Dispatches from the Classroom

Teaching has been quite the... experience. First off, I think it is important to view this as a means to an end. To do otherwise just seems to be asking to get in line with the crusty old career teachers-our coworkers. We get paid an unfair amount of money to do moderately difficult work that entails equal parts entertaining and teaching. Libby was initially shocked this isn’t just nanny work, but then again, when one of our Vietnamese counterparts for example, has an electrical engineering degree but teaches English instead because some of his engineer friends with first-rate jobs have 450 dollar a month salaries, it’s good to approach our job with some degree of integrity. That being said, this isn’t teaching. And it isn’t teaching in the same sense as teaching in a developed country. You do the best you can do, and your best is ALWAYS good enough.  (because when it comes down to it, your English will always be better than your student’s).   A lot of the crusty old guys and some of their younger followers are quite jaded over surface level concerns- yeah the model is customer driven, the customer is always right. Yeah our language school is profit driven-but we’re profiting as a direct result too (re: that whole engineer thing). Yeah they stick autistic children willy-nilly in the classes, which is a major distraction, but the two kids I’ve seen have had what appears to be moderate Asperger’s which in no way impedes their cognitive ability, even though the rest of the kids shun them to a corner.  

Legitimate issues do exist. Though there seem to be a boatload of alternative teaching opportunities, so I don’t see why people don’t just switch jobs before basking in their self-imposed misery. A lot of the classes are too large (the largest being about 24 people), but I’m pretty sure that’s a universal teacher complaint.  We teach for 2 or 3 hour blocks, which is too long for anyone’s good. More frequent shorter meetings would go a long way for their learning development. For the majority of the classes, participation and focus isn’t a problem, though there are always a few bad apples. That being said, in all classes below a certain proficiency level there is a Vietnamese TA that serves a dual purpose of translation and discipline.  The problem is with the teenagers, who don’t have a TA. A lot of them have to spend their Friday and Saturday night 6-9 or 6:30-9:30 learning English. So yeah, entertaining plays a big role in our teaching because as the most level-headed of our coworkers pointed out, these are their Friday and Saturday nights. So yeah they can get a little rowdy, and yeah they can be disinterested, and yeah their parents could be sending them here just to get a little time away from the kids, but they still come. My only complaint is that they don’t have the discipline I saw in Korea (and which must exist in Japan-number 1 Asia power), which was bordering on superhuman. Must be the tropical heat. Or something. Anyways it’s kind of fun getting to play games.

The most difficult part about our job is the unbelievable variety in students. Libby teaches 4-5 year olds learning the alphabet, I’m a boy/girl one day and then police officers the next day (we’ll have to wait and see on the police officers, she’s teaching them as we speak and apparently the classes are government funded which means participation is REALLY a problem…but word on that later). And then there is everything in between: 6-8 year old beginners, 8-10 year olds, 11 year olds which are the worst because they have learned how to be bad and exaggerate boredom, teenagers, and college students/adults.  I’m still learning how to be bubbly and silly enough for the children and Libby is struggling with how to entertain adults without treating them like children.  With every new class, comes 3 new books and every age has multiple levels, so our bookshelf is now filled with multiple colors.  While quite a struggle lugging them to the nearby coffee shop for lesson planning, it is nice how much guidance and resources the teacher’s books have especially when we hear about teachers in other schools who have to come up with everything themselves.   

