Butterfly Season

Gosh It’s been a long time since I’ve written a blog post! In the last one I was talking about moving to Pleiku and now 3 years on I’m settled here and a lot has happened! I’ve decided to try updating this space more often about life in Vietnam and my projects (let’s see if I can keep it up).

Life in Vietnam

The festival of Tết (Chinese New Year) ran from the 8th of February to the 14th. We spent a lot of quality time with Yumi’s large family, we sat in the shade, ate until we burst and sang karaoke. 2024 is the year of the Dragon which is Yumi’s zodiac sign which according to tradition means she has to be careful with her luck this year.

I managed to carve out some time for hiking and camping during the week-long bank holiday break. There are no guidebooks or modern maps available so I consulted the old 1:50k maps that the American’s made in 1970 and cross-referenced with Google Maps satellite images to find points of interest and I’m making my own maps based on what I found on the ground; I discovered a few great circular walks during the holiday and I’m looking forward to taking other people out on them. For those with local knowledge, this was all in Chư Păh district, near Chư Nâm.

In other news, today I saw the first emigrant butterflies of the year! In the region of Pleiku, the butterflies (Catopsilia) pass through on their way from Cambodia to the Philippines . Seeing the sky filled with these delicate insects around midday is a beautiful spectacle! Sadly it’s basically impossible to capture the magic on camera so I’ll share an AI-generated image that attempts to encapsulate the essence of this mesmerizing phenomenon.

The arrival of the butterflies heralds the season when the Jackfruits are best to eat in Pleiku. Jackfruit is my favourite fruit!

Projects

One of my recent endeavors involves crafting an arcade machine for my classroom. Designed to plug into the computer like a keyboard, this project aims to bring some of the digital activities in the classroom to life as it’s much easier to interact with than keyboard and mouse.

I bought arcade machine buttons online and an Arduino Leonardo board. First I made a prototype out of a cardboard box but now I’ve designed a container to be laser cut so it’s durable enough to be in the vicinity of kids.

For the software side of things I’ve been learning to program in the game engine Godot which is a lot of fun! It’s free (as in gratis and libre) and I’m hoping to make some much more involved projects soon.