A Hodgepodge of Weekly Events

This is going to be very incoherent. Just a warning.

Maybe I should discuss teaching first. As many of you know, this was my first week acting as a teacher's assistant. It's been a fantastic experience so far. My role involves a lot of general classroom supervision (answering questions, controlling behavior, guiding discussion), but perhaps the most important part of my job is the Dialogue Journal. The Dialogue Journal is much like a traditional journal, only instead of the students writing to themselves, they are writing to me, and I write back. It's like a private conversation between myself and each of my students. It's a fantastic idea (not mine), and seems to be working brilliantly so far.

I also spend the week organizing some sort of activity for Friday, over which I have complete control. I took a risk by starting out this Friday with a very high concept game, in which the students interview crime suspects (fellow classmates) and try to find holes in each one's alibi. The crime was my own murder, of course. I was very worried that I wouldn't be able to get the various concepts across (suspects, alibi, proving innocence, etc.), but I was surprised at how quickly they caught on. The game went over really well. After it had finished, I was suddenly struck by the thought that I had more or less taught a class, on my own, for an hour. And the kids had enjoyed it. That was a huge confidence boost.

The kids are too much fun. One class activity had them in groups, drawing their own four panel cartoons. The subject matter of the cartoons was a bit alarming. One cartoon was about a two-timing lover who is brutally assaulted by his girlfriends when they discover his infidelity. Drawn in cute stick-figures, of course. Another was a parody of Titanic (I think) in which Jack pushes Rose off the boat because she demands expensive gifts. One particularly creative cartoon involved the Grim Reaper's son, who goes against his father's wishes and becomes an angel . . . so he can chase hot angel chicks. The students also wrote stories. One involved a family vacation in Hawaii. Ending with death in a tsunami.

All told, I think the first week went really well.

In other news, I have officially become the frequenter of a restaurant. It takes probably less than a minute to walk there from the hotel: just down the alley and across the street. Though if you didn't know it was a restaurant, it might be hard to tell. It's bascially a little space under a tarp with some tables and chairs, and a wide stove out front. They serve food of the quality you'd expect from a sit-down restaurant in the US, only it arrives within minutes, and costs about US$1. It's also probably a lot healthier, and the people are a lot friendlier. There are some things about Vietnam that I miss already, and I'm not even close to leaving yet.

When you frequent a restaurant it is only a matter of time before you meet someone else who frequents the same place, and this is what happened to me. I finally struck up a conversation last night with a woman who I'd seen eating there a couple times before. It turns out she is from Tasmania, and is teaching at the Australian International School here. But here's the exciting part: she runs a local English Club that meets weekly right in the area. And she invited me to their English Club party on Saturday. Apparently a lot of kids my age are in the club, and most of them speak English really well. This is exciting for me; it seems like a great opportunity to meet some friends. We'll see how it goes.

The last bit of news is about my job search. Throughout the week I've been looking for part-time work teaching English in the area. Not for the money, just as a means of branching out and meeting some people my age (most language school students are around my age). And for teaching experience. I've been using www.saigonesl.com to locate specifically "Backpacker Schools," which are schools that will hire anyone who can speak English, regardless of education. And I did locate a school nearby--one of several. I figured it wouldn't hurt to try it out. So after finishing up at AIS I gave my driver the address of the school.

It started raining along the way. I don't know if I've mentioned this, but it's currently monsoon season over here. Every day, at around 2 o'clock in the afternoon, it will rain for a couple hours. Or, at least, it's supposed to rain at 2 o'clock in the afternoon. The schedule has been a bit off lately. At any rate, it started to rain a little after noon. Nothing much changes when it rains; everyone just puts on a rain poncho and continues about their business. No one uses umbrellas. I'm not sure why, but I haven't seen a single one.

I had a rain poncho on this particular occasion, but if there is one thing that rain ponchos seem disinclined to do, it is protect you from the rain. I arrived at the school thoroughly soaked. Of course the school was also closed. I asked someone sitting out front, having lunch. They said the school would open in three hours. My driver seemed to understand this. He took me back home. I got off the bike and paid him. I held up three fingers.

"In three hours, right?" I said.

He nodded. "Three."

He arrived at three o'clock. About two hours later. I was taking a nap at the time. At about 3:20, I received a sharp knock on the door, from the maid. I realized in almost the exact instant that I awoke what had happened. I also realized it was more or less my fault; I had assumed he'd understood what I meant when I held up 3 fingers, a very poorly chosen gesture in hindsight. I frantically put my still-wet clothes back on (I had laid them out to dry), tied my tie in an effort to look presentable, and ran out meet him. I apologized profusely for making him wait. He didn't seem to mind too much.

