One month later and I still miss Vietnam and the friends I’ve made. This experience was beyond amazing, and I am so lucky and grateful to have been apart of it. I told my Vietnamese friends that I would see them again someday and I sincerely meant it because they were the highlight of the…

Snakes, Bees, and Shrimp! OH MY! It’s Delta day! Four hours out on the water and walking around beautiful islands is what vacation is all about. Oh, wait… this is study abroad & that would explain why I’m laying in bed all sweaty and gross writing a blog post instead of swimming in a pool…

Today was hot. And the worst part is it’ll probably feel like nothing compared to the four hours we will spend on the Mekong Delta tomorrow. But that is a problem for the future, and I’m positive I’ll complain about it in tomorrow’s blog post. Today we went to a Shipping company, Cat Lai, and…

Buddhism: A religion that I knew close to nothing about before entering Vietnam. But after today I can now confidently say that I understand the religion. Even though Buddhism is not my personal belief I was still able to find the beauty in it today. The religion is built around the idea of ending human…

Today was filled with sight visits. Even though it wasn’t the most exciting day of the trip, the companies were interesting, and this really is the most valuable part of study abroad. The first site we visited was Vietnam Singapore industrial park. The park makes profits off of developing and leasing out land to various…

I wasn’t sure if I wanted to go into the Cu Chi tunnels when starting the day. But at the moment I realized this was an opportunity I didn’t want to miss out on, when would I be in Vietnam again? Crawling in the first tunnel wasn’t as bad as I had suspected, I crawled…

This morning started with a 6 am wake-up call. Because of this insanely early time and when you stay up insanely long hours the day before I thought I would fall asleep right away on the bus. But as we began to travel further outside the city, I realized that these sights weren’t something I…

Today began with a trip to the US consulate. The building looked nothing like I was expecting. I don’t know why but for some reason I thought it would be a large building with the basic fancy themed furniture you see in every government movie. Instead, it was located on a floor of a normal…

The morning began with a Vietnamese History and Culture class. The students put on a mini fashion show for us in their traditional clothes. It was amazing how many different outfits they had for all their occasions. It made me wonder to myself what Americans would do in a fashion show of our traditional clothes…

Well, to start it off I’ll call myself out and say that my title has nothing to do with this post at all. It translates to “I am a student,” which we learned in class today. And due to a mixture of me being proud of being able to say one whole sentence in Vietnamese…

Yesterday the Vietnamese students entertained us with singing performances. I was amazed by not only their beautiful voices but how well they sang the words to American songs… I live in America and don’t even know the words to these songs (which is incredibly awkward when they excitedly invite you to sing along). Today during…

I’ve never made friends faster than I did today. Stepping off the bus, I was greeted by a smiling face, an arm wrapped around mine, and a new friend. This is not how I would’ve expected the Vietnamese students to act based off of my readings. The culture books portrayed the Vietnamese as people who…