Xin chào (hello) everyone!

Greetings from Vietnam! It's Friday here and we just finished our first week of camp! Woohooo! It's been a crazy first week and a major sensory overload but in the best way possible. There are six other American coaches here in my camp, two boys (Bryant and Donald) and four girls (Abbey, Renee, Nay and Lauren) and we've been really fortunate to really get along well with each other. It's really cool that all the American coaches are athletes too, because we've been able to get together and work in the morning and/or at lunch. We've been running a lot of stairs and doing a bunch of circuit workouts. We've been waking up around 5:20 a.m. to get some work in before breakfast at 6:10 a.m., so needless to say we have pretty early mornings. 

The Vietnamese coaches that we are partnered with are also awesome. It's fun because we are slowly teaching them a little bit of English slang, while they're trying to slowly teach us a  bit of Vietnamese. They're not quite as willing to work out with us, especially so early in the morning, but we're still working on getting them to join us.

Teaching in the school has been really fun, too. Everyone is divided into four teams (green, yellow, red and orange). My team (the best one) is the yellow team. We even have a team name and team chant. We're "Yellow Star" with our chant being "Be Brave, Be Brave, Be Brave, yeah!!" Sorry Blue Devil fans, I tried for the Yellow Devils but they thought star would be a better fit. Overruled, I guess. Although, in true Blue Devil fashion, they did come in first place in the athletic portion. We haven't graded the academic tests yet, but I'm sure they passed with flying colors, as well.

We leave tonight for a weekend trip to Hoi-an, which we're all really looking forward to. It's an old port city that is said to have really great shopping and awesome beaches. As a native California girl, I love any chance I get to go to the beach, so I'm extra excited to get in the water and lay out.

That's all for now, but I'll write about our adventures next week in Hoi-an and let you know how my team does! And as always....Go Duke!

Alyssa Smith
Class of '17