That's my girl!
In other news, Vietnamese training is, well, ongoing. Where all the time has gone I cannot tell, but if there is anything akin to purgatory on earth it must be the intensive language training at FSI. You are not in the hell of your former job/life/whatever, but you are also not in the heaven of your first post. In a way, it feels like I have plunged into the darkest jungle of the Congo, cut off from man and civilization and I am just waiting for a "Dr. Livingstone, I presume?" moment when I come out the other side.
In actuality, it really isn't that bad, but you do seem to sort of go into a kind of suspended animation where your social and family life all grind down to a snail's pace. I also recently experienced the phenomenon known as "the wall." It was as if I just stopped absorbing any Vietnamese for a week or two, and I also felt like I had forgotten some of the simplest things I had learned in the first weeks of training. I have heard tell of tears of frustration at this point in training. Fortunately I have not melted down, but there have been moments when I wanted to go kick something, for sure.
I found that my remedy for the frustration was to review all the things I have already learned. The sheer amount of this language that I do know is very encouraging, I just had to remind myself that I do in fact know a lot of Vietnamese, and can actually have a coherent conversation using the language.
