UCHANU Year book page.

It's been a while. Just trying to compile everything in one place and figured I'd post this up here.

Dear Tim,

I remember telling myself that I should make a conscious effort to continue blogging after UCHANU. I failed miserably at that. BUT, i've finally found something worth blogging about.

I found this in a book I was looking at for my research paper on Globalization and Vietnam Society. The book was Social Change in Southeast Asia and published in 1998. The letter was written on January 11th, 2007. I found it 4 years later, 2011. The letter is from a girl name “Nicole” to a guy named “Tim” and she was expressing her love and appreciation of him during their time spent together in Asia. I really hope he got this letter before leaving it in this book. It got me thinking about my own past experience in Vietnam. I remember crying so much at the last UCHANU dinner that all my makeup was smeared off and no matter what, the tears just wouldn't stop. It was so heartbreaking having to say good-bye to everyone, not knowing when we will see each other again, or if we'll keep in touch, and letting go of the memories. My biggest fear coming back to America was that I would forget my life in Vietnam, that I would all to easily re-emerge back into my surroundings in America as though I had never left. Reading this letter reminded me of how that can never be possible and that the experiences I've had, the people I've met have completely changed my life and myself whole utterly. I would tell everyone I've come across how much they made my experience so worth the trip. Not only Vietnam, but also the many people that I’ve come across who I’ve grown to love and appreciate and all the people that I’ve known I’ve grown attached to in my life but never really told them out loud how much I love and appreciate them and our friendship. Taking a break from my research paper, Here it is:

January 11th, 2007

Dear Tim,

I can’t tell you enough how glad I am that you came to Asia for the holidays. My tears in Bangkok were preventing me from expressing myself fully.

It’s incredible when you spend every moment with a person for a month – and suddenly that person is gone – life as you’ve come to know it is altered. There are pieces of you all around me: traces of the baby power bomb you dropped in my bathroom, Pol Poc, Red Dust, and Yrahm Yreene, the beautiful tea set (which I cherish), your stomach rubbing oil, photographs, my backpack – which I still cannot bring myself to unpack because doing so I suppose would be an admittance that the trip is indeed over.

But, what I have the most of is – the things you taught me, and the countless moments that filled me up. I’ve been thinking about how crazy we are – to have done this trip. To spend our time getting to know each other in crowded hotel rooms, bumpy buses and very intense, high-pressure situations. It was at times hard for both of us, I know… and without the ability to step away, take a break, reflect – we had to trudge forward with our adventure. It was full-on, and there are times that I regret not communicating better, clamming up or being snappy, sometimes showing the opposite of what I wanted to. I wanted so badly to do right by you. Forty-eight hours later, sorting through it all, I miss you – you’ve become someone I care about immensely. And, as I did in Madison, I feel inspired that another crazy person exists in the world- willing to do the crazy thing – to just do it, press click, to go, to seize the moment.

I’m not sure if I told you enough that I appreciate you. There are many things about you that over the past few weeks I have come to love. In the rapid pace and exhaustions of travel these are things that you sometime fail to mention. I love how you lie on your stomach and pull all the covers over your head, how you pace the room aimlessly looking for something/nothing like a reflexive morning routine, how you apply hair gel. I love watching the way you talk to people, your kind and giving smile and ability to communicate through laughter and positive energy, the way you appreciate a good hard-boiled egg on a mountain top, how you appreciate lots of little things, how you awkwardly answered, “two years” then sheepishly turned to me and said, “that sound about right?”, how you are unendingly generous, how you put yourself in uncomfortable seats in order to make me more comfortable and then lied and said you liked it better in the uncomfortable seats, how your impulse was to protect me always, how you tell assholes to “be nice”, how you always ask, “got everything?”, how your whole self is positively elated by a motorbike and an open road (me too!), how you made me feel more beautiful in the past weeks than I have ever, ever felt in my whole life, the way you eat baguettes, your sleeping morning face, the way you look at me when we make love, the way your hand feels in mine – constant, calming, gentle, trustworthy – when there are no more words to say, and exhaustion has won over me. I love your love of knowledge and learning. I love your ambition. I love your tenderness. I love your sense of self. I love your intellect and your unbridled sense of adventure. I love rolling over in bed and putting my hand on your stomach. I love your strength. I love many things about you, this is just as start.

Whatever happens – know these things. Thank you for the most intense, beautiful, eye-opening, challenging trip of my life.

I love you too.
Nicole ~

I hope I can find you one day Tim and Nicole, and that you're somewhere married.

