My Poorly Titled Cambodia Post

Cambodia is an absolutely fascinating country, and three days was far too short a visit. I doubt it's possible to see all of Angkor Wat in three days, let alone get a good taste of Khmer culture, and right now a part of me yearns to cancel my flight home, rent a bike, and explore every last nook and cranny of the place. Of course I can't, and I won't. But Cambodia really had that much of an impact on me.

When I say I'd like to bike the country, I mean that very specifically. Unlike Vietnam, Cambodia is a very rural society: about 60% of the country's 14 million people live as rice farmers. There are two major cities: the capital, Phnom Penh (pop. 2 million, in comparison to Saigon's 10 million), and Siem Reap, which is not even 200,000. Everyone else lives in the countryside, which looks like this:





Only most of the time, there aren't nearly that many trees.

So basically, Cambodia is a giant rice field, with a couple cities and some palm trees tossed in. And a lot of temples. Not just ancient ones, but beautiful, enormous modern ones as well. They stick out like a sore thumb. You'll be driving along through a tiny farming village of stilted corrugated iron huts, and suddenly this will pop up out of nowhere:



Or this:



It's surreal.

So anyway, Cambodia is basically a giant rice field with a couple cities, a few palm trees, and a bunch of spectacular temples thrown in. And that's what I love about it. It was so much more relaxed than Vietnam. Even Siem Reap, where I spent most of my time, felt like a relief from Siagon's constant hustle and bustle. Of course, if I were to go back to Cambodia, I would spent as little time in Siem Reap as possible. It's a tourist town through and through, having exploded in recent years due to its close proximity to Angkor Wat. Walking down the street, it's not uncommon to see more Westerners than Cambodians. Which is not to say that all the tourists are Westerners; Angkor Wat attracts a very international crowd. There were also a big number of Japanese and Korean tourists, and a few Indian tourists as well. But anyway, while Siem Reap was a pleasant place to stay for a couple days--safe, clean, relatively quiet--it's not a great place to learn about Khmer culture, and tourism has inflated prices all over town.

Phnom Penh, which I explored for a couple hours waiting for my next bus, is a completely different world. Siem Reap paints a picture of Cambodia as a third world nation climbing into newfound prosperity. Phnom Penh paints a much more accurate picture of the country as a whole: the prosperity certainly isn't being spread around. Although I didn't get much time in Phnom Penh, I heard stories of rampant drug trafficking, prostition, and robbery at knifepoint. The traffic was not nearly as bad as Saigon, but the city felt a great deal less safe.

So why do I love Cambodia again? Mostly for the countryside, and there's just so much of it! That's why I'd love to take a bike trip through the country. It would be a good way to see all the temples as well; we passed at least ten on the way from Phnomh Penh to Siem Reap, which was about a six hour drive.

Our bus stopped a few times along the way, and I got to talk with some of the locals. I was stunned by their level of English-speaking ability. Granted, the people I talked to are probably not representative of the country as a whole (they probably had had a lot of experience speaking to tourists, since I'm assuming the bus stops in those places every trip), but I was uniformly impressed. I was able to carry on a relatively sophisticated conversation with almost everyone I talked to. The people were incredibly friendly. They sold fried beetles and spiders. I ate a whole beetle, but could only eat one spider leg. Even I have to draw the line somewhere.





The bathrooms were interesting. They were all non-flush, "squat" toilets. In each stall there was a tank of water and a bucket. I'm guessing it was probably not very sanitary.



Hmmm . . . What do you think?

The Mekong Delta Adventure - Day Two

Only good news this time: I got my pictures back. It's a good thing, too, because I was really hitting a brick wall trying to describe the second day without them. I'm still not sure exactly what the problem was, but I had a hunch that my computer's SD slot might have been the source, so I bought a little USB SD card reader. It reads my card just fine.

We woke up early the next day and set off for the Can Tho river market. I'm not quite sure what was going on the whole time, but it seemed as though we drove into someone's back yard, asked if they could give us a tour with their boat, and they agreed. I'm not sure how my friends knew which house to go to, but it seemed to work out.

