2 interesting events last week

Last week we were invited to 2 interesting events.
The first was a celebration of China Independence Day 10/1 by the Chinese students on campus. There are about 500 students from China coming here to study Vietnamese. Most of them live in our same dorm building. We met a few of them who happen to be next door to us. They have actually come into our room to play with Caleb a few times. You can see them in the picture here with Caleb, on the night of their performance. These girls have been rehearsing in front of our building the past couple of weeks, so they invited us to come see them perform. (Can you guess how we communicate with these students? They know little bit of Vietnamese and English. We know little bit of Vietnamese and Chinese. So we try all three languages in every conversation, and the words somehow get across one way or another. It's painful, but fun.)
The second event was some sort of a "Miss/Mr Haiphong U", where we got to see 19 girls and one boy from the Foreign Languages Dept walk on the stage in their nice outfits and also show off their talents. It was quite an interesting experience. The winners from this dept will get to compete in the all school pageant in two weeks. One of the 19 girls happens to be in one of my classes, and she came in 2nd place. We didn't get to see her perform her number because we left early (we were seated in the 1st row right in front of the huge speakers). I also forgot to bring a camera. I congratulated her in class this morning, but I am wondering if she knew what "congratulations" meant.
The auditorium where these two events took place is actually right in front of our building, so it was very convenient. We can't remember the last time when we only had to walk a few steps to attend an event. Some of the perks we "get to enjoy" being foreign teachers...