The coworkers as I’ve alluded to are quite an interesting cast of characters as well. There’s a couple very nice, normal and levelheaded teachers that mostly get drowned out by the loud, jaded and crusty old teachers in the teacher’s lounge. Apparently quite a few of the old teachers in the gang left recently so maybe they are just still in mourning. There are a few older (40s-50s) teachers who aren’t crusty or jaded, they’re fun mostly just to watch.  One older Brit loves Burger King and goes out to get it most every day.  Another is a gigantic black man named Ron who had a HILARIOUS diatribe over how this is like Disneyland compared to his NYC inner city PE teaching days in response to the dourest Brit of the whole lot-one of the crusty crew’s acolytes. This guy really is a hoot. We are supposed to wear shirt tucked in with ties every day. His shirt is so tight that like the buttons pull apart and expose his skin (also his shirt is so small and tight that he can’t physically tuck it in). He finally showed up to work a few days ago with a belt which honestly and truly was one of those tiny belts girls wear around dresses. He’s a philosophy major who wants to join the RAF which is also kind of funny. Best of all though was his rant about the degradation of English culture and the excess of cynicism and envy-which I agreed with initially. As time went on though he continued to exemplify this very excess of cynicism to the point where I thought it’s people like him that are England’s real problem!   It’s all so new that I can’t help but feel like my opinion of this whole foray will change repeatedly in the coming weeks and months. For now, it’s pretty good.

The Dog days are Over

Wow it’s been a long time. Lots to catch up on so I’ll go one installment at a time. First off, there was the culinary roller coaster, Top thrill Dragster to be specific. We hit a peak two weekends ago at Tres Gourmands (thanks Mr. LeCorgne). I was all excited there were going to be these Michelin starred restaurants here in Saigon with Vietnam style prices, turns out Michelin hasn’t made it to Vietnam yet. Had to rely on TripAdvisor and it sure didn’t disappoint! This was truly a next-level culinary experience, a level neither Libby nor I had previously known existed. 7 courses of pure heaven with 2 palate cleansers (savory truffle ice cream & key lime basil sorbet), 7 types of homemade cheeses for one of the courses. The duck liver spring roll, the fish ravioli, and the lamb lasagna were probably the highlights for me but everything was swimming in truffle oil, the mignon filet had a morel sauce that was somehow outdone by a different pepper sauce. If someone pointed a gun to my head and asked for a complaint, I might say the beef wasn’t supreme quality but we are in Southeast Asia home of the beyond suspect beef so they get a free pass. Clocking in at 3.5 hours, that meal went down in the record books. Like the top thrill dragster, we were at 400 plus feet in the culinary dining sphere before plunging down to zero the next day. Honestly I think my stomach went through gourmet food withdrawals the next day, that or I was simply refusing to eat any food that would blemish the perfect memory of the previous evening’s food.

            The next evening we had a much more-traditional­???- Vietnamese meal. Dog three-way. I had to do this right because I knew odds are this was going to be one of those one and done culinary experiences. Despite Kien’s claims that Dog meat was like Viagra, it definitely was one of those one and done deals. Dog, first way, little cutlets that you rolled up in lettuce and mint and dipped in fish sauce. Yeah I couldn’t complain with Kien’s “very healthy” assertions but… yeah. Contrary to popular belief, dog does not “taste just like chicken.” Rather it tastes gamier with some distinct flavor that I’m not quite sure how to describe. That and my brain has already quarantined that memory and is currently trying to dispose of it ASAP. I think it was providence that loads of pictures of cute little puppies started showing up on my Facebook that same night I ate them. The second way was the only palatable serving of dog I had (the restaurant prided itself on having 10 variations of Dog), it was a Dog meatball. I hate to admit it, but it sort of tasted like Swedish meatballs with all the onion flavor and frying but you could never forget what you were eating because a little dog bone stuck out of each meatball (which doubled as a convenient handhold sadly enough). The next dish was straight DURTY- Dogribs. Dogribs are about as lean as you can imagine, everything disgusting about dogmeat is truly exemplified in this dish. The “ribskin” is so hard that I couldn’t even tell if it was a bone or not, that is until I looked over the table and saw Kien just chomping on the skin. Needless to say we went and got banana and chocolate roti (similar to crepes) after that… experience… The dog restaurant was exactly where you would picture it, nameless district somewhere in Saigon where you had to literally walk through a different karaoke bar and restaurant before you came upon the much dingier place in the back… One funny side note, Libby and I were rightfully curious as to where this dog meat come from. Do they raise the dogs on farms specifically to slaughter or do they just go for whatever they can get their hands on in the streets of Saigon? Much to our dismay Kien said they did both… Apparently after further inquiries Saigon in years past has had big problems of “dognapping.” I’ll leave you with that. 

