It's hard to believe that I've been here for a month. It's flown by, and if the rest of my time here goes this quickly, I'll be home before I know it!

I'm doing well with getting settled in here. I was speaking with Sydney, one of the other teachers who's been here about three months, the other day. She asked how long I'd been here, and when I told her three weeks, she was shocked. Because of the way that I was interacting so comfortably, joking with all of the other teachers, she had assumed that I had been here for much longer, and was just away on vacation for the three months that she'd been here.

Tet holiday ended well - On Wednesday Freya and I went to the Cu Chi Tunnels. It was really, really crowded with other tour groups, but interesting to see nonetheless. We didn't really get any pictures worth putting up, since most of the pictures are just holes in the ground that lead to tunnels, or holes dug out with bamboo spikes sticking out of them. (On a side note, our tour guide informed us that the term "booby traps" comes from the Bamboo that the Vietnamese used in their traps during the war). There was a shooting range at the Tunnels where visitors could buy bullets for any number of machine guns, rifles, or handguns that were used in the war, and shoot them at targets across a field. It was a bit disconcerting to hear gunshots while walking through the jungle on the tour.

After we got back from the Cu Chi Tunnels, Freya and I both had a nap, then went out to dinner and on Huong Vuong Plaza to watch Avatar in 3D. Watching movies in foreign countries is always amusing, and this was no exception (though not really worth going into in detail on here). The rest of Tet holiday was rather uneventful - it consisted of lots of 24 watching and sleeping in. On Friday we went into school to plan all of our lessons for Saturday and Sunday.

I had my first full weekend (four classes on Saturday, four on Sunday). It was every bit as exhausting as I expected it to be. Afterward I went out for a few drinks and dinner with some of the other teachers, and in true ILA style, ended up at T and R and ran into a bunch of other teachers there. I ended up staying out til 5am and got back to my guest house as the guy who works here was waking up. Ooooops!

I started my private lessons yesterday. I'm working with a 10 year old Korean girl, Julie, who has fairly good English, but trouble reading, writing, and connecting the words that she knows when they're spoken to what's written on the page. She's absolutely adorable, and working with her is so much fun that I almost feel bad for charging...At the end of the lesson, we play bingo with numbers 1-30, where we each write numbers in a 3x3 grid, and draw little slips of paper with the numbers written on them out of a drawer. Becky told me that Julie always beat her, but also warned me that she cheated when they played. Before we started, I told Julie that Becky said she cheated (how's THAT as an example of reported speech...), and that she wasn't allowed to cheat when she was playing with me. I won the first game, and was excited, and told Julie that Becky said that Julie always beat her badly. Julie said "I know...it's because I cheated". She's so adorable, it seems like the perfect job! The only downside is that it means I don't have any days off now (work at ILA on the weekends and Tuesdays and Thursdays, and this on Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays), but I'm very much looking forward to it anyways.

There's not a lot else going on here. My Survival Vietnamese lessons start tomorrow afternoon, and I'm very much looking forward to being able to communicate a bit...or at the very least, learn some pronunciation so that I can say my students' names....