UCHANU: Integration back in US?

How can I integrate the experiences of the semester into my life, and in what concrete ways can I remain connected to UCHANU and Vietnam?"

Words cannot explain my time in Vietnam and how much I have grown and changed here. In integrating the experience of this semester into my life, I'm not sure how I will even let go of this whole experience. In returning back home, I know in my heart that there will be a feeling wishing that I was back in Vietnam where I found friends, family, and a home here. This experience has changed my life in general and the most fearful thing that would happen to me is that in going back home, and returning to the daily routines before of going to school, meetings, and all that other stuff, that I will forget that I ever went to Vietnam.

I'm pretty good at going back to daily routines and picking up things again. Hence, I'm afraid that I would get so wrapped up in everything back in the States that I would forget all the memories that I have here. Therefore, my main goals is to keep the memories that i have made here stay with me forever. I want to remember all the time i spent here and the people that I have met. The biggest way to do this is through my pictures and facebook haha. but anyways... i think it has been an inevitable change of myself that I have come here. I have changed and become more comfortable finding myself here and knowing that I can survive anything if I can survive Vietnam.

I have never cried so much in my life in that one night of saying good-bye to UCHANU and Vietnam. Vietnam was the challenging/ frustrating, life changing moment of my life and my first real Heartbreak. I will never forget my fist love, Vietnam.

One Heartland

Over the past week, UCHANU has been able to come together and fund-raise to buy enough jackets to fit the small children of Nghe An and gather donations of clothings for the poor families there. Tabling, classroom talks, coffee selling, coffee shop fundraising, food selling, and High Roller Night were all successful in gathering enough donations for this trip. Honestly, UCHANU were not the biggest contributers but it were the people's support that we were able to gather that made this possible. One Heartland was just successful in bringing it all together.

Working in a group with One Heartland was honestly a very gratifying experience. However, it does take individual initiative in order to get a group working together. There has to be a leader within a group from what I've learned over the years. There has to be leaders and followers within a group. With in each group, there was a person in charge of getting things together, and without them, we probably couldn't get the materials that we needed in order to sell food and drinks, or collect clothes, etc. The boys too initiative and started selling coffee and that honestly was the bread winner of the group. We were able to generate a lot of revenue from selling coffee and food and without them, we couldnt have raised enough. However, it does take good followers in order to make the group efficient. Not one person can always be there to take charge and so the followers have to be good followers in order to keep the group going. In my opinion, sometimes the followers are the most important part of a group because without the followers, who will the leaders lead? Anyways, working with UCHANU there were fair shares of people who were willing to take initiative and come up with creative ways to fundraise and there were people willing to put in the time and effort in order to carry out those creative ideas.

I've worked in another group in HANU with my International Relations class and the group was for a research project. It was of a different scale and for class, but nonetheless it was a group. In a smaller group, there has to more communication and less dictatorship I believe. We all had to convene and do our parts before any body else was able to do their part and make sure we were all on the same page etc. So there was less of the whole follower and leader aspect. But more communication I believe went on. For One Heartland, the UC students were busy traveling while the HANU students were in Hanoi, so we lacked this communication for a while. We held 3 meetings, one for UC and one for HANU and then one together. Ideas were being reiterated so it took us a while for us to formulate who to carry out the fundraising. In bigger groups it's harder for people's voices to be heard or for everyone to jump along with the idea. But once, something is initiated then you can either hop on the bandwagon or not. In this case, the bandwagon was going in the right direction and we were able to achieve more than what we had expected.

In a group, you can do a lot, but it takes the initiative of each individual in order to be successful.

1 month left.

Almost every day now, I have that fear and sadness hit me about going home within a month. I use to remember before that my time in Vietnam wasn't that short and I have all the time to go and do a whole bunch of things. However, now with one month left, that is not the case anymore and within that month, there is so much for me to do. From finals to projects, to volunteering, to trying to spend time with family, there are few rare chances for me to go and explore Hanoi except during the night time. In the day, my days are so packed with things to do that it's crazy. i want to go out and explore, eat everything, and do something new each day now. The past few days coming back from the Southern Trip has been packed with all these things to do and it's scary. In a sense I am ready to leave Vietnam, because I am ready to go home and see my family and friends. But I'm not ready to start living my life how it was in America again. I can't even think about what it was like before I went to Vietnam. Each day I wake up with the feeling I have to do something, go somewhere, eat something new. I flip through the lonely planet desperately trying to find a guide to this new something. Sometimes it ends in success, others in failure. After all, it is a tour book made for tourist, sometimes you don't want to go to really tourist areas. However, i realized it will be the simple things that i miss the most. Waking up for a banh mi in the morning and eating sua chua nep cam, crossing the street, walking around Pho Co, hanging out at the same bars. Maybe I need to just soak in everything that I've been doing and will miss of Vietnam rather than trying to go and find new adventures. My life n vietnam has become one great adventure and maybe it's time to come back down to reality.