Kien on the left and our buddy Nam on the right

Cute little dog statue?

Good Morning Vietnamm goes... multimedia

“It’s a game, Blithe”

It’s difficult trying to explain the ‘rules of the road’ here in Saigon. One thing that did stick was one friend’s suggestion early on to never stray too far from the “pack” of moto’s. Well, after another week or two riding around with that suggestion stuck in the back of my mind, and a few rush hour experiences, I had an epiphany-the perfect metaphor for Saigon traffic- https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=B6M_XgiONoo  …Holding true to the deferential and obedient Asian stereotype, the ‘rules of the road’ maintain a strict hierarchy. For everybody’s convenience, and maximum efficiency, the hierarchy is strictly demarcated based upon horn size/volume.  Horns here are not used as a last resort-I’m about to hit you as they are in the US. Rather, the horn is used to prove existence, more as a “heads up, I’m coming relatively close to you, DON’T veer towards the sound of my horn, please move closer to the school of moto’s.”   First let me clear one thing up, the ‘rules of the road’ aren’t actually rules but more of a quasi-safety manual. While you can actually get pulled over for riding in the oncoming traffic lane, running red lights, presumably driving on the sidewalk (haven’t seen anyone get pulled over for that one) and weirdly enough not using your turn signal (not sure how that one got stuck in here) these “traffic stops” are really more like an infrequent but very expensive toll. The “tickets” are always negotiable and depending on your negotiating luck & skill can range from 5 dollars to 25 dollars. But back to my perfect metaphor. The plankton are the metaphorical pedestrians and bicyclists since they don’t even have horns. Riding on the sidewalk is really fun and a great way to get around intersections or up one way streets; however, it gets really annoying when you’re the pedestrian and you’re constantly getting beeped at by moto’s trying to get passed you… o well you win some and you lose some… Same goes for bicyclists. Biking is quite popular here and somehow they manage to cope just fine in the sea of motorized traffic. I think the only reason they stay is that they never stray more than two feet from their curb, sort of like an invisible bike lane. That being said, just last night I saw the most amazing act of neighborly good-will between a moto and a cyclist. Going up a hill, a moto moved up behind this bicycle and stuck his left leg on the back of the bike and proceeded to push this bicycle for something like a 1000 yards, it was amazing. At the risk of degrading my no longer perfect metaphor, I saw a quite unusual transport in the street-a wheel chair. Not sure what the wheel chair would translate to-maybe the protozoa or whatever the krill eat? Wheel-chairs in Vietnam have three-wheels and are shaped sort of like those seated bicycles with a hand push/lever to propel the object. Needless to say I was sort of shocked driving in rush hour traffic and finding a wheel-chair chugging along while simultaneously being engulfed by moto’s. I feel weird taking a picture of a crippled person but I’ll try and get one posted on the blog in a few days.  Next come the Juanito’s-the moto’s. Like the bait ball, the wall of moto’s somehow move seamlessly and in weird contortionist directions (backwards, forward, left, right and really anything in between). Sometimes they are tasked with maneuvers that require a school, such as going into the JUMBO-sized traffic circles or going through intersections that don’t really have traffic lights. The school mostly resides in the right lane or middle two lanes. The cars here are like the Jack’s. There is something like a 100 percent tax on all cars so they really aren’t very common by US standards. They really like to honk at the moto’s but I think it’s mostly as a way to vent their frustration in having brought a figurative sledgehammer to the game that required a screwdriver (that or they are the poor taxi drivers, not sure why they abandoned the tuk tuk).  A lot of the time you’ll just be stuck in a lane with a taxi behind you sitting and honking at you, at which point you’ll get over at your earliest possible convenience. The same cannot be said for the Bluefin tuna’s, which have a deafening horn and require immediate action. Most of the time the moto’s stay away from the left hand lane and the bus’s and dump trucks don’t stray from the lefthand lane, but if there was a real danger on the roads, the bus would definitely be it. It definitely makes you jump a little hearing the oversized airhorn compared to the beep-beep of a moto horn.  The fact of the matter is that safety on the roads in Saigon are mostly maintained through reasonable driving speeds. 90 percent of the time you’re not going over 30 km/hr which translates to 18 mph.

