I was up and out walking by 6am on my now regular walk in Cam Thanh. This morning I ran into Gary near the Bale Market bridge and stopped and chatted briefly. When I got back it was to discover the power was off. It has now started raining steadily. After breakfast we decided to go to the beach. We forgot that with the power out we had no internet and all our devices are now low on power. I actually got a little wet going to the beach but Kevin had left earlier and he hadn't. The longer we sat there the heavier the rain became. I headed back late morning as I needed to prepare for today's lesson at AnBang. Kevin stayed at the beach. We were doing “Filling in a Form” with some basic personal questions and some tense questions about yesterday, today and so on. Again with no internet I had to remember what the questions were that I had previously thought of. I borrowed a rain coat from Dung as I couldn't find the one which we bought to Vietnam, I think Kevin left it in Hanoi when he used it there. I dressed for the part and it was off to get Jean-Ann. We again set up for the lesson with the details on the white board. Well 2pm came and neither Vy or Hein were there so we started without them. It was quite hard as we kept seeing blank faces from the kids. This is the older 11 and 12 yo kids. Well we managed to get them to copy what was on the board and we paired them up and they started with the questions. Luckily Hein came at 2.30 and Vy at 2.45. I had been working with 2 boys and they were really struggling with pronunciation. Jean-Ann had managed the 18 girls and they were finished. At about this time 3 New Zealanders arrived to help but we had wound the class down. Jean-Ann again did some drawings and Little Anh took two and so I had her in tears when I told her she could only have one picture as she had got one yesterday. We had tantrums of course but I stuck to my guns and took one away and gave it to another girl. Jean-Ann and I then went for coffee next door at the restaurant as it is still drizzling. We headed back for the last lesson and had 16 students. This lesson also went well and I was pleased. The New Zealanders showed up half way through and so helped with pronunciation and tense when the kids were answering questions. To finish off I asked the kids to sing a couple of songs which they did, You are my Sunshine and Rain rain go away. How appropriate. We then read with the kids for 20 min before packing everything up. I dropped Jean-ann at home and quickly returned a call to Kevin and found that Vinh had called around and they were drinking beers. The power has only just come back on at 5.30pm. I arrived home and opened the fridge to find water everywhere. The freezer had of course started to defrost. I did a quick clean up and grabbed a G&T. Vinh invited us for lunch on Tuesday and he is going to cook for us. He asked us to invite Monika and Jean-Ann as well. Finally he left and we headed into town with plans to go to No 35 Pho Xau but it was closed. We then decided to head down the side street to a small restaurant at the rear. I ordered My Quang and Kevin a vegetarian savoury pancake. It has now started to rain much heavier. We chatted with an American family from Texas next to us while we waited for the rain to ease. Well this didn't happen and we eventually just grinned and ran for it. By the time we got to where we leave the scooter we are saturated so on we climb and brace ourselves for the deluge all the way home. We arrive and the family just can't believe we came home in it. I could literally wring the water from my dress. We quickly headed inside and a hot shower was needed to warm up. Under the covers quickly.