Here's the back yard:





And here's a row of houses from the front:



And a few shots of the market in action:







The market is basically like a giant game of bumper cars. Only in the water. And instead of bumping into you for the fun of it, people bump into you so they can sell you things. Usually they'll wave at you from a distance, and you can respond by waving them over or refusing them, but some of the bolder ones will actually ram your boat and start tossing fruit at you. Well, okay, they don't toss the fruit. But boat ramming does occur quite a lot, and it's a big part of what makes the river market such an incredible experience. I also enjoyed ducking to avoid giant poles and motors and whatnot. It adds a whole new dimension to the shopping experience.

If you look closely at the first picture you'll see a pole sticking up with some fruit tied to it. Most of the boats have poles like this; they're like billboards, advertising what each boat sells. Most boats sell fruit, but there are boats selling cigarettes and water bottles and things like that. One boat served us coffee, and another boat made us breakfast.



I'm not quite sure what was in it, but it was good.





In these two pictures you can see the "fruit pole" more clearly. The second picture also provides a nice broad view of the whole thing. And I'll close with this nice view of the living conditions in the area:



After the river market, we went to a park where we fed crocodiles. Or, well, where we were supposed to feed crocodiles, I think. Most people tried to keep from feeding the crocodiles as long as possible. This is how it works: you pay a little money, and they give you a long fishing pole with a piece of meat on the end. You get to keep the pole as long as the meat is still on there. So naturally, everyone tries to keep the meat from the crocodiles as long as possible. In this way it's evolved from simply feeding the crocodiles to an elaborate crocodile teasing game, in which you dangle the meat in them, wait for one to lunge, and then pull it away as fast as you can (preferably while jumping high in the air and shrieking; everyone else will do this with you). It's a great time. I was terrible at it. Those crocodiles are just too fast for me. They're also incredibly creepy.



I mean, look at that guy! The really creepy thing is that they just sit like that, heads poking out of the water, jaws agape, for minutes at a time. You can tell he was looking right at me when I took the picture, too. He's smiling for the camera! I'm going to have nightmares over this.

After feeding the crocodiles, we watched a pig race. The pig race was about as lame as it sounds. It didn't even have the dignity of being anticlimactic; an anticlimax requires the expectation of a climax, and I had set my expectations pretty low. It was also hilarious and incredibly fun, despite the complete lack of tension and the fact that it was over within a couple minutes. I practiced my Vietnamese by shouting out the number of the pig I wanted to win (everyone else did this as well). Then we all stampeded down to the finish line to cheer them on from there. My pig didn't win.



Finally, we went to an old house which apparently has featured in several films (I gather a French film, L'Amante was shot entirely in and around it).





And that's the trip. Next is the trip to Angkor Wat.

The Mekong Delta Adventure - Day One (Now with pictures!)

Well, I have some good news and some bad news.


The good news is that my weekend trip to the Mekong Delta was absolutely mind-blowingly fantastic, and a definite highlight of my trip so far. The bad news is . . . I don't have pictures.

Well, that's not quite right. I do have pictures, an absolute wealth of them. And I must say a lot of them are pretty darn beautiful. But for some reason (Karma? Fate? The wrath of God?) the SD card on which they reside is no longer functioning. Or maybe it's the computer; I'm not quite sure. See, the problem is that when I stick the SD card into the little slot, the computer doesn't recognize that it's been inserted. Nothing happens. The card doesn't appear on the "My Computer" screen. I'm currently researching ways to fix this, but haven't found much. Some sources suggest that heat can warp SD cards, which leaves the data intact but renders the card itself useless, because it can't be detected. I certainly hope that isn't the case.

I still have to test the card on another computer, which I should be able to do tomorrow. If it works, I'll make a new entry full of pictures for you guys. If it doesn't, I guess you'll have to wait until I get home . . . to look at them on my tiny camera screen. Believe me, I'm as disappointed as you are. I'm really proud of these pictures; I think some of them are some of the finest I've ever taken, and I really wanted to share them with you, my wonderful readership, especially since I've left you so picture-deprived. But this is life, I suppose.

So enough bad news. Now onto the Mekong Delta trip itself, which is very good news indeed.

