People lived in the tunnels and attached annexes, coming out for surprise attacks. Ventilation holes and entrances were well hidden and American troops did not discover most of them and as a result this area was heavily bombed as they tried to destroy the hidden bunkers. We went through about 100m of tunnel and the are tiny (and had even been widened fir tourists)! I had to crouch and eventually crawls to get through with not much space beside my shoulders. They were hot and stuffy too so it was not hard to believe that mist people living down there for over a year died.

Sorry for the long post and thanks if you made it through!