Southern Vietnam

The past 10 days I was lucky enough to travel throughout Southern Vietnam, going to Saigon, Can Tho, lang Vinh Hanh, Rach Gia, and Phu Quoc. The things that I have experienced there are hard to sum up because so many things has happened:
1) Saigon; meeting my fraternity brothers and going to eat at Nha Hang Ngon, Cen Tech nighttime sky view, Lush club, backpacking district, eating Oc, shopping, more backpacking district, drinking beer on the street, and the famous Apocalypse Bar. Going to the Cu chi tunnels and going to District 5, known as the Chinatown and seeing all the temples there.
2) Can Tho: riding through a Thang Long farms, staying at a Nha Nghi, eating Hu Tieu, karaoke, floating market, Long Xuan Market and food hopping all around.
3) Homestay in a far away village near the Mekong Delta where the food was delicious with fish, veggies and rats, sleeping with the mosquitoes, going on a boat to catch fish, walking through the jungle and bird sanctuary where the green waters is a sight to behold, visiting a Mosque and the people of a Cham village, and the different temples.
4) Driving to Rach Gia before reaching the Superdong where the waters and rough and the speed of it was intense that made a lot of people sea sick before reaching Phu Quoc.
5) Being completely free and roaing around the entire island from the Southern point where the most beautiful beaches are to the northern tip seeing Cambodia, and visitng Chua Su Moun where the monks invited us to have tea and fruit with them and chatting it with them.

These past few days have been amazing and am so thankful that I was able to experience all of it. The only thing that would have made it any better is if I had the chance to share it with my parents. Thinking about it, and knowing that I only have one month left before going back to America, i feel extremely sad and confused. I'm confused about what to do with my time here, do I try to make a list and do everything on that? Should I just continue living my life here as it was and enjoying it as it is because I will never live like this again, or should I start somehow, someway to plan and scheme of coming back here in the near future after graduating? I guess, time is creeping up on me and it makes me confused on how I would like to spend this time here. I still have a lot of schooling to complete and things to do with family before going back, so I'm not sure where my priorities are. However, I do know that whatever I do now until I leave, I have to continue documenting and recording every single bit and pieces of it so that when I come back, my parents can share this experience with me.

What does an Ao Dai really mean?

Today I went to visit my aunt and we were talking about how I wanted to get an Ao Dai made in Vietnam and how much all of the costs are and such things. We were talking about how the modern Ao Dai of today with like the halter top Ao Dai or the the ones with no neck, or puffy sleves, or really long tails, how they don't look nearly as beautiful was the classic ones. yea, there're more modern but not necessarily any more stylish. Then, all of a suddent she dragged me upstairs to try on her very own ao dai and wanted to give me it instead of going to get one made for me. I thought that this gesture was really kind of her and it got me thinking about what an ao Dai really means to girls and Vietnam. I have worn plenty of Ao Dais in my lifetime, almost every year I had to get one made for me because of weddings and other celebrations. Wearing an Ao Dai to me was a symbol of traditionalism and classic Vietnamese beauty and that each Ao Dai that I have worn was connected with a special event and meaning. Like this Ao Dai I wore to my cousins wedding or this one was for my grandfather's funeral.. etc etc. I could never think to part with any one of them and because that they are tailored to fit your body , that each ao dai specially belongs and and was meant just for you.

now here I am with my grand aunt's Ao Dai and she is so dearly giving away to me, another ao dai to add to my collection and meaningful events in my life. I just couldn't believe that she would give me one of hers because I thought that there was so much more meaning in them. When I asked her if she was sure, she said yes, that she had no occasion to wear them anymore and that she knew right away that they would fit me. Therefore, this Ao Dai is probably the most special one in my closet since it was given to me by my aunt from Vietnam.

I survived SAPA!!!

