Yesterday (Friday), when it was time to head to my tiếng Việt class, it was raining really hard and I almost bagged it.  I am glad that I didn’t though!  Our class already shrunk from 11 or 12 students at the beginning to around 7 students now – this damn language is just too hard and people get frustrated and just quit coming.  (I’ve been close to that point myself – but it’s getting better.)

Anyway, of the 7 remaining students, only 3 (including myself) showed up for class yesterday.  So this Korean guy, Mr. Kim, talked our teacher, Thầy (teacher) Hién, into letting Kim and I go to the căn tin (cafeteria) to buy beer and for the rest of class we drank beer and just talked casually in tiếng Việt.

Here are Ms. He Lim (also Korean) and Mr. Kim passing out the beer:

And here is our whole class as of yesterday, Ms. He Lim, Mr. Kim, Thầy Hién, and me:

So Mr. Kim was telling us about some Korean liquor that is 40% alcohol (80 proof) and Thầy Hiến said the Vietnamese also have an 80 proof liquor.  So I had to be an American and tell them that “Ở Mỹ chúng ta có rượn chín mươi độ alcohol (I didn’t know how to say alcohol in tiếng Việt), which translates to “In America, we have liquor that is 90%  alcohol.”  And thus these Koreans and Vietnamese were introduced to the concept of Golden Grain.

At one point, Thầy Hiến asked us how many bottles of beer we could drink if we just sat down and started drinking and continued until we couldn’t drink anymore.  I said 15 or 20.  Ms. He Lim said 1 (!).  Thầy Hiến said 10.  Mr. Kim said 50.  I called bullshit and said “You’re on.”  I believe he can probably drink plenty, but I really want to sit in a bar with that guy and watch him drink 50 bottles of beer.  He swears he can.  We’ll see.