Day 8

Monday officially started our second week here in Viet Nam. We all are getting used to the area around our hotel and the foods we have are having each day. Everyone is just excited to see what the second week will bring. What exactly I am thinking on this Monday is that the countdown to the end is beginning and that I really need to do everything that HCMC offers.

As for what Monday brought us, we started off at the school for a history lesson and than language class. The history class was about the ancient history or Viet Nam before Westernization. It was a little boring at first, but once it hit the time period right before Westernization it got very interesting because it really showed a lot of their beliefs and why the city and people are how they are. And then language class was just like normal but this day we learned the numbers. All the guys were excited for this lecture because they have all already learned one, two and three because they would always say one two three cheers! Mot, hai, ba, yo! Other than that class was pretty normal. Then we had lunch at the canteen, which was pretty ordinary with fries, these really good tomatoes over lettuce, bread and some other more Vietnamese food. By this day, we had seen most of the things that they can make so there really were no more surprises.

After lunch and a quick stop at the hotel to change, we headed over to the University of Agriculture and Forestry. Here we heard from some of the professors on catfish farming. The first PowerPoint was on the University in general. We learned about many things pertaining to the University like who are their international partners and the multiple degrees students can earn from this University. We then had someone from the faculty of fisheries talk to us about the main aquatic farming happening in Viet Nam. They spoke about the wealth in aquatic farming as well as the difficulties that have come because of either human actions or farmers wanting to switch the kind of farming they perform. The last presentation was on catfish farming. One thing that stood out during the presentation is the types of catfish farming. The cage farming was cool to see in pictures because we saw that on many waterways heading towards the Delta. The pond like farming we would be able to see a little later in the day.

We then took a short bus ride to another part of campus to see where they test and treat the catfish. They had created like a little sample catfish farm. They had the area where they hatched and grew the baby catfish, and where they changed the gender of the catfish from male to female. It was a very interesting display but because we were short on time, we had to leave for the hotel after only 15 minutes.

Monday night we all stayed in because we were tired from the weekend. I ended up going to bed early that night.