1)Went on a nice train ride there and arrived in the freaking cold at the Lao Cai train station.
2)Ate some bombass Com Ran and Thit and Chao Ga.
3)Went to Dragon's Jaw and saw an amazing view of Sapa Town, experienced the fresh air and misty morning dew, took wonderful pictures and ate seaseme ice cream.
4)Went shopping around the market and got suckered into buying a bracelet from a cute hmong girl.
5)next day, went on a survival hike to Ban Ho and needed assistant from our little Hmong friends who were trekking through that mud like it was nothing while we had to nearly hold on with our dear lives to survive.
6)Bombass food at the stay home once we survived all of the mountain trekking.
7)Thank you Anh Thai for organizing our excursion and playing tour guide. I will gladly go work for our company if you ever open a tourist agency.

2 months left??

My meeting with my teacher about the half-way mark sparked some discontent with me. What am I in Vietnam for? Why am I here? What do I want to achieve or experience? All along, i have thought about this studying abroad experience just as that. Study abroad. I came here to learn about this country, school, and its people live. I feel that in the little time that I have been here, i have done a lot of things that I never knew I could do or had the courage to. Crossing a crazy traffic street, eating food on the sidewalk while sitting in a chair that I can barely squeeze into, seeing my father's hometown and the relatives' faces who I have never thought I would get a chance to meet, seeing my parents in their natural habitat, drinking bia hoi on a tuesday after classes, riding around on the back of a motorbike, xe oming it with 3 people on a bike, eating sua chua nep cam maybe 2-3 times everyday and my favorite banh mi lady around the corner every morning for breakfast. All these things are experiences big and small which I will miss when I have to go home. While at the same time, I feel that I have so far achieve what I wanted coming to Vietnam for. Which is to learn, in and outside of the classroom, through books, people, and my own experiences. So with 2 months left of this program, I have nothing else that I want to achieve. Now, with this 2 months, in a sense, I am free. I am free to do whatever I want here while I still can because in a sense I have gotten all of my goals out of the way and now I can just relax and enjoy my time here. however, there is this panicky feeling within me every time I go out now saying " this might be the last time you..." and I hate that feeling. I feel so sad when that thought pops into my head and instead of enjoying the moment, I fear when that moment is over and afraid that i will never have the chance again to live in that moment. I think this being said, I will miss Vietnam when the time comes to leave, and I do not know how I will be able to say good-bye.

Harvesting Rice! actually.........cooking for the people who Harvest Rice!

This weekend we went to harvest rice. however, I was one of the cooks who was in the kitchen, so I missed out on the chance to harvest, but it was still fun being in the kitchen. I'ver never had to make a full meal for 50 people, so it was kind of cool, and I learned how to make nem :) It took a really long time to prepare and make everything, we wanted to finish early to go out to the rice fields too, but the kitchen was so small and there weren't a lot of places to cook, so we had to take turns and rotate. Then, when all the people were back from cutting rice, we still weren't done, so they had to wait and some of them were nice enough to help. However, after the meal, everyone just knocked out and it makes me wonder about when all the rice farmers come back how tired and hungry they all are. Even though they were hungry, everyone was even more tired, so we seemed to overcooked. It was nice to work in the kitchen though cause I do like to cook, but it wasn't really cooking, but preparing really was what we were doing. I just wish I was able to go out into the fields for just a litle, but and take some pictures, but I'm glad I was in the kitchen or else my eczema would probably go into overdrive.