I woke up at 5 o'clock on Saturday morning. I took a shower, put together a bag of necessities, and met my three friends outside the house at 6. The rest of the morning was spent traveling to the city of Can Tho, which is the main hub of the Mekong Delta region. Now, I had been informed beforehand that this trip would take about three hours. I am fairly certain it was at least five. It felt twice as long. Let's just say traveling by motorbike is basically like traveling in a car, only slower, a lot windier, and not nearly as comfortable.

Thankfully the weather was glorious, and by glorious, I mean mid-sixties and overcast the whole day, with no rain. There was also some fascinating scenery along the way. It's easy to forget, living in the city, that the country of Vietnam is basically a big jungle. After all, the only signs of this in Saigon are a few palm trees here and there and the heat. It's remarkable, then, when leaving the city, how quickly you find find yourself in what is basically . . . a big jungle. A wall of palm trees lines either side of the road, punctuated by the occasional tiny village or lotus field. We stopped at what I suppose you could call a roadside cafe (a roof made of palm branches propped up with big sticks, with hammocks underneath to sit on) and ordered coconuts. The woman took us out back, grabbed a long stick with a hook on the end, and yanked them right out of the tree. Then she cut off the tops, stuck in straws, and handed them over. Coconuts are really pretty good.



Unfortunately I wasn't able to get many good pictures of the country, since we were moving and didn't really have time to stop.

Poverty is rampant in the city; in the country, it is omnipresent. The most common building materials are corrugated iron, scrapwood, and bedsheets. You see whole villages like this, propped up over the rice fields on little stilts. Whenever the highway crosses a river, there's a little fishing community built right on the water's edge. The houses all have porches jutting out over the water, where the boats come to load and unload.

The city of Can Tho itself is more or less indistinguishable from Saigon, to the point where if you took a picture of each place and asked a Vietnamese native which was which, I doubt they'd be able to answer. We found a hotel and rented one room for the night. There was another guy in the group, so we shared a bed; the two girls shared the other one.

But I'm getting ahead of myself. It was only about noon by the time we arrived in Can Tho. We had lunch immediately, and then set off for a nearby temple, which is apparently one of the oldest in Vietnam. It had some really neat architecture, and the Buddhist iconography inside was spectacular. Unfortunately I can't really describe any of it, and even if I could, it would hardly be an adequate substitute for actually seeing the stuff. This is where a functional SD card would come in handy.

Aha! Indeed it would.













The next stop was the Bang Lang Stork Sanctuary. It was about an hour's drive away from Can Tho, so we arrived around 5 o'clock in the afternoon, which it turns out is the best time to visit because dusk is when the storks all fly back to roost. To get to the sanctuary we had to drive deep into the jungle on a tiny, incredibly bumpy dirt path, and cross these terrifyingly skinny little stone bridges with no railing whatsoever. It was definitely worth it. It was astounding.

You can hear the storks from a long way off, but it isn't until you get there and kill the motor that you get the full impact. It's overwhelming. The air is filled with squawking. The trees are white with . . . well, you know. We went up a rickety spiral staircase to an observation deck, from which you could see out over the tops of the trees. The trees were completely covered in a layer of flapping, squawking stork.

Trust me, this is a lot cooler when you actually see it.

And now you can!





Anyway, since it was getting dark, many of my pictures of the stork sanctuary didn't turn out particularly well. But there are still a couple good ones, and I did manage to get a video. We came down the staircase and had dinner right at the sanctuary, which was probably my coolest dining experience in Vietnam so far. You'll never guess what they serve there. That's right, stork! A woman brought out a little grill and a plate of various stork, uh, pieces, including the heat and feet. At one point the power went out, so she set a few candles out on the table. There are few things more romantic than a candlelit meal of stork feet in the middle of the jungle, with a cloud of insects buzzing around your head.



After that we drove home and went to bed, because we were tired. I am also tired right now, so I think I'll go to bed, and save the next installment for tomorrow. No, this is not a pathetic device to raise my number of entries for November. Okay, it is. But I truly am tired. I think if I continued to write, the rest of my story would take a noticeable dip in quality, and I don't want to shortchange you guys like that. But before I sign off, I'd like to close with another bit of good news:

Tonight I bought my bus ticket to Angkor Wat!

