The second day in our new hometown is now coming to an end. What a day! Well, I’ll start telling from the beginning of our big journey. 

Tuesday morning, 9:00am. The on-arrival training in Hanoi was now over and there we that is Helena, Jessica, Ivana, Claudia and me, with all our luggage for the next nine months, standing and waiting for the bus which should bring us to our new home. Our local coordinator X. Mai picked us up from our accommodation in Hanoi and accompanied us by car together with Mrs Hien (she’s the education minister of Hòa Bình City), Mrs. Nga (mentor of the volunteers in Cong Nghiep Highschool) and Mrs. Thanh (mentor of the volunteers in Hoang Van Thu Highschool). 
We were all really excited and also a little bit nervous because we wanted to leave a good first impression. After we luckily managed it to introduce ourselves in Vietnamese, we stuffed all our luggage into the little bus and the journey began.

During the 1 1/2 hours bus ride, we drove past lush green rice fields and giant mountains, which reminded us of the rocks of the Ha Long Bay. We saw the sky getting clear blue as we drove towards Hòa Bình, a province 76 kilometres in the southwest of Hanoi. As we talked about our first impressions of Vietnam, the food and some basic Vietnamese expressions, our excitement became bigger and bigger. Claudia and me were the first ones to get out of the bus at Cong Nghiep Highschool, where we are going to live for the next nine months... 

Now I’m sitting on my bed in my room here in Hòa Bình. There are so many impressions and thoughts on my mind about what happened lately and I’m so overwhelmed of how much hospitality and politeness I have experienced in just 4 weeks. The way we were welcomed at our school, the way the teachers still care about our well-being and about if we have eaten enough for breakfast just makes me smile every day. We have already got so many invitations to have dinner or tea together with teachers and their families. Through that, we already had the chance to meet so many nice people (parents, little children and teenagers) and are constantly sharing and exchanging our experiences and our culture with them.

From the first day and the first encounters with the teachers and all the students, we were treated like members of the school community. Especially the students were really excited to meet us. They always greet us with “hello teacher” and you can still see how happy they are when they see us in the lessons. At first, it felt a bit weird to get that much attention from them, but for the students it is a whole new experience to have foreign people at their school as we are the first international volunteers at Cong Nghiep Highschool. 

Tomorrow at 4pm there will be our weekly “English Speaking Club” (ESC), a project which encourages the students to practise English outside of the school lessons in a more playful atmosphere. Claudia and I prepare funny games and interesting tasks for them to get to know each other more and at the same time improve their English speaking skills. I really like this project because the students have the chance to talk about topics they like and we already had a lot of fun when we had the first ESC last week. I’m looking forward to the next weeks and months here and to all the experiences we are going to make. 

Hòa Bình means peace in Vietnamese. I can only say that this city truly deserves its name.