Coughing, Quoting and Cackling to Myself

For anybody who cares (even if it is only enough to open a webpage), I am at the moment in a reasonably good humour but have an inappropriately prodigious nose. Most unfortunately for somebody who is supposed to make a living by teaching, I am also accompanied by the infamous tickle in the throat leading directly to a most indecorous hacking, and crackly whispering vocables that native speakers crinkle their foreheads at, while ESL students hear rumblings and beginnings of thoughts like 'Why school hire American accent teacher very not interesting'. So, I am not teaching today. I was going to do one short two hour class, but my supervisor sensibly told me to stay away. So now I have no reason not to write another blog.

Work itself is going on pretty much as expected. This week is a new term – I introduce myself to my classes as the teacher who croaks. I have a level 6 class this term, new heights of grammatically fortified students expecting me to enlighten them. That is an evening class, primarily adult students, so at least I am mostly unburdened of the testosterone gallery of the class!

Say No To Dishonesty
Speaking of education, I found this article on education in Vietnam exemplary of, what should I say, verbosity masquerading as obtusity, or perhaps the opposite, I’m not sure. That’s the point.

Foie Gras Feast
I always read the important news from the good old US of A. Open invitation to anyone interested in foie gras to head for Chicago. Illegality is so appealing. This fact is demonstrated by what I saw this morning. Red lights, here in Hanoi, are sort of like a gentle suggestion. Typically, about half the traffic stops, the other half guns it and shoots through the congealed blob of stopped motorbikes like hornets through the crack in your window. Usually this is when you use your horn. Today I saw a kid do it on a bicycle, going about as fast as you can go on a bicycle like that, whipping past the motorbikes and, upon hitting the middle of the intersection, he just let out a piercing scream to attract the attention of any traffic foolish enough to assume that a green light means you can go… Think of it as a swarm of Mayflies in Michigan being swatted with a radio antenna, you’ll hit a couple but the herd moves on. On my motorbike, unlike in my life, I try to run with the herd!

Chillies Aid Sumatra Jail Break
Pocket a habanera next time you see one, you never know when it might come in handy.

Prison guard: "The is the first time chilli has been used to get out of this penitentiary,"
Recaptured prisoner: “Nothing takes the taste of shame and humiliation out of your mouth like … ketchup or yoghurt or bread or anything but chillies!

Can you tell that I am reading a Bill Bryson book right now?

I have never kept much of a reading list, exactly, but here are a few comments on what I’ve read lately. Upon finishing my training in Saigon, I read Guns, Germs and Steel, by Jared Diamond, which is a really fascinating, um, history of the world. The most interesting part, for me, was not so much the history itself, but his ability to summarize and synthesize information from many different disciplines into a comprehensible whole. It’s a great book to read when you are jobless – it is dense and it makes you feel like the tiniest blip on history’s radar screen. Somehow that is comforting when you are just watching TV and waiting for the phone to ring all day. And, on top of that, it’s not that difficult of a book to read, not like a textbook.

There were few other books in there somewhere, and one of them was Memoirs of a Geisha which is very informative for anybody interested in Geisha, or, indeed, humans in general since most of us are more similar than different. Even if you have no clue what a Geisha is, you are more similar than different.

Finally, my quote of the day from Bill Bryson’s book on Australia, Down Under.

“Listening to cricket on the radio is like listening to two men sitting on a
rowing boat on a large, placid lake on a day when the fish aren’t biting; it’s
like having a nap without losing consciousness. It actually helps to not
know what’s going on. In such a rarified world of contentment and
inactivity, comprehension would become a distraction.”

Anybody who can do what Bill Bryson does and apparently make a living at it deserves my attention!

Xe toi

I got a motorbike, and a helmet so that I still look funny driving down the street. I have decided that in order to drive safely in Vietnam you must have Buddhist instincts which I don't have, so I got a helmet instead.

It is a blue honda, used indeed. The speedometer and odometer don't work, the mirrors wobble, the end of the handlebar falls out if you pull on it, but so far it usually goes when I want it to, and stops as well.
And so, now that I am mobile, I try to stay in the middle of town as much as possible... It is nice to have West Lake accessible. That's maybe 20 minutes. Having wheels doesn't mean that I want to spend hours at a time on them!