And so we went off to the school again. I was worried that we would arrive before the school opened; the man in front of the building had, after all, told me at around 1 o'clock that the school would open in three hours. But we didn't leave until around 3:30, and there was a lot of traffic on the way. When we arrived, the school was open.

I presented myself to the front desk. "Hi," I said. "I'd like to be an English teacher."

Unfortunately, no one at the front desk of the English language school seemed to know English. We struggled for about fifteen minutes. The woman kept requesting some sort of document, but I couldn't understand what exactly what she was saying. My deep fear, of course, was that they were requesting a diploma. It had been a fairly dormant fear for the past few days; I had thoroughly convinced myself that, since it was a Backpacker School, they would be so delighted to see me walk in the front door that they would hire me on the spot, no questions asked. But now this fear awakened. And then she said it. That word. "Diploma."

I asked her, very slowly, if it would be alright for me to work without a diploma. She looked at me a moment, and left. This was distressing. Then she came back with a white guy. That was reassuring. The white guy and I talked for a while about the school, and I learned that the campus in District 1 was in fact much smaller than the other campuses, and taught mostly young children. But I would be given an interview if I brought a resume and photocopies of my passport and visa. I thanked him and left.

So this particular school didn't work out for me. Transportation out of District 1 every day (to get to a different campus) would get expensive, and as much as I like children, the main goal of this part-time work venture is to meet people my age. Still, it was a good learning experience and all that. Now I know generally the sort of thing to expect.

Here's to Week #2.

Fun with rent! (And a general update)

My supervisor informed me a few days ago that it was about time to pay my rent. I asked how much it was. He replied, somewhat enigmatically, that it would cost me “270” for the month. I didn’t think much of it until the next day, when I actually needed to pay. “Hmm,” I thought to myself, “270 dong doesn’t make any sense. That’s less than a cent. He must have meant 270,000 dong.” Which is roughly equivalent to about US$20. This also seemed bafflingly cheap, but at that point everything in Vietnam seemed bafflingly cheap to me. I also reasoned to myself that since I had arrived in the middle of the month, perhaps I was paying only for half the month. This all seemed to work out in my head at the time.

I practically skipped down the steps to pay. I was excited. I was only paying $20 for rent! Vietnam was fantastic! I proudly displayed my wallet to the hotel owner, and withdrew three 100,000 dong bills. She looked at my hand and stared for a while. Then she looked back up at me curiously, as if she did not understand. I did not understand why she did not understand. I said, “Rent,” hoping she knew the word. She did, and frowned.

“No no no no no.”

I frowned, and repeated. “No?”

“No.”

She lead me to her desk, and withdrew a calculator. I wasn’t quite sure where all this was leading. She typed into the calculator: 270. Then she looked at me. I nodded. Then she pressed the multiplication symbol, and typed: 17,800. Then she pressed the equal sign. A very large number appeared. Suddenly I understood.

“Ohhhhhhhhhh,” I said.

She looked at me and smiled. “Ohhhhh,” she repeated.

Of course. Once I realized, it was so obvious it hurt: the rent was $270 American dollars. That’s the exchange rate, by the way: US$1 is equal to 17,800 dong. So, I needed a lot of dong before the end of the day. Approximately 5 million. I had about a million on me at the time.

I went to the supermarket. It’s roughly a ten minute walk from the hotel, and there is an ATM right inside the building. So far, it’s the only ATM I’ve found that will actually work with my debit card; Vietnamese banks seem very picky about what cards they will accept. The ATM was my only hope.

I put in my card, typed in the PIN, punched some buttons, and finally ‘Withdraw.’ I entered 4 million as the amount. The machine beeped loudly. A message appeared on the screen: “We’re sorry. Please enter an amount below 2,000,000.” Hmm. I entered 2 million instead of 4. The money dispensed.

I went through the steps for the second time, entering 2,000,000 for the amount again. I was greeted with another loud beep. “We’re sorry. You have reached your withdrawal limit for the day.”

Hmm.

That was bad.

I walked back to the hotel in more or less a panic. I desperately prayed that I would not see the hotel owner on the way back up to my room. If she saw me and was expecting the money, how on earth was I supposed to explain my predicament? She would probably just think I didn’t have the money and kick me out.

I rang the doorbell. The maid came out and opened up the gate. I took off my sandals, left them on the shoe rack by the door, and dashed up to my room, locking the door behind me. I sat in my room for hours, dreading a knock at the door. Eventually I went to bed.

