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!