Day 10

Today was a pretty typical day for us, but what made the day a little special was that it was our last business presentation. We all have not started to realize that we have to leave soon and probably are still hoping to stay longer.

The day started off with breakfast at the hotel again. My typical breakfast of eggs, bread, watermelon, pineapple, and water. The Vietnamese breakfast food has started to scare me because like half the people on the trip are having stomach issues. But anyways, after breakfast we headed to UEF for another history and culture class. In this lecture he spoke about the Westernization of Viet Nam and how it had an effect on the culture. One example that he spoke of was the new religions that were adopted. The people started to migrate towards Catholicism and Puritanism. Although they switched religion preferences, they still kept some of their culture in their Catholic religion. The Western Catholics worship Jesus, whereas the Vietnamese worship the mother Mary because they prefer to worship females instead of males. The teacher than went into the yin and yang philosophy that the Vietnamese tend to base a lot of things on. One part of the yin and yang philosophy deals with even and odd numbers. In Viet Nam, odd numbers are considered lucky whereas even numbers are for the dead. Something interesting that he said was that when people build houses, they will only build one or three gates, never two. Two gates is reserved for graveyards. He went more in depth into the philosophy but by that time all I was concentrating on was keeping my eyes open. By the end of the lecture I was asking myself why did I stay out till 1 AM the night before. I was able to catch the end of the lecture about the Ngu hanh philosophy made up of five elements: fire, earth, water, tree, and metal. Fire is yang, water yin, tree yang, metal yin and earth in the middle is both yin and yang.

After the lecture we got a break where some of us got ice cream from the cantine. It was delicious. I got this cone that was pre-wrapped with vanilla ice cream and a delicious chocolate topping. Yes I enjoyed the chocolate topping a lot. After finishing the ice cream and over break we started language class. We learned words like engineer, business, happy, beautiful, naughty, and tired. All things that that we can add to responses we have already learned. Like when someone asks us how we are doing we can now say we are tired or happy or even naughty. We then learned of a quiz that we will have to take on Friday. I’m going to need to study because I cannot recognize words yet only speak them.

After language class we went to lunch at the cantine. We had tomatoes, fries, this beef stew thing, and rice. We are all thinking they know what we like because they put out so many fries for us. Lunch was short so we could head back to the hotel to change before heading just a few blocks to the UEF administrative office for a presentation done by Mark Oakley of Duane Morris, a law firm here in Viet Nam. He spoke about the ups and downs of foreign investment in Viet Nam. Something he highly recommended for all people wanting to invest in Viet Nam is to go in alone or with someone you highly trust. He said he has seen way too many businesses get screwed over by local partners. He knows that there is a lot of potential in Viet Nam but coming from the law firm side of things, the government puts so many regulations on foreign investment that people considering doing it, needs to get things right the first time if they want a good shot of making it. The presentation was very interesting and I found it nice to hear about Viet Nam from that viewpoint.

After the presentation we headed back to the hotel at 3 where I fell straight sleep until 5:20. After waking up we all, except Andrew, headed to the same place we went last night, The Black Cat. They guys still loved the burgers this time. I got a chicken panini that was not too good. The burger last night was definitely a lot better. We all came back to the hotel and then went out to have a few drinks at the world famous Rex Hotel rooftop to enjoy the view of the city. We decided to walk back from the Rex. On the way back we saw a bat just walking on the ground so we took a picture of it. Then we just enjoyed our walk back through the city. Our time here is getting shorter and there is still so much we all still want to do in the city.