In Love with Central Vietnam

One of the best things about this central trip was the chance to finally see my Vietnamese family. My grandparents in Vietnam have already passed away and I was never able to meet them, so going to their home and seeing the place where my dad grew up and all his sisters and brothers was really a touching moment for me. My parent's came back to Vietnam for the 49th day of my grandmother's passing which is a big deal, so they were only here for a funeral basically and my uncle and cousin came back for the same thing too. It was fortunate that I was going to the central at the same time. My dad's hometown is in Quy Nhon, but he lives in the country side where it takes 2 hours to get and 2 hours to get out of the city. I thought I wasn't going to get the chance to see my family or my dad's home because it was such a long way for me to get there and they don't own a car or anything. So my dad said that they would just come into the city and stay for a couple of hours and then leave, but my aunts really wanted to meet me so they told my dad to bring me back. They rented a car taxi to drive them into the city to pick me up and then we all went back to my dad's hometown. I come from a family of rice farmers. The whole area is belongs to the "Pham" family and everyone there has our last name. How we are related, I have no clue, but we somehow in someway. My aunt lives in a small house with just one room for sleeping where like 6 of them share it. They have a kitchen attached and then another room for the alter. They just built a bathroom and a place to shower about 2 days before I came there and it's outside, so it's not attached to the house. The land that surrounds the area is all rice fields and so it's green and lushes, and a beautiful scenery for me. Overall, it's really hot and the house is pretty small for everyone to live there. But it didn't matter to me really because it was just nice getting the chance to see my family. To see what they look like and to talk with them. It was just really nice and to be able to be there with my parents too. However, i know that live there is a lot harder and more painful, so it makes me sad that there's not much more for them that I can do. We've always sent money over from America, and I thought that it was to help them out, but it seems that even the money that we send isn't enough to live on so even though we send money and try to help, it's not enough. That makes me sad. Knowing that I get to live such a great life and come to Vietnam and enjoy all the landmarks and places that not even my family can go to or people here in Vietnam that I have met can visit just makes me realize how privileged I am here. Later, my cousin's husband drove me on this motorbike back to the city which is another 2 hours and he had to drive back with makes it a 4 hour ride on the motorbike and trust me, 2 hours is enough to make my ass hurt. Going back into Quy Nhon, I met up with my cousin who's from America and visiting also, and we just went to drink sinh to and chat and with her was a monk and his friend. So it was the 4 of us and a monk sitting on the sidewalk talking about life and giving me words of wisdom.

On that note, I definitly love the central a lot more. Quy Nhon, Da Nang, Hoi An, Kon tum, Hue, they're all places that I could see myself living in Vietnam. Coming into EAP Vietnam, I thought that the place where we were staying and going to school would be like those places. It was how i dream of Vietnam being. Hanoi is fun too, but it's the people that make it so. All the UCHANU kids and people we meet make the place lively, but the city itself... all the dust, people pushing, motorbikes, crowds, smell, streets, it's something that I can do without. In the central, it's just a lot more freer and calmer and a nice place I think. Especially Quy Nhon, which is probably my favorite place. Da Nang was ok, but Hoi An was even better because I got a suit tailor made for me there. I definitely want to go back and get more stuff tailored. Da Nang, was great in that I could see the giant Bodhisattva which was incredible and the temple there. Kon Tom, it was a lonnnng hike, but the village was nice and sleeping and staying in the stillhouse was an experience. Probably my second favorite place would be Hue. Renting a bike and riding it around Hue, into the countryside made me fall in love with Hue. Then, going on that full day tour to all the cultural parts and the temple was just a great experience. I definitely want to go back to the central.

UCHANU: Rich and the Poor??

I asked my buddy about what it means to be rich and poor in Vietnam. He says that he can just tell by looking at a person if he or she is rich just by the way they look. Most of the time, rich people dress cleaner and have paler skin, ride a more expensive motorbike and not as skinny. With the development, asking if the gap between rich and poor will decrease, he says that once the development is over that the gap will be smaller. However, with the development now, farmers who use to have land, got taken over, so now they go to the city in order to find work. But since they had no other background beside farming, it's difficult for them to find any work so they are a lot poorer in the cities than on the farms to begin with.

Project Kiem An: Interviews 1 and 2 - Xe Om and Shoe Shine boy (man)

we did our first set of interviews on Saturday. Our initial plan was to go to the back alley of Thanh Xuan and interview the nice xe om driver we had for survior hanoi. However he was not there. so we decided to eat lunch and hoped to invite other xe om drivers to eat with us and interview them, but they all wanted to come and said it wasn't right for just one of them to go, but we don't have enough money to pay for all of them so we had to go to pho co for our interviews thinking that the shoe shine boy and xe om will be easier to interview there. We went to pho co and saw a xe om driver there who was pretty friendly and open. He use to be a truck driver but something happened to him that changed his life and his license got tooken away from him for 3 years. After getting his liscense back, he tried to work for the truck driver company again, but it didn't work out so he became a xe om driver. basically, you can be a xe om driver if you wanted as long as you have motorbike. He makes really little to support his family but it's a way to get money. he will probably do the job until he feels like not doing it anymore.

The shoe shine boy was harder to find because they are constantly moving. instead of a shoe shine boy, we interviewed a shoe shine man. it was a pretty sad interview because he was really shy and was so concentrated on the shoes that he didn't want to talk much. he wouldn't even drink the tra da that we bought for him. He basically did the job since he was a small boy and never had any aspirations or future dreams, nor does have any now. It seemed so sad to interview someone like that and felt even more impersonal trying to make someone talk about their job and life like that.