Unlike many stories this one has no dramatic conclusion whatsoever. The next morning I ran quickly to the ATM, withdrew another 2 million dong, and paid the rent. The hotel owner did not seem particularly upset that it was late. In fact, I’m not certain myself it was “late.” Vietnamese people have a much different sense of time than we do in the West; it could be that any day within a certain general time frame is acceptable. I’ve never paid rent before, so the experience itself is unfamiliar to me, let alone the fact that I’m doing it in an unfamiliar society.

In other news . . . well, the less said about planning week, probably the better. I’m just glad that we’re through with it and can start working with kids next week. I’ve gotten to know some of the staff really well, and they all seem to be really great people, so I’m excited to work with them. On Friday we had a staff banquet, housed in the ballroom of the nicest hotel in the city. Needless to say that was a new experience for me, probably the fanciest dining experience of my life. I don’t think I made too much of a fool of myself, so that’s good. It was all very overwhelming though, and trying to converse was intimidating. I thought I was actually doing really well until the end, at which point it seemed that everyone had found a group and were talking exclusively, and very animatedly, within that group. I didn’t feel comfortable trying to “inject” myself into the conversation, and I felt like an idiot just standing around listening to people talk. But that was only the last fifteen minutes or so; up to that point I had been conversing pretty steadily with a variety of people, so I felt pretty happy with the night overall.

Now that I’m actually working, new entries probably won’t come quite as steadily as they have been. But I’ll try to get a new one up at least once every week. And I'll continue taking pictures. So . . . bring on the education!

The One-And-Only Exclusive Saigon Motorbike Video Tour

WARNING: the title may make the actual video a tad anticlimactic.

Anyway, I wrote an entry on walking, so I figured it was only appropriate that I follow up with another transportation-themed entry. This time I will discuss the motorbike. There are an awful lot of motorbikes in Saigon. It is, in fact, pretty much the only thing anyone drives here. And everyone drives them. It's not uncommon to see what appear to be ten-year-old girls cruising around town on these things.

There are numerous practical reasons why the motorbike is so popular here. It's small: cars are simply too big to navigate the streets very freely, or navigate the alleys at all. It's also light, fuel efficient, and all that stuff. But the real reason everyone drives them, I've discovered, is that they're way more fun.

I have yet to drive one. I've ridden them several times now. My supervisor has taken me out a few times, on quick tours of the city. I'm also riding with him to school in the mornings. Today I took a xe om or motorbike taxi, for the first time. I didn't have the right change, so I ended up overpaying the driver, but at least this way he didn't try to extort me after the ride, which is apparently a common problem.

This cathedral was brought over brick by brick from France during the occupation.

Riding a motorbike through the city is a completely different experience than walking through it. You might experience the city more intimately on foot, but when you're cruising along on a motorbike, you feel like a part of the city. It's like you're one of thousands of little blood cells, flowing through the veins of some enormous . . . thing.

Rest assured, this building is very significant.

If you see a car, it's usually a taxi, or it's owned by a company of some kind. But the car for personal use is growing in popularity, despite its ridiculous impracticality. A car in Vietnam means, "Look at me, I'm rich!" As such a lot of people who want to appear wealthy are buying them (most of whom actually are very wealthy, since cars are extremely expensive over here). It's actually getting to be a bit of a problem: cars clog the streets and lead to traffic jams. Personally I don't know why you'd want a car when you could be crusing along on a motorbike, having a near-death experience every five minutes and getting caught in the rain during monsoon season.



I apologize for the horrible wind noise in the second half of the video. You might want to turn the volume down/off.

Walking

In Minnesota I never did much walking. I think it had something to do with the amount of space. Sure, I would walk around the house, or across campus, or about town. But more of my time was spent driving between home and school, or home and town--or school and town, I guess, since I have to drive through town to get home. There's just too much space between everything.

In Vietnam there is no space. Anywhere. At all. No space between buildings, no space between people. Walking has become a part of my life. If I want to eat, I have to walk. If I want to buy anything, I have to walk.

Yesterday I walked from my hotel to a park which is pretty much in the center of town. It's the farthest I've walked alone. I was starting to feel trapped by the vastness of the city; how was I supposed to go anywhere without getting lost? Then I told myself to buck up. I had two legs and maps were available. I could walk wherever I chose. All it would take is a little planning.

Allow me a brief paragraph to rave about www.diadiem.com. It was recommended to me by my supervising teacher, and, when translated into English, is probably the most useful website I've encountered in my life. It's a detailed interactive map of Saigon. You can use it to see where in the city I'm currently staying: type in "171 Co Bac" and click "Find" (you'll have to translate the website into English first), and there it is. Go a little north from there (well, up—I'm not sure if that translates to north), and you'll find a big patch of green that says "Cong Vien Tao Dan." There's the park.