I’ve decided driving is more like a game than anything else here in Saigon. Never do you feel like you’re just driving like you would back in the States. It’s more like a rat race. There’s a residual of rush-hour traffic in everyone’s driving 24/7. Everyone loves to accelerate as fast as they can to about 30 km/hr and then stop 1 block ahead at the next red light. I think everyone really just tries to get their fastest ¼ km splits in hope that they can shave a couple minutes off of their 2 km trip. It’s really nice that shifting gears has become subconscious because driving a moto truly requires 100% attention on the road at all times. At the very beginning I would start snapping at Libby giving me directions after about 3 minutes of driving, it’s quite a relief being able to drive the moto without their being tangible discontent amongst us by the end of the ride and a very real necessity to go and drink a beer to calm down. Libby said she stopped getting light-headed from her presumable anxiety and nervousness from being the passenger after about a week. She still has to learn how to the drive the moto but given her propensity to drift off and enjoy the scenery you can sure as hell bet I’m never going to let her drive with me in the backseat ha!

We will add video footage soon!

Dispatches

Last Sunday we went to the “club” with six of our former students. Every club we went to before had American style prices, so we drank quite a bit of whiskey beforehand thinking we would only get a drink or two at the “club.” Turns out the club was actually just another rooftop bar with the “clubby” addition of really loud American top 40 hits. That being said, turned out the prices were Vietnam cheap! To the point, it is possible to have surface level conversations about what kind of movies you like and how many siblings you have for a few hours!  We drank towers of beer and had a wonderful time. The jury is still out whether those few hours of drinking are worth more than a day of hungover misery… On a side-note, I’m noticing a sort of competition clubs must be having with each other that takes place in the bathroom. One club had ice-cubes in their urinals. Another club put gobstopper-esque candies in their urinals. This club, which happened to be way cheaper than the rest, outdid them all. Floor to ceiling glass with a great view and then the urinal was just a giant wall of sloped glass with water falling down it. Minus the fact the glass was sloped the wrong way from a practicality standpoint, it was pretty novel and thus awesome. Looking back, the bathroom might have been the highlight of my night… I’ll have to go back so I can get a picture…

On Tuesday night we went to Broma (French colonial style building) to see a former LC program participant perform. He has totally quit teaching and is making it as a “professional” musician. I use asterisks because I seriously doubt he could be a professional back in the States, but if people are willing to pay him, why not? My prejudice could just be that he’s a solo acoustic guitar player and singer, and when you think about it, I’m willing to bet there’s not a more generic style of music that exists in the world, but that may just be me. Anyways, we went to Broma, which doesn’t have a covering on the rooftop and the musician was late in showing up, so we elected to get out of the rain by going to a different rooftop bar that did have a covering. As we were standing in the rain on the roof, The Rex Hotel was just staring at us in all its glory just across the intersection. The Rex is one of the 5 star hotels in Saigon and apparently has an amazing rooftop bar.  One of our new friends, a current LC student, convinced us we should splurge and try it out.  After getting lost in the lobby with the Versace’s and Armani’s stores, we made it up, and to our surprise, the best thing about that bar was the music that night. Sorry Jeremy, but these guitar players were definitely next level. It was a Spanish guitar band of all Vietnamese guys, but I’m still amazed at how good their picking was; I’ll be hard pressed to find better guitar playing here in Vietnam. The Vietnamese, are very capable people, and like most Asian cultures, are perfectionists. We couldn’t stay for a second drink (due to the outrageous price), so we decided to explore the hotel a little bit more. The building was shaped in a rectangle with a giant courtyard in the middle and on the whole left side was two rooftop pools on two levels. Well it had just stopped raining and since no one was around, we decided to go for a swim with an awesome view of the Biztech tower and the Saigon skyline in general. Acting like a confused white person goes a long way here, but still, I felt really really stupid walking out the lobby with wet hair and shorts that looked like I peed on myself, really badly. We’ll see if we try our luck a second time.