Mapping a "Developed" Space: Trung Yen

Mapping the space of Trung Yen was more difficult since it was a "developed" area where we could not find many of the traditional things that we needed to find on our list. Riding there, you see a lot more tall buildings and complexes that have foreign names on them. The area was more dusty and had a lot more cars so therefore more pollution. Right in the middle of everything was this random tra da place on a street filled with foreign banks and motorbikes. Usually, you would see the pavements filled with other vendors on the sidewalk, but here, only one tra da vendor stood out where business men would come sit down and smoke. Talking to the lady, asking where certain things were, she didn't know the street names really and things were far to get too.

We walked up the street where we entered a different area where there were more trees and old men playing chess on the grass under a tree right in the middle of the street. This area was basically the divider between roads and here were old men just chilling. We walked around and found a great park area where people were playing tennis, badminton, taking walks and just a friendly, public space. Finding things such as sim cards, sinh to, pho bo tai chinh, were all pretty easy because they were everywhere. The place to find fresh meat and veggies was difficult, as well as an elementray school, and doctor. Those things were a lot farther away. The place seemed like a more friendly area to live than in the old quarters because it was less crowded.

I think I would live there if I had a family or something in Vietnam. It seems like a place where you would want your kids to grow up because there are less people and seems less dangerous. However, things that you need seem to be farther away and less of a walking distance.

Project Kiem An: Mapping of a Space: Đền Bạch Mã

For our first group project we had to go to an area and map out the space of it. On our map we had to indicate the various places where we could get things done or buy such as: 

- Eating a bowl of pho bo tai chin   

- Eat xoi xeo

- Buy a sports newspaper

- Drink Tra Da

-Buy vegtables

- Buy pork meat

- Play baminton

- Report a crime

- See a doctor

- Go to a pogoda

- Get your shoe shine

- And the list goes on etc.....

My experience of this place was simple but yet fun. The area is located near the old quarters, so to me, the Old quarters is a lot more fun and exciting area. There are many shops, vendors, people, and things to do. Den Bach Ma was no exception. It was close to the areas where we like to go clubbing and bars like Club Jam, Dragonfly, Red Lounge. Passing by these places, I was like, "oh! I didn't know it was so close to here!!" The neighborhood borders on various streets where we had to walk up and down to get there, but everything that we needed to find was extremely close to one another. Other groups took maybe 4 hours, while we just took 2. The hardest ones were probably the key makers and playing badminton. We thought we couldn't find a police station so we walked around looking for one and asking where it was located only to find that there was one right next to the temple and around the area, there were like 3-4 of them, which shows how much you can report a crime. 

Den Bach Ma made me feel very easy  in a sense. Maybe it was because we chose to go in the evening at a cooler time, or that the area was familiar to us. Once I saw Dragonfly and Club Jam, I was ya! I know this place. It wasn't hectic or crazy or nervous walking around that area. The area had an active feeling to it. Not busy in a sense where it's chaotic, but people were going about their own business and people didn't mind us asking the prices even though we didn't buy anything. It was just lively.

I don't think I would want to live in Den Bach Ma however. Not that there's anything wrong with  the place, but I just don't want to live in such an open area. I'm use to the suburbia of California, and would want my kids to grow up somewhere like that too.

GIG: Interesting Stories!

One article I found interesting from GIG was the "Pretzel Vendor." The pulled quote  from the article about stealing money was the first thing that caught my attention. Isabella was in college when she started working at the Pretzel vendor. She liked the job because it paid well in cash and since it was cash, it was easier for her to steal. This is what I found appalling; the thought that someone would actually steal more money at a job instead of getting a better higher paying job. Considering it might have been difficult for her to get a better job, I could understand that, but she actually thought it was OK to steal, "I mean, it wasn't evil." is what she says in the article. She goes on saying how the job got mixed into her personal life because she started having an affair with a co-worker. She was constantly around this person and it was easy for her to have that affair until she split with her husband. After that, the affair got complicated because she didn't want to seem like she was jumping right into a next relationship, or make it obvious that the affair was going on, so she decided to quit one day.

I think the most interesting part of this article was the end where she said how much she misses and loves the job. When I think of pretzel vendors, i think of college kids just trying to pay for tuition by making pretzel and how bored or menile they think the work is. Here, this girl is in love with it because it was such a simple job that paid well, she gets to meet new customers everyday who interacted with her and how at 25 years old, working at this pretzel vendor changed her life and made her grow up. It's funny how a job that not many people think is significant can change a person and in return that person loves a small job like that, which might not be so small after all.