One more month

With a whole month left, it might seem a bit premature to say my trip is drawing to a close. But in a way it’s the truth. It seems like yesterday that my trip was at its halfway point. That was when I first began to have this feeling—a vague sense that my time in Vietnam was finite, and that it would eventually draw to a close. Now the halfway point is long past, and the feeling is much more tangible. In a month, I will be back home. Before I left for Vietnam, I had difficulty imagining what life in Vietnam would be like. Now, after only three months here, I am having difficulty remembering what life was like before.

Some big changes will soon be occurring in my life here, contributing to this overwhelming sense that I am nearing the “last leg” of my journey. Tomorrow I will receive my paycheck for the month of October and will subsequently be quitting my side job at Aston. This was a difficult decision to make: I truly love my job at Aston, the children and the staff. But it’s necessary. I have to see at least something of Vietnam outside of Saigon, and traveling is impossible with two jobs. The month’s paycheck should be plenty to support any traveling I do within the country. Even airfare.

With this major change there will be an accompanying shift of focus from work to . . . everything else. I have to finish my papers for the ELTAP program, begin planning weekend trips (the first of which I think will be to the Mekong Delta region, but more about that later), make a souvenir shopping list, and begin planning my BIG trip, which I will be taking over the last twelve days of my stay. The current plan is to fly to Hanoi (the capital city of Vietnam, located in the far north) and take buses back down to Saigon, effectively touring the length of the country, and hopefully arriving back in the city in time for my flight on December 12th. Preparing for this will take up a lot of additional time.

The bright side is that with all of this travel, I think we will start to see blog entries coming in greater frequency, and with a lot of pictures. The main problem I have been having for the past couple months is that, while I am enjoying my life here enormously, it has not been exactly what you would call “exciting.” This is not a criticism. It simply means that I have been living more or less as a working class citizen of Vietnam might live. I love Vietnam, and at this stage in my life I’d much rather be a working class citizen here than in the US, but still, I think there is a limit to the amount of excitement you can experience with such a lifestyle. Now, as my role changes from full-time teacher to part-time traveler and eventually full-time traveler, I should have a lot more to write about.

I’ve received requests to talk more about Vietnamese culture in my blog. These requests were eye-opening. First of all, I apologize for the self-centered nature of my blog; here I am in a foreign country and all I can talk about is myself! But the requests were eye-opening in another way too: before receiving them, I truly felt like I had integrated into Vietnamese society. I had made lots of friends, was able to get around the city, even learned a bit of the language. But when pressed to write about Vietnamese culture, I struck a brick wall. How much have I really learned about this culture, anyway? Just because I can function within the culture doesn’t mean I’ve even begun to understand its subtleties. I’m sure there are hundreds of tiny cultural details I miss on a daily basis.

One major difference that I have noticed between Vietnamese and American societies is that Vietnamese society is much more collectivist. Now when I say “collectivist,” I don’t mean it in the sense that Vietnam is a communist country. The fact that it’s a communist country has very little to do with it. In fact, I wouldn’t classify the country as communist at all in the theoretical sense; business here is more or less free market, with probably fewer regulations than in the US. The government is rigid and controlling, but in a social rather than an economic sense. It’s probably closer to fascism than communism.

The collectivism I refer to in Vietnamese society is a characteristic I suspect has been around for a very long time. It’s not a national unity but rather a very powerful unity among small groups. These are usually family groups, but can also be groups of coworkers or plain old friends. The ties within these groups are far more binding than ties between coworkers and friends in the US. With a job in America, it is understood that you will probably, at some point, have to move on, and any friendships you have made up to that point could very easily be severed, or at least will fall to the wayside. In Vietnam this is not always the case. Often people will have the same job for their entire lives. Coworkers become part of the extended family.

The importance of family is immediately apparent. Each home has a shrine to dead relatives. The death day, rather than birthday, of a relative is celebrated as a holy day. Family ties go back generations. The New Year holiday, Tet, is celebrated over several weeks, during which I am told Saigon becomes an empty shell. Everyone floods to the countryside to visit their “family.” Think about that. 8 million people live in Saigon; most of those people live in what we would consider an extended family, with grandparents, aunts, and uncles often living in the same house. And this “family” goes to visit more “family” in the country. How far do these family ties reach? I’m just sorry I have to miss the holiday; I really would’ve liked to be around to experience it.