A different group of our students invited us to a small get together on Friday afternoon. For lunch, we went to a Hanoi style restaurant, which was pretty unremarkable. The interesting foods section is conspicuously blank this week, I’m sorry. I had a close call with Dog at this restaurant, but they had run out of Dog by the time we ate; I haven’t given up. After lunch, we roamed around town for a little while looking for a market to get ingredients for dinner. This group was a little better than our last group in that one of the students was near fluent, so we essentially had a translator which we needed as the rest of the group knew very little English.  That being said, lots of times the group would revert back to Vietnamese, and we would just sit there until they stopped talking, at which point we’d ask Sang what they were just talking about.  Before coming, Libby and I had somewhat naïve notions of going to the market and picking out fresh ingredients with which to cook our meals. First off, these markets aren’t exactly your Sunday stroll through the Farmer’s market. As I said before, meat isn’t refrigerated and general sanitation just isn’t quite up to American standards. But that is only the minor problem. The big problem is that the market is really where you get hit with the foreigner “upcharge.” Our mangosteens were marked up about 400 percent so we resorted to walking around the corner and having Sang go make the transactions alone, kind of funny. We’ll just have to be on our bargaining game if we want to attempt the food market experience alone.

                 We told Sang that we would contribute Sangria to the dinner to which he was rather excited since he also learns Spanish on the side. After implementing the going around the corner and hiding strategy, Sang said he’d go get the wine at one of the stands. I was thinking how strange it would be for someone to be selling wine at this market when he comes back with two 12 ounce water bottle containers of Rice wine. 30 percent alcohol content was pretty cool, but I didn’t even bother trying it on its own; the smell was enough to dissuade me. We did happen to run across a proper liquor store on the walk back so the final product was what I dubbed Asian sangria. Red wine, rice wine, 7up, mangosteens, and pineapple. It wasn’t so bad, and with a little tinkering I think it’ll definitely have its place in the repertoire. Thankfully I was only on cocktail duty because the cooking half of the meal looked like quite the… uh, experience. The typical Vietnamese kitchen usually contains 1 or 2 gas stoves and a rice cooker. Definitely no oven, and in our case a very unusual sink. All of this is of course fit into a space the size of a decent sized closet.  The sink was very curious. It actually sprayed out into a sectioned off corner of the floor and had a drying rack for all the dishes and cookware and silverware. It kind of would have might have been an awesomely efficient setup if it wasn’t placed at floor height (think foot rinser at the pool or the beach) which necessitated the Asian squat or else hands and knees and regardless made your feet really close to the food.  In addition, in lieu of no more than maybe two square feet of counter space (and that’s generous) most of the food prep was forced to take place on the floor, which was again, interesting. Thankfully, I stayed out of it for the most part. The final product was actually quite delicious.  The apartment was two stories, and the top floor was mostly empty save for storage, a hammock and a couple of mattresses against the wall, so we ate on the floor in the empty space of the room. There was some sort of broth with eggs poured straight into boiling water which created this weird but awesome shredded-tofu(???) like consistency in the broth. We had that with pork cooked in fish sauce and some other things which was also delicious. Finally, or rather to start we had a good salad with hard-boiled eggs and dressing made from lime juice.  I only came to realize afterwards that the only reason why this food was probably so good was that the cook was leaving in a month to go study baking for three years in Arizona… Looking back we probably should have skipped dinner and had a baking session instead, though as I speak, I’m wondering where she gets access to an oven (she has posted some pictures of professional quality cakes but I think that’s just at her job).  After that cooking experience and just staying in a very traditional Vietnamese apartment, I can say with only a sliver of facetiousness, that I understand how the VC were able to live in dirt tunnels for ridiculous amounts of time. I mean, even Hamas has to put concrete in their tunnels! Truly exceptional people!

