Lisa and I are on our final trip with the students. We are in the mountains on the border with Laos. As I write this, all I can see is green forested hills and misty clouds. It has been raining a little. We are visiting a permaculture school that teaches sustainable farming practices to indigenous minority groups that live in Vietnam or Laos. Worm farms, biogas systems, composting, strip cropping, grey water use, and soil erosion prevention farming techniques and the like. Strangely, the food here has been extremely repetitive. Rice and eggs every single meal for 5 days. Although yesterday they slaughtered a pig and we were excited for something different. We had rice, thin slices of pig fat, boiled liver, heart and stomach and bloody looking sausage. Not really the most appetizing thing to eat or look at.
Oh well, we have had the opportunity to swim in the river, jump off rocks into the river and go for a hike. Lisa had a very full leech on her ankle that fell off two nights ago when she took off her sandals. I gave it a little salt bath and it vomitted up her blood and then died.
We were able to purchase a very cheap airline ticket from Hanoi to Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia back in October and our date finally arrived. We chose the weekend after the AP tests were all completed and then we took off. Instead of staying in KL for three days, we managed to find our way to Langkawi Island on the west coast of the Malay peninsula off the coast of the border of Malaysia and Thailand in the Andaman Sea. Our hotel was very nice and pretty inexpensive. The temperature was near 100 degrees during the middle of the day. There were lots of Muslims on vacation here including about 60% of the women wearing full black burkas. There was a sign near the pool that explained what was appropriate to wear in the pool if you were a Muslim woman. We didn't know there was such a thing as a "burkini" until this trip! 
The above photo is the morning after a rainy day. The rain quite literally washes the air. The droplets of water condense around air particulates and then drop to the ground. This particular morning, we took the elevator downstairs and walked outside to our bus stop. We both commented on our "super vision." It was weird, like we had a film peeled off our eyeballs. Everything was so sharp and clear. Things had edges. The leaves were green. It was like we were surrounded by objects that were real, that we could reach out and grasp. Like we were in some sort of movie set. It lasted one day.
