Are we having dog for dinner?

Yep.... thats what they do here. I have never been happier to not be invited to dinner. Fortunately they realize I have a moral dilema eating dog. But apparently it goes really well with beer. It has been described as very tasty. I will try the turtle next week. Its supposed to be better than beef. I did try snake wine which is fermented from rice and 10 other ingredients including snake. It was described to me as it is supposed to be very good for the man but the final outcome is good for the woman. It seems like this goes for a lot things around here.

I wish I could eat the rooster that crows out my window every morning. It starts at 4 am and goes until about 11 am. It crows to compete with the other 4 in the neighborhood and they are constanlty cock a doodle dooing at each other to show off who has a bigger... well you get the point. They definitely don't need any snake wine. I wish I had a sling shot and have this one out my window for a nice dinner.

So I was directed to the Mekong Garden which apparently is a crocadile farm. I didn't realize what they were raised for until I saw the handbags, shoes, and wallets for sale. Unfortunately they were very expensive...$100 and up...otherwise I would have bought some. I did luck out enough to show up during feeding time. Check out the video....it really is something else.

I also started to play volley ball with the students over here for some exercise and they are no joke. It isn't a sport, its a religion over here. Check out the video of how they set up the ball, spike it and the saves they make. They are unbelievable. I am like the fat boy that gets picked last for the teams. Nobody wante the clumsy American.

The Undergrads Reuse Their Needles....

to give doses of LHRA  female carp in order to induce egg deposition. Here is a video of this ocurring:

I can't believe the nasty pond they jump into in order to net these fish. I will have you know that sewage is not dealt with the same way we do it in the US. At the University, it is piped to ditches along the perimeter of the the property. So I am sure some of that has ended up in this pond. I guess something has to feed the fish.

They then chose the ripe females and a couple of males. The way to sex these fish is pretty neat. If you pull on the pectoral fin of a male their tail will move. Its kind of like when you scratch a dog behind the ear. (Men, we're just so simple.) This at first had me wondering why all these students keep pulling and massaging fish pectoral fins. You can also tell if the brood sac is large and puffy (filled with eggs). The picture below shows a female and a male fish.





Here is a video of one student demonstrating how the male sperm is extracted (Its a little unclear):

The students were also required to count fish fry, 6000 to a bucket and they told me all of them had to be counted in the one large bucket. I am still not sure if I believe that since there were easily over 100 thousand. Here is a picture of that tedious lab work



Here is a picture of some baby snake head that being raised in the hatchery. These are the types of fish my study deals with.

Hope you enjoy the pictures and videos. Please let me know if these videos do not work. Also feel free to post on the wall. I always enjoy seeing who is reading this stuff.

Did I tell you?..... I got married!

To a beautiful Vietnamese woman....jk....So above are some pictures of when I was in Hochi Minh City for a wedding. I especially liked when they put dry ice in the pyramid of wine classes and then poured wine in the top one to create a waterfall and vapor. I also added the pictures of the Pagoda when we were in Trah Vinh. There are also some pictures of the seafood near the river and mango and dragon fruit at my hotel. These were in Can Tho.

Tomorrow I will see them harvest some fish at the school in one of the aquaculture ponds. Today I was shown around the aquaculture hatchery where they raise snakehead, carp, catfish, shrimp, and eel. Once they reach a larger size they are thrown into ponds nearby and later harvested. I am not sure what I will see tomorrow but I will take some pictures.

Next week I will be going to a fish farm where they are using the new feed technology that I will be doing a cost benefit analysis involving partial budgeting and capital budgeting. Once I get my hands a little deeper in this I will begin to talk more about it.

Hope you enjoy the pictures.

Ask for toilet paper and you get a guava

Since it is monsoon season it typically is sunny in the morning and between 12 and 4 pm it will rain for ~3 hrs. And when I say rain I mean by the buckets. Its like a water park.

Today I am in Trah Vinh while my collegues attend a meeting on aquauculture. Its in Vietnamese so I am not sure how much I would get out of it plus I would have needed some sort of security clearance. Anyway, I am enjoying ice coffee at the cafe with Wifi. During the week I have worked with the faculty here on translating some important papers and next week we will dive into the snakehead fish research. I'm looking forward to it.

After the meeting today I will be taken to do some sight seeing. There are beautiful pagodas here that are used by the Khmer people. They are an indigenous people that mainly reside in Cambodia but some clusters like in Trah Vinh have stayed despite the Vietnamese take over of this area in the 16th or 17th century. I'm looking forward to it.

Now that I take the hotel toilet paper with me everywhere I go I had to ask for some at the hotel. This did not go well, as I received a guava instead. For those of you who don't know, that is a fruit with red meat inside. They taste awful in the Carribean or at least smell awful but here the variety tastes quite good. Finally through some complicated act of Shirades I was able to obtain my toilet paper.

Note: Do Not just dive into the food here or you will hurt yourself like in any sport. I had spicy grilled calamari and cocanut sauce on rabbit last night. I didn't think that would be too bad....wrrrrrroooooonnng! stick to soup with noodles for a while.

I am posting a video of what the streets at night look like here in the more touristy section, though I would not call it that touristy....I may have seen 8 tourist in total there.