(Libby does not support these final statements).

On Saturday, we went out with a friend of a friend from Phnom Penh. Though to call the friend of a friend, a friend, is stretching it. We actually hung out with him for a single night at a bar in Phnom Penh, but he was just exceptionally nice. He put me in contact with his other friend who was teaching in Saigon. Turned out the friend teaches an hour outside of Saigon, but he was really nice and I told him to let me know when he comes into town and we can grab drinks. Long story short, somehow Libby and I found ourselves on a “micro-brew” pub crawl with like 8-10 British dudes aged like 30-35. Even more funny is that our “friend”-William, had just bought his girlfriend’s engagement ring that afternoon so we somehow are at like his pre-bachelor party bachelor party. I can truly say it was quite the cultural experience. First off, they are so proud of their intra-Britain ethnicity, we had Wales, Ireland, Scotland, not sure the rest, and honestly don’t care… You’d think they would want to just group themselves under the English nationality, but who knows. It seems similar to a person with dual Canadian and American citizenship telling people they were Canadian… They were all very nice, about 4 of them had Vietnamese wives which was pretty hilarious. Libby kept asking them all where their wives were from and all of them kept saying Vietnam. I didn’t know if that was rude on her part but maybe I was the only one that thought that was funny.  What impressed me the most was their beer drinking abilities. I mean, some of these little guys were just pounding liters, and yes it started showing at the end, but they really kept at it until they were down for the count. One of them fell on his face on the sidewalk-really hard- and must’ve managed two more large pints before essentially falling asleep at the table. The other thing that impressed me was their musicality. One of them was a for real DJ in Brighton and a few others played electric guitar. That didn’t surprise me for all the things America has surpassed England in, I think the little Island still has a superior music scene-definitely superior music per capita.  They were naming a number of American hip hop artists and white rappers I have never even heard of.  Anyways, they did sort of have that obnoxious and very vocal Western European defeatist, self-subjugating, amoral political viewpoints. I think it must stem from those times spent in the air-raid shelters while Germany was annihilating their cities and all they could about it was, well nothing, and today manifests itself in those anti-Semitic rallies…At least they aren’t as bad as the other European countries but then again they at least can say they managed to be the last important European nation to get bombed by the Germans. To connect the dots, I said something along the lines of Englishmen and Americans be pseudo soul-brothers alluding to all our shared cultural values and such and he was like, “YA, like… cough IRAQ!” I was like, SHOCKER!!!!! (except in my head), and then moved on… Soon after he was telling me about how with some American’s he can tell that they don’t know how to act around him (meaning Brits) and obviously try and put on a persona. He said something along the lines of he liked us because we seemed to be acting like ourselves. My thoughts: meta-Stupid. Sometimes the stimulating characters are few and far between halfway across the world but thankfully we have Vietnam to keep us preoccupied! We did find a very good German “micro-brew” so I’d consider the pub crawl a success all in all.  That being said we spotted at least 4 rats at another location on the list.  But, we at least have that micro-brew to hold us over until the American style microbrew opens up in the next month or two. We met the co-owner a week or two ago who had his Colorado brewmaster on the way over. We got to be on his “membership” list which means we get to go to some tastings and provide feedback. Pretty excited! Anyways, it’s been a week plus with the moto and I just finally learned how to properly shift the gears (it’s really hard getting taught by people who don’t have accelerate and such in their vocabulary) but for the sake of brevity (ha) it’ll have to wait.. till next time!