One absentee ballot, please.

All of this McCain-Palin stuff has me bummed and, well, scared. If they win, I won't live in America for another four to eight years. I mean it. I think they could be worse than Bush.

I'd like to be able to return to the states for a while at least, in between adventures, so I just donated to the Obama campaign. And I also figured out everything I need to do to vote from overseas. (It turns out that Fedex will mail my ballot overnight for free!) Sam pointed out to me recently that he will be here in Nha Trang visiting me during the election, and that we'll probably be watching the results on some TV in a random bar (I'd add probably an expat bar). I'm foreseeing either a very wonderful or a very sorrowful day.

I know donating and voting isn't doing a lot, but it's a start, right? I'm brainstorming what else I can do from over here to help....

All of this comes after another lovely day in Nha Trang. Here, at times it's easy for me to lie on a beach and not think about the rest of the world. Slums are out of sight, and I could excuse myself from watching the convention since I don't have at TV. But as soon as I leave that beach, reality hits hard. I walk home past the slums, read the NY Times online, and watch Palin's speech on youtube.

I actually didn't get to the beach today, though. I had a meeting with my boss and two English teachers (both 24-year-old girls) at 9am. I got my teaching schedule! I have two or three classes every day. There are 10 class periods a day here--more like an American high school schedule than an American university schedule. Some days I teach the first two or three periods (starting at 7am--ouch!), other days I teach the last two or three and one day I think I teach the middle three periods.... Unfortunately I don't have Monday or Friday off right now, but my Friday classes only run until the middle of October so I should be able to take some long traveling weekends after that. Next week I'll start going to the classes, just to observe, and the week after that I'll start team teaching all the classes.

(As a side note, on my way to the meeting a group of three Vietnamese students yelled "Katherine" to me. I turned to them, assuming they actually intended to talk to me since I was the only American within, oh, a few miles at least. I clarified that I wasn't Katherine, and when I told them my name, they said, "Oh, you're our listening teacher!" I didn't even know yet that I was teaching a listening class, but somehow they knew already. The three students were really nice and excited to meet me, and it made me even more excited to start working.

Also, one of the English teachers I met told me that her class--which is a non-english major class--is comprised entirely of male students who are "very excited" to meet me.)

After the meeting I came home and talked on skype to Corey about her challenges at City Year in Seattle. Then I shared lunch with Katherine--a yummy salad of tomato, basil, cucumber, carrots, olive oil, salt, a little rice vinegar, and some raw tofu. (Normally I hate raw tofu, but it's really good here. Probably because it was made fresh this morning. It takes the place of cheese in the salad, at least.) She seems to make this salad frequently, I think I will be doing the same. We also brainstormed how to make a mean italian meal--her father is Italian. We decided that we could make a mean bruschetta and some great pesto sauce, given the wild abundance of fresh basil here. I love having vegetarian friends!

We then ventured out in search of bubble tea. (For those of you who dont' know, I developed a serious bubble tea addiction this summer while waiting to come to Vietnam.) We decided to walk to the other side of the city and then take the bus home in order to save a few cents. Not surprisingly, though, we quickly got turned around in the backstreets and wandered around for a couple hours. Luckily we wandered right into a vegetarian restaurant, which was delicious. When we asked how much the plate of food was (we split it), the man was silent for a minute, smiling to himself and thinking just how much to overcharge us. He told us 20,000, but Katherine and I both knew very well that it should only be between 7,000 to 10,000. We offered him 10,000, and he accepted, I think realizing that we knew what he was up to. As a concession, I told the man we would be back often because we both live here. He seemed to be ok with the arrangement, gave us a business card, and we went on our way.

Soon we stopped in a cell phone shop to ask for directions to bubble tea and the "super"market (it's really tiny!). Luckily the guy at the shop actually knew where we wanted to go, and how to get there. In Vietnam, if you ask for directions and the person doesn't know how to get there, he or she will just make something up and give you absolutely wrong directions, instead of just saying they dont know. But this guy at the cell phone shop even drew us a map and labeled all the streets, even the ones that were irrelevant to where wanted to go.

It was this map that finally enabled us to find bubble tea, only a couple hours and at least 5km after leaving school. We actually found two places right beside each other. Unfortunately neither was very good (we tried both places, of course!). The search for good bubble tea in Nha Trang continues.

The supermarket, called Maximark, is only two streets away from bubble tea, so we stopped in there for some things: fiber crackers (because I'm not getting any fiber here), baby bottle wash to clean veggies (who knew! the things you learn living in southeast asia), a colander, individual packets of sweetened condensed milk, an air freshener. I also discovered ant spray at Maximark, which I'm sure I'll be buying soon to manage the constant presence of ants. I might also be buying mosquito killer that sprays itself intermittently into the air--tonight I found a mosquito in my room for the first time. In fact, it was INSIDE the mosquito net around my room. The thing's supposed to keep them out, not trap them in!

We caught the bus home after a long day of walking. The number 4 bus actually stops right beside Maximark and right at the end of the "donkey path" beside our building--it's practically door to door service! We bought some banana treats from the french-speaking vietnamese man and had our daily exchange in French. It's really one the highlights of my day, exchanging a few words in French. OH! I think I'm going to start going to French class with one of the English professors who's learning French! It's less than $10 for a semester. You can't beat that. But it's a French class that will be taught in Vietnamese, so I'm not sure how useful it will be. I'll give it a test run before paying.

I guess I should also focus on Vietnamese lessons, too, though. I feel like I'm using less Vietnamese here than in Hanoi. Today, though, when asking for directions, I found myself asking questions in Vietnamese that I didn't even really know I knew.

I'm living more simply here than I'm used to, and I love it. The thought of walking into a Target right now makes me tense. I don't want McCain-Palin to win, but I can't say staying here for a few years would be such a bad thing....