Anyway, I’ve taken quite a few more pictures of Saigon, but the more I take, the more I realize pictures aren’t the best way to give you a sense of the place. One of the city’s intrinsic characteristics is that it’s always moving, and without that sense of movement, the feeling of the city is lost. So instead I’ve composed a brief video tour of the streets at night. I think unfortunately the video gives off a bit of a creepy stalker vibe, which was certainly not my intention, but I was trying to be as discreet as possible with the camera. Still, this is probably about as close as you can get to actually experiencing the city, so it’s a compromise I’m willing to make. The lights have a funny effect on my camera, but overall I think the video turned out well.



I mentioned earlier that I plan on going to the Mekong Delta region, the southernmost region of Vietnam. I’ve arranged to go this weekend with a friend, so hopefully I’ll have lots of pictures for you next time.

A Masterpiece

I really, truly promise I will write a proper blog entry in the very near future. I've been keeping you all waiting for too long. But take this as a sort of prelude, if you will:

WARNING: Contains a graphic scene of childbirth.

This video says a lot of things that I can't really convey in writing. It displays the Vietnamese accent, which is very distinctive but difficult to describe in writing. It also takes some getting used to; you may not be able to understand much of what they say at first. But more importantly, the video displays how much fun these kids are. My supervising teacher did warn the kids that they might end up appearing on Youtube, so I don't feel too bad about posting this. And most likely they won't find out.



Here's another one. I didn't have time to do all the fancy editing I did with the first, but it's also quite a bit more organized, so editing wasn't really necessary.

The Moment of Truth

Yes, here they are at long last.

Pictures.


I picked up new batteries the other day, and they seem to be working. I gather the reason the other batteries weren't working is simply that they were made in Vietnam; Vietnamese batteries are notorious for being cheaply made and ineffective. So I went to MaxiMark and picked up some Duracells, which seem to be working fine. Pictured above is the alley in which I now live. My hotel isn't actually visible; to get there you have to walk all the way down and take a right.





Here we have a cup of cafe sua da, which roughly translates to "iced coffee with milk." These beer crates are always stacked next to the little place where I have coffee. The Vietnamese word for beer is bia, which cannot be a coincidence. It sounds exactly like "beer" said with a British accent. I've asked around about it, but no one seems to know exactly how that came about. I'd also like to know when beer was introduced to Vietnam, and by whom. It's extremely popular here.



The one thing I find interesting about this advertisement is the model. She's Vietnamese, but you can hardly tell. She's so pale. Compare the color of her skin to that of the guy on the poster behind her - and even he is light-skinned compared to most Vietnamese. Vietnam is a tropical country; there is a lot of sun here, and people spend a lot of time in it. They have dark skin. Vietnamese models, on the other hand, all look pretty much white. Pale skin as a standard of beauty has a long history in Asia (and elsewhere), because it was a sign of nobility; it meant you could afford to spend all your time indoors, as opposed to the vast majority of the population who spent their days working out in the sun. So I understand where this standard of beauty comes from. I'm still surprised by the fact that it continues to exist. I guess it's no different from America's obsession with tanning.





I'm still working out how to take decent pictures in low light. Being rainy season it's overcast most of the time, so often it's hard to take decent pictures. Of course the fact that I took these at night did not help. These are just a couple traffic scenes. I need to get some pictures of this street around rush hour; it gets incredibly busy. It's a pretty narrow street, but sometimes it can take me a few minutes to get across.







Here we have a few photos I took around the neighborhood. The first picture features a couple gates; the gates here are really artistic and picturesque. The middle picture is a nice quiet street. The restaurant pictured at the bottom lacks the distinction of having a tarp. In case you've noticed, I'm trying to avoid taking pictures with people in them as much as possible, just because it makes me feel bad. I probably wouldn't like some guy going around taking pictures of me. I feel slightly less guilty when taking massive crowd shots, for some reason.



Oh, and one person you haven't seen for a while:



Playing around with the bathroom mirror. Anyway, I'm just getting warmed up on the picture front. Hopefully from now on I'll have a few more pictures for you every week. Also I hope to get another blog entry with a bit more substance up early this week, since this is basically just a showcase for the fact that my camera is again functional.

