Wednesday May 18

Today's activites started with the third installment of our Vietnamese cultural education.  We learned about dualism, yin-yang philosophy, and traditional community organization.  Dualism involves a way of thinking in terms of extremes.  Traditional Vietnamese will identify a person as either tall or short or, fat or thin.  There is not much of a middle ground and modifiers such as thinner or fatter are not used.  I am not sure how this way of thinking came into existance but it seems possible that it is a facet of the non-rational mode of existance that we learned of in previous lectures.  Afterall, it seems rational to try to modify adjectives to to better describe nouns.  Yin-yang philosophy seems to share similar roots in non-rational thinking.  I am usure about a lot relating to yin-yang philosophy so I will save my judgments on it for my more detailed journal.
We continued to learn about traditional farming villages.  Historically, the Vietnamese lived iin closed villaages with independent governments.  The village centers were a couple of acres large and were surrounded by walls of densely planted bamboo.  Sometimes women would live their entire lives and never leave the village walls.  Eventually the villages realized the benefits of cooperating with each other to assit each other during natural disasters and invasions.  This realization led to the formation of a central government to oversee the villages.
In the language class we learned how to say where we were from and what we are studying at the University of Pittsburgh.  We now have the skills to do a decent introduction of ourselves in Vietnamese.
In the afternoon we went to a coffee shop to listen to a lady from Wisconsin talk about her experiences and percepions of Vietnam.  She is a straight talker.  She informed us of the high cost of living in HCM City.  As I recall she was paying over 10,000 USD a year for her six year old's schooling.  She also spoke of the her children's friends and their talents.  The students generally have at least one Western parent and have western names.  They can speak 3 or 4 languages fluently.  She was frightening me a bit.