A view of the pond.

Walking in Vietnam is different from walking in Minnesota. It takes some getting used to. The first couple days I experienced intense "Crushed Toe Anxiety," an unpleasant period during which I was constantly afraid of having my toes crushed by passing vehicles (people tend to drive within half an inch of you). I also learned quickly that sidewalks are usually not meant to be walked on. More often they are for street vendors, or for the family dinner table. Occasionally you can hop onto the sidewalk to get out of the way of a vehicle, but usually you're walking right in the street, sometimes in the middle of it.


More park.

This is with smaller roads, of course. You definitely do not want to be walking in the middle of the big roads. You will die. You do, unfortunately, have to cross them quite frequently, which is another challenge. My travel guide frequently told me: "Whatever you do, don't stop! Just keep walking, they'll drive around you." This, it turns out, only applies in certain situations. There are a lot of situations in which stopping briefly is necessary to weave around vehicles, like when a van pulls out an inch from your nose. It's other situations, like when the road seems clear, so you start to cross, but then the light changes and you realize you have a massive wall of motorbikes thundering toward you--that you don't want to stop. As long as a vehicle is not coming straight at you, pausing is okay.


Here's a good example of the kind of hodgepodge architecture that is really common here; all over town there are shiny new modern buildings right alongside old dilapidated ones. It turns out the reason the buildings are all so skinny is not due to problems with space, but because during the French occupation, tax was based on how wide your house was. Silly French people.

The only thing restricting how far I go now is the heat: it's so hot here that walking even a short distance can be really draining. But yes, walking is good for you and all that. Builds character, good exercise.

The cleaning girl was changing my bedsheets when I came back from my walk. The balcony door was open. I should elaborate: there is a "mystery door" in my room that I have long suspected leads to a balcony (there is a photo of the door in "Pictures!"), but I could never seem to get the door to open. After the cleaning girl had left, I inspected the open door. How had she done it? It turns out the door opens by pushing out—not by pulling in.




Views from my balcony.

Ten Brand Spanking New Photographs! (Of The Neighborhood)

I was a little braver today, and ventured a little farther away from the hotel. I was rewarded with some pretty fantastic photos of the local market (if I do say so myself). I also took a tour of Dictrict 1 of the city with my supervisor, but unfortunately I did not realize how many pictures I had taken by that point, and was only able to take one additional picture before my memory was full. I'm sure I will have more opportunities at a later date.







The hat at the bottom of this photo belongs to a woman who was standing in front of me when I took the picture. It sort of gives you an idea of the height difference.


I love the disgruntled man in the corner here. I was trying to take the picture while his back was turned, but he looked back right as I pressed the button.




This is a closeup of a pagoda-like building I posted here previously. Wes Thompson informed me that it was not a hotel, as I had presumed, but a school. Most schools here, apparently, are designed to look like pagodas.




When the busy streets are too overwhelming, I usually duck into an alleyway. They are everywhere, and form an almost labyrinthine system of travel between the main roads. Lots of families eat outside in the alley, and you still get a few people on motorbikes coming through, but it's all much more relaxed, and occasionally you'll find an area that's completely deserted. Some of the alleys are even sort of picturesque.


Gardens seem to be really popular here. You see a lot of them out on little balconies.


This was the first and only picture I was able to take on my tour of the city, of a Buddhist shrine right outside the temple. I did inquire before taking the picture, and my supervisor told me it was okay. While in the temple I was able to witness a Buddhist ceremony. I'm not sure I understood quite what the occasion was, but there was a lot of drumming and chanting and it was really neat.

San Francisco to Saigon: The Extended Photographic Journey

A fascinating view of San Fransisco.

Here are some rather bad pictures of the airport in Hong Kong. The lighting was weird, so I tried a couple different settings, but still only a few pictures turned out:











This huge sign is outside the airport in Saigon. I was on flight UA 869.

The staircase in my house:

The house is much bigger than I expected and also a lot more like an apartment building. My room is about four or five flights up.


House regulations and things, thankfully provided in English. The translation is pretty fun.

Various pictures of my room:









You'll notice the shower does not have a stall. The bathroom more or less is the shower stall. There's a drain in the corner.


And finally Saigon itself:











You'll notice a very common theme in these pictures is the extraordinary abundance of wires.

I also bought a sandwich. It looked like this:

I don't have a clue what was in it, except I'm pretty sure I saw the woman crack an egg in there. At any rate it was very good. I ordered it by smiling and nodding when she pointed to it.