Xin chao! Tên tôi là Ally! We learned a few Vietnamese words and phrases to start our day, as well as made 3-minute proposals for services that are successful in America that we think could be successful in Vietnam as well. My group did food delivery robots and we won a UEF notebook! I also got third place in the Kahoot that we played, so I won a regional flavor of Lays chips. It was so awesome learning such a complex language and trying our best with the toned letters. It really put into perspective what it must’ve been like for the UEF students to learn English.
After lunch, we went to the Park Hyatt Saigon hotel – oh my gosh it is so luxurious there! We were asked to not take many photos in the hotel, so to protect their guest privacy. Speaking of which, I appreciated the hotel staff’s commitment to the guests’ privacy and personalized services. I think that these commitments, paired with the premium quality of the hotel, make Park Hyatt (and Hyatt in general) stand out and hold their ground in the luxury industry. We were shown one of their standard rooms, and even that room was quite extravagant. Everything was very clean, neat, and thoughtful. They showed us a new addition to the rooms, which was a collection of bedtime story cards in a nightstand drawer – they were so interesting to look at! They also showed us their restaurants, gym, pool, and spa – all of which were also insanely nice. The hotel restaurants partner mostly with local food distributors, and the rest are French partners, as one of their restaurants is a Vietnamese-French fusion. In regard to sustainability, we learned that the hotel uses Lumitics food waste machines to keep track of their restaurants’ food waste, and they said that their waste has decreased since they started using the machines(side note: while the machines seems to be rather useful, I’m a little skeptical about their net eco-friendliness, as it is an artificial-intelligence-powered machine, which is not so good for the environment). Another sustainable practice that I noticed in passing was that they have regular hand towels(rather than paper towels) in their public restroom, and once you’re done with the towel, you put it in a designated bin, and then they wash them. It’s not a brand new practice, but I personally have not seen it very often, so it was a nice surprise to see it in such a grand place.
After the hotel visit, we had the rest of the day to ourselves; I took a nap for a couple of hours, and then most of us went to a food street market with some of the UEF students and tried some foods that are not offered in the US (lots of us tried a sort of boiled duck egg- fun! but I probably wouldn’t try it again 😅). We then headed to a karaoke place, where we sang and had so much fun.
Today was another wonderful experience full of connection and learning, and I’m so so excited to see what else is headed our way!