Striking a balance

My first month living in Vietnam was probably the most exhilarating and exhausting time of my life. I spent those thirty days in a constant state of wonderment. Everything was so new. The city was new, the culture was new, the food was new. The traffic, the noise, the street vendors, the makeshift wheelchairs. And the attention. I probably did more socializing in those thirty days than I had done in the whole previous year. Believe me, it was not due to my own efforts: everywhere I went, people wanted to talk to me. That was very strange and took a lot of getting used to.

It was an absolutely wonderful time, and by the end of the month I was getting pretty sick of it. I moved to my new apartment away from District 1, began socializing less, and got a new job working 15 hours a week on top of my 20 volunteer hours. This might sound a lot less exciting, but it was also a wonderful time in its own way. I found the lack of social obligations incredibly refreshing. I rediscovered having time to myself. And as my responsibilities as a teacher increased, I gained a new understanding of the profession. And after a month I was sick of living like this, too. I wanted to have a social life again.

So here I am, in the third month of my stay. I think the first and second months were both very important and natural stages of my development here; I had to go through both to arrive at where I am now. The next two months will be the tricky part. I’ve lived at both extremes; I’ve seen both ends of the spectrum. I’ve learned that I can’t live much longer than a month at either end. Now I have to try to live somewhere in between.

I’ve already started going out with my friends a bit more. That’s been a welcome change of pace. I’ve also started a more thorough exploration of my area, and rediscovered Vietnam as a place of wonderment. Believe it or not, after my first month of living here I actually thought I’d seen just about all that Saigon had to offer. How could I possibly have thought that? You could live in this city your whole life and not see everything. In my recent walks I’ve discovered a tiny department store with all the basic necessities, eliminating the need for a fifteen minute walk to MaxiMark, the giant and much more expensive general store down the street. I’ve located a number of new cheap restaurants, a hair salon (if you say ‘barber shop’ here no one has any idea what you’re talking about), and a bakery.

I had my hair cut at the hair salon. This is actually the first time I’ve had my hair cut since I came here, because honestly I was a little afraid, and NO JOEL I AM NOT RACIST. I am merely unable to speak Vietnamese, and was therefore worried that I would not be unable to communicate with the barber. But it worked out really well. The barber spoke a little English, understood me perfectly, and I emerged with one of the best haircuts I’ve had in a while. It cost about $2.50.

I want to hold off talking about the bakery, because the world of Vietnamese pastry is so vast that it deserves its own entry, and several pictures. Speaking of pictures, the camera situation unfortunately remains unsolved, but I have made progress. I asked around about the possibility of purchasing a new camera, and it’s—well—not a possibility. Basically, there is no such thing as a Vietnamese camera, meaning they are all imported. And while most things in Vietnam are incredibly cheap, anything imported is a huge exception. A box of cereal here costs about $6, for example. Even the cheapest camera here is around $300.

But all is not lost. I talked to some more people at AIS, and some of them have had similar problems with Vietnamese batteries not working for them. Apparently it’s not that the batteries are incompatible with American electronics or anything, just that they’re so incredibly cheap and worthless that they can’t power anything. But higher quality batteries are available in the country; it’s just a matter of tracking them down. They’ll probably be expensive, but I should be able to find them somewhere.

And when I do, trust me, there will be a lot of pictures. I will make a serious effort to atone for depriving you for a month and a half.

Dear Tourist,

You know who you are.

I used to see you every day. Back when I lived in District 1, I’d see you walking around the Pham Ngu Lao area every time I went out. You’re that guy who lives right in the center of the Backpacker District, in a guesthouse with a couple college friends you brought along. Somehow you managed to convince your friends it would be fun to backpack through Southeast Asia. I’d really like to hear the logic you used on them. Was it the same logic you used on yourself?

At any rate, now that I’m living in District 10 I don’t see you anymore. I guess you haven’t left District 1. And why would you want to? You have everything you could possibly want there: all the city sights are within walking distance, there are lots of clubs, plenty of nice restaurants serving non-Vietnamese food, and even a few karaoke places. What more could you need? Of course, you’ll have to leave the vicinity to check out the new bar that just opened; all of your American friends say it’s great. How is the American beer there? I hear it tastes like it’s from America.

