Summer Begins

Summers are hectic in Hanoi English centers. During the rest of the year, there are night classes on weekdays for adults wanting to improve their English, and classes for children on Saturday/Sunday. This means that people like me usually work five nights a week and then one full weekend day. To be honest, most of my training and experience is focused on adults, so the children’s classes put me in a place where I need to challenge myself a bit more. Yet, the summer program will be shifting all of the children’s classes to weekdays, meaning I will be phased-out of my kid’s classes for the time being.  (I hope)

So I’ve been proctoring a good deal of tests and marking many papers, boring but necessary.

A little while ago, in April, I finished my first contract with my employer, and signed up again for another six months. I figured that would give me enough time to save money, get experience, and assess where to go next. This is because, I don’t know if it’s worth enduring another cloudy and damp Hanoi winter, and I have been considering moving onto greener pastures and to more sunny uplands. Yet this is tempered by the fact that “sunnier uplands” may not have a large enough market for my skills. Big cities are where the money is – for better or for worse.

But, between my contracts, I took a week-long holiday to my second home in Vietnam, Hoi An. “Wow, you look a good deal healthier!” was the comment many of my colleagues gave me when I returned to Hanoi. “Yea, I just spent a week on the beach in Hoi An,” was my reply. Well, I didn’t spend the whole time on the beach; I did get a chance to visit with some old friends and motorcycle up the Hai Van Pass which now seems to be a ritual every time I visit. After the long winter, it was a welcome break. I would wake up early, walk out on the balcony to welcome the morning sun shining on the mountains. It was a chance to see old friends that I had made during my first trip through the old town of Hoi An.

Back in the city of the fog and smog – Hanoi, I’ve been busy with the transition to the new program, finding a new place to live across the river, and going to the pool at the Thanh Loi Hotel (one of many pools in town) whenever I can get the chance. The pool costs about 4 dollars a day to  visit, it’s right on the shore of Hanoi’s prettiest lake, and with a connected restaurant and bar – it’s the perfect place to work on my “Italian brown” when I have a spare moment. I know what people say about laying out in the sun, but try living in a place where it is perpetually socked-in with fog from December to May – you’ll see the value of sun rays. 

It seems like I never get totally settled here, I’ve only recently gotten my paperwork done, finally have a place of my own with a kitchen, I’ll be getting my own motorcycle to save myself renting, but if it isn’t one thing it’s another. Despite this, I like this country all right, and depending on what opens up (or doesn’t) elsewhere, I may stay here for a while.

Goodbye Kitty

I’ve been living in a large old Vietnamese house, set in an ordinary Vietnamese neighborhood. I share it with the landlord, who is an old Vietnamese man.  