It is hard to believe that we only have 1 more day in Vietnam. Tuesday and Wednesday we started the day like many others with a trip to UEF. Both days we had a Vietnamese culture class followed by a language class. In our language classes we reviewed everything we have learned so far and also learned more of the fundamentals of the language. It continues to be obvious that English and Vietnamese are two very different languages. In addition to the tones, Vietnamese also has more vowels and verbs are not conjugated. For example "I go to the market" and "I went to the market" look exactly the same. They differentiate the two by using words like today or yesterday with the phrases.
On Tuesday, after our morning at UEF, we went to Glass Egg. Glass Egg is a company that is hired by other companies like Microsoft and other gaming companies to produces 3D graphics for video games. When we got there we got a tour of the floor. It was amazing because we got to see the artists working on current projects. They mainly design cars and tracks for racing games but will occasionaly do characters or landscapes. It normally takes an experienced design artist 32 days to finish one car...sometimes a company will ask for more than 200 cars for one contract. After our tour we got a briefing about some of the details of the company.
Thursday we had a day trip to the Chu Chi Tunnels and the War Remnants Museum. The tunnels were extremely eerie because we were on a site where the Vietnam War was actually being fought. We got to see some of the traps the Vietnamese used against our soldiers and we also got to go down into the tunnels that they built to escape the enemy. The tunnels were insanely small...definitely built for Vietnamese and not Americans. We were only in the tunnels for less than five minutes and we came out completely drenched in sweat and dirty. After the tunnels we went to the Museum. It hit most of us very hard because we were seeing the Vietnam War from the complete opposite side. It was rough to see how the Vietnamese were affected by the U.S. during the war and how they saw us a result. Don't get me wrong, we have not seen or recieved any negative emotions from any of the Vietnamese we have encountered on our trip. They have been nothing but welcoming and kind, however seeing the museum definitely hit home. Tomorrow is our last full day here and it is jam packed with activities with our UEF friends!
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