I can spot you easily in a crowd, except when you’re walking around the Backpacker District and everyone looks exactly like you. Since you’re always walking around the Backpacker District, I guess I can’t spot you easily in a crowd. But if you somehow wound up in the company of Vietnamese people, believe me, you wouldn’t stand out just because you’re tall and white. It would have more to do with the $500 backpack you carry around everywhere, your plaid Abercrombie shorts, and that old Dark Side of the Moon t-shirt you've worn for about six days straight. In case you haven’t noticed, Vietnamese men all wear collared shirts when they go out, and they don’t wear shorts. You really should have picked a different Pink Floyd album, by the way; you’ll get awfully hot wearing black around here.

In case you’ve yet to detect my snide, condescending tone, I’ll say it outright: I don’t like you. I know I shouldn’t form an opinion without talking to you first, but I just can’t help it. I see you on the street and I cringe. You see, I have a moral objection to your lifestyle. It’s not that I have a problem with bars or clubs or fancy restaurants; I’ve been to all of these myself on occasion. There’s nothing wrong with going out and having fun. It’s more that I have a problem with your reasons for being here.

Why are you here, anyway? Maybe you’re “taking a year off” from college. Maybe you’ve just finished college, and are doing a little backpacking before you have to go to work permanently. Maybe you’re trying out the ESL teaching bit, or maybe you’re just taking a vacation. It doesn’t matter. The one thing you are not here to do is live in Vietnam. You are here to be in Vietnam, which you equate to living here. Personally, I think you want the social status of being “well-traveled” without having to actually travel. You’re probably doing this so you that when you go to a party back home, you can tell the girls, “You know, when I was in Vietnam, this guy tried to pickpocket me….” I realize I don’t have the right to make this kind of judgment. I have no idea why you’re here; I’m just trying my best to think of a plausible reason. This is the best I can come up with. You certainly aren’t here to gain cultural experience. Your contact with the Vietnamese people is limited solely to the commercial plane. You stay in your role as buyer; they stay in their roles as sellers. Everyone stays comfortable and safe. You treat the country like it is an exhibit in a carnival sideshow: you observe, but always keep a distance.

I met someone the other day who is the exact opposite of you. He has given me newfound faith in what tourism can be. He is in his early twenties, is from the Netherlands, and has biked through Mongolia, China, and most of Southeast Asia. He left for Jakarta yesterday. Most of his six-month journey has been spent in small villages where no one can speak English. He eats their food, sleeps in beds they provide, and is constantly struggling to adapt and communicate. He confided to me that after a few weeks living like this, he has to stay in the city for a while; he has to eat something without rice and talk to someone in English. This is perfectly understandable; I don’t expect you, as a tourist, to go to the remotest village of the Amazon rainforest and live there without outside contact for three years. But what I do expect of you is respect for the country you inhabit, and therefore a willingness to spend time living among the people, experiencing their way of life. That is what separates this man from you. I can guarantee that when he gets back to the Netherlands, he’s going to have a lot more to tell girls at parties than you will.

I’m probably going too far in judging you. I have to step back. You’re not a bad person, probably. I really have no way of knowing. All I know is that you could be like this man I met, and are not. Instead you’ve chosen to waste your time here—time that has the potential to be truly life-changing—and waste it in a way that shows disrespect to a country and its people.

I feel sorry for you, really. Whenever I see you, you look lost and out-of-place. Perhaps because you are.




Sincerely,
Aaron

A New Routine

Okay, so I've settled into a new routine.

It really doesn't take long. I fell into it almost immediately after the move, and there hasn't been much variation since. I guess it's inevitable. And it's not really a bad thing; I'm still enjoying my time here. I enjoy work at both my schools, and although my social life has diminished somewhat since leaving District 1, I'm still getting out at least a couple times each week. So far I'm content.

I've refrained from talking about AIS in the past several posts because a lot of truly awful things have gone on there. I can't go into detail on the blog, but I'll tell you all about it when I get back. The way I see it, this is a great experience for me, because I'm being exposed to the dark underbelly of the education world without having to worry much about consequences. If I say the wrong thing, there isn't much they can do to me, since I'm not technically an employee. I've signed no contract. The students are still wonderful, of course, and most of the staff are friendly. There was a somewhat scary incident a few days ago: one of our students asked to use the restroom, and on her way to the door, she collapsed. She didn't try to catch herself at all. I froze for a second, unsure of how to react; Tim was closer and went to help her up. I eventually got up, held the door, and watched the class while Tim took her to the nurse's office. We're still not sure exactly what caused the collapse; it didn't seem like a normal faint to me, and she couldn't walk for a while after. Apparently the student has had a long history of episodes like this, of which we were not notified by the school.