Oh, right, I have a job

In the last week and a half, I’ve mostly worked. Those of you who know me very well might be surprised at that, but the people I work with seem unsurprised. And speaking of work, let’s see, how is that going? My school is basically an IELTS preparation course. IELTS is the test that ‘foreign’ students have to take to get into English-speaking universities in Australia, New Zealand, the UK, etc etc. The school has classes from beginner (I mean the “ABC” kind of beginner) through eight levels up to the actual IELTS preparation course. Each course lasts through a five week term with class four hours a day. For about the first month I worked, I was filling in for teachers on holiday, so I had different classes and different schedules. Now a new term has started and I have a regular schedule.

I have one level three class with twelve students. I think level three is good for me. They are advanced enough that I can talk to them without always having to resort to sign language, my acting skills or drawing silly pictures on the board. They are not so advanced that they ask me questions about adverbial clauses and nominative phrasal verbs and intransitive quantifiers and all that jazz that I don’t know much about… Plus with only twelve students, some of whom I taught last term, I can actually remember all their names, which is good. So I usually enjoy teaching that class.

I also have two level five classes, which so far have been mostly another story. I only have them two days a week, so I don’t get to know the students as well. And, obviously, they are a lot more advanced. So they are doing things like speed reading, academic essays (that is the theory at least), impromptu speaking etc. So, in those classes I think of myself as a surfer who is being dragged along by the cord between my foot and my board which has been attacked by a shark. In level three I can usually keep on my feet. Well, maybe I will get better after a couple weeks. Four hour classes tend to defy all possible efforts in terms of preparation.

So I take ‘pages’ from my speech class, my myriad writing classes, and really nothing from the ‘English’ classes I’ve had. My attitude in the classroom is, well you could say lazy. These are students who are trying to get into university abroad, and our classes are supposed to prepare them for that experience. So, being inspired by all my favorite professors, I tell them that they can get out of the class whatever they are willing to put into it. People who don’t bother to do the work sort of annoy me but I don’t spend a whole lot of time lecturing them, they’ll figure it out when they take their exams. The idea of me actually motivating someone else is a little laughable. Anyway, that is the job.

Outside of the job I am still thinking about getting back into a Vietnamese class. Somehow being an English teacher doesn’t help my Vietnamese much... I have used a bit of that in my class, for example in a writing assignment about ‘famous buildings in your city,’ I kept running into the One Legged Temple. This place is generally called, in English, the One Pillar Pagoda, but in Vietnamese is called one-legged… I can understand just enough to know if my students are talking about me on break, but not enough to know what they are saying. Not really all that helpful! I can, however, tell motorbike taxi drivers which way to turn, not as if they listen to me but at least I can tell them!

And it is summertime, even here in Hanoi, which is hot with a capital T. Downpours happen a lot. The other day a huge tree was knocked down just up the street from my school. And on occasion the downpour climbs up into my bedroom through the three inch 'crack' under the door. I haven’t really figured that out yet – there is a door which seems to open towards the rest of the building, but there is some space out there which apparently has no purpose whatsoever other than so that you can open the door which goes to it. And for breakfast this morning I passed on my typical Vietnamese iced coffee for a Mocha which I didn’t much like, Vietnam is not a place where I miss coffee from America…

Thoughts of the day

I am about to become "elegant and civilized." Both at once. I am so excited. I am not joking, see, I have no choice. By virtue of my location I am improving myself, just read the news... Please click on this link for more details about how you, too, could take advantage of this unique and valuable opportunity. Moving to Hanoi, that is!

ps I am not joking, but I may be laughing.

One more link for my Mom. You never know what will show up in the Vietnam News!

Nhà Hát Múa Rối Thang Long

So the next stop on the tourist trail involved water puppets. Water puppets are truly amusing. A traditional art in northern Vietnam, water puppetry is now kept alive not in the villages where it began, but in the Thanh Long Water Puppet Theatre in the middle of Hanoi. Anyway, they also do a show out at the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. This museum, aside from having some fascinating on some of the primary ethnic groups in Vietnam, has just opened a gallery on Hanoi from 1975 to 1989, the period of the subsidized economy. Very interesting, and, to say it mildly, unusual to see.

