Teacher's Day, Cooking Dinner

Teacher’s Day

Wednesday, November 20^th was teacher’s day here in Vietnam. First, all classes were canceled and the school held a ceremony for all teachers. The ceremony started like all others at my university here in Vietnam – with a few dances and songs from students, which are always fun to watch. This was followed by lots of speeches, all in Vietnamese, which were not so interesting. After receiving flowers from the rector, we went to a hotel downtown for lunch.

presents for teacher's day

students singing a song for teacher's day

In the afternoon, some students stopped by my room to visit. It was a little awkward, and I wasn’t really sure what I was supposed to do, but I showed them some pictures of my family and we talked for a little while. They brought me flowers and a few other presents. In total, I received 6 bouquets of flowers, one card, a scarf, one figurine, and a few emails for teacher’s day. One of my coworkers told me that since her father-in-law, her brother-in-law, her sister, and herself are all teachers and live together, her house is always packed with flowers at this time of the year!

Cooking Dinner

Our first dinner - vegetable soup, bread, guava, and rice cakes

making rice cakes together

A few weeks ago, I invited some students and teachers over for dinner. I cooked vegetable soup, which wasn’t really American, because I had to use Vietnamese ingredients, and wasn’t really Vietnamese, because it was sort of American style. That’s basically how all my cooking is here in Vietnam. So, we had soup, bread, and guava, and one of the Taiwanese teachers made rice cake for dessert in her rice cooker. After dinner, I taught everyone how to play some different card games, like “BS,” and we had a nice little party. 

So, to return the favor, my Vietnamese student wanted to show me how to make Vietnamese rice cakes. She brought over all the ingredients, and we made the rice cakes together. They’re easy to make, but they sure do take a long time! There were pork and shrimp rice cakes for all the meat-eaters, and two types of rice cakes for me – bean, and tofu and mushroom. First, you take the dough and make little balls. Then, you flatten out the balls into circles, add the filling, and seal the edges. I didn’t do such a great job with this, because I like my rice cake with lots of filling. So, I always overfill them and then they break during the cooking process and the filling comes out. But, I still think they taste better that way! We had tons of rice cakes, even without cooking them all, and I was stuffed! Afterwards, we played cards again, and now I can honestly say that I know how to make Vietnamese rice cakes, having learned on two separate occasions.

making rice cakes

the final product - rice cakes!