We started a poetry unit, and the other day the students had to write haiku. One student asked me to write one, and since I was missing Minnesota winter, I wrote this:

A bare tree stands cold
Sweet fire consumes winter
Eyes like falling snow

I wrote it in about five minutes, so it's not particularly good, but it sparked an interest in me. Haiku is fun to write because it doesn't take up much time and you have to work within specific parameters, which for me makes the process a lot easier; I can't write anything without some sort of formal rigidity. The only thing I don't like is that the form doesn't give much space to rhyme, and I love to rhyme. Anyway, I think I'm going to try to write one haiku a day, and then at the end of the week I can post all of them for that week. That'll give me something to post if I don't know what else to write about.

Working at Aston's has been an enlightening and challenging experience so far; I think it's taught me more about teaching in these three weeks or so than I've learned in my entire time at AIS. This is of course because at Aston's I'm in charge of the classroom, whereas at AIS I'm in sort of a periphary role. Monday, Wednesday, and Friday evenings I teach teenagers and adults (mostly around 14 and 15, a few around 18, and the occasional adult), and then on Saturday and Sunday morning I teach younger children, anywhere from pre-school age to 12. The transition from teaching older children during the week to teaching younger children on the weekend is a difficult one; during the week I adapt to teaching at a higher level, so on the weekend I often find myself giving instructions that my younger students don't understand, like "Get into partners!" It's a real challenge to constantly change the level at which you teach, and to remember which class is which in terms of what they have learned and what they will understand. But the students are generally pretty good. I will admit I much prefer teaching older students; they're less rowdy, more willing to listen, and I can actually converse with them, as opposed to the "call and reponse" style of teaching I have to adopt when dealing with very young students. But it's all good experience, I get paid for it, and for the young classes I get a teaching assistant. It all works out.

Hmmm. What else? I guess I probably shouldn't make it so transparent that I'm writing these off the top of my head. You deserve quality organization in your blog entries!

I'm on a really cheap diet right now, and I'm probably eating too much. Within the past few weeks, the most I've spent on food in a day has been about 3 dollars. I eat a giant bowl of soup and a loaf of bread for breakfast; a big pile of rice with pork, vegetables, and tofu for lunch; and then for dinner I do whatever I feel like. Sometimes I eat so much for breakfast and lunch that I don't even need to eat dinner. It's a very different diet from what I'm used to in the US; at college I usually skipped breakfast, had a medium sized lunch, and had a big dinner. Here it's almost the opposite.

I still can't stand coriander. It's actually gone from being a mildly humorous problem to being rather serious. I've almost been sick just from the smell of it. It is without a doubt my least favorite taste, smell, and sight in the world (if I knew what it sounded/felt like, it would also be my least favorite sound/texture). I usually figure out a way to communicate to the restaurant management (the people standing up rather than sitting down beneath the tarp) to leave it out, but sometimes even the smell of it is too much for me and I have to leave. Originally I thought I didn't like it just because it was in everything, but now that I've gone a few weeks without tasting it and it still makes me sick, I'm more inclined to think I just really, really hate everything about it.

Vietnamese pork, on the other hand, is incredibly delicious. No offense to our own pigs at home, but they just don't stand up to Vietnamese pigs. And our pigs are quite a bit better than pork you buy in a store! I'm not sure what makes the pork here so amazing; the beef isn't very good at all. I suppose it might actually have to do with how they cook it rather than the quality of the meat. But whatever the secret is, I need to find out, because Vietnamese pork completely makes up for the existence of coriander. It's really that good.

One other food-related nugget of wisdom: if you are ever presented with a mysterious purple sauce that smells rather uncannily like decaying flesh, just go with your gut instinct. Please don't make the mistake I did and actually try it.

Actually, scratch the previous entry.

I'm pretty sure I just ate a duck fetus.