The GREEN words in the above paragraph are links to the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre and the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology.

Randomly, just to keep you thankful for fresh air and freedom, here is what you would look like if you were a snake and were dropped into a large jar of fermenting rice with some of your friends and left on a shelf somewhere. “Snake wine.”

So here is a photo of the water puppets.


To top all of that, today is also to test out my ability to post videos. Apologies to people using dialup, it might take forever to actually see the videos, but they are still there, trust me!

Dragon Dancing

The first is Múa Rối Nước.

Saigon Traffic

An old video of a typical quiet xe ôm ride.

More ‘lost on a motorbike’ photos

One more day of wandering the countryside. Today I went southeast from Hanoi, roughly following the Red River. It was easy not to get lost that way – there is a road following the top of a flood control dike, which you can see from far away so I found my way back without a problem today. Unlike Saturday, when I spent two hours getting from Tam Dao back to Hanoi, then two more hours getting from the Thanh Long Bridge part of Hanoi to the ‘my house’ part of Hanoi. Darkness and large trucks and light-absorbing pedestrians and ox carts stuffed and overflowing with bamboo and elbow to elbow crowds of traffic and testosterone driven racer bikes … Well, I did get to ‘see’ some parts of Hanoi that I don’t think I have seen before. Anyway, I was talking about today.

First, here is the obligatory water buffalo photo. They are kind of far away, not a great photo, but water buffalos are my favorite large slow farm animal here so I had to take a picture anyway!


























Here you can see a ‘field’ of lotus. Lotuses. Loti. Whatever. Aside from being an important symbol in Vietnamese Buddhism, lotus flowers are sold fresh, used to make medicine, and most importantly, you can put lotus seeds in che. Mmmm! The area behind the lotus is a cemetery.



A cathedral on the delta. There was no one around so I couldn’t go inside. Catholicism has been around in Vietnam for a long time. I am always fascinated to see the similarities in iconography between the cathedrals here and the pagodas (Buddhist temples). In any case, the grounds outside were very nice.


























The road, following the dike, gave a nice view of everything else which was flat like a pancake. Well, flat like Indianapolis, maybe I should say.




And finally, the Red River itself which is of course brown. There seem to be a lot of these barges/houseboats on the rivers and canals here. They are quite big, as you can tell when they are empty and have six or eight feet of the keel between the water and the deck. Anyway, that is my day at the river. I may not be able to go play along the Susquehanna, but I can keep busy!

The Motorcycle Diary I

Well, I guess number II, if you count the vote. The vote which at the moment is dead even, not counting one write-in vote for a bicycle and one intrepid voter who decided to flood the ballot. Both of those over-ruled by the election commission... Anyway, I decided to rent a motorbike last weekend, to get a taste before actually buying anything. Saturday I went to Tam Dao hill station. About 80 km outside of Hanoi, it was rather a long ride for initiation day, but it all worked. A few bumpy muddy spots, and a few large trucks with over-zealous egos, a few roadside coconut milk stands, a lot of kids staring at the nguoi nuoc ngoai on a motorbike, a lot of noise coming from the chain which was about to fall apart, a large hill (thus the 'hill station' idea I suppose). A large hill which was a bit much for a 100 cc bike with two people on, one of whom is roughly equivalent to two Vietnamese people in tonnage terms... Anyway, Tam Dao is a sort of northern futile attempt at copying DaLat, for anybody who has been there. It's on a mountain, the weather IS cooler, there are jungles and waterfalls and endless bamboo dragonflies for sale... Now that I think about it, this is the first time that I have been out to the countryside since I got here to Hanoi. Nice. Mostly a flat ride, through, well, rice paddies of course, also a lot of flower fields - roses etc. And a few field/paddies with lotus plants. Dog restaurants and bia hois. Lots of people who generally gave good directions. A couple herds of water buffalos. The friendly kind. A lot of dust. It didn't rain though, that was good. I rented, of course, a Honda not a Minsk. That's my current inclination. And next are a bunch of photos from Tam Dao, and other countryside shots. Although I saw a lot more that would have made nice pictures - driving a motorbike and taking pictures don't really mix, do they?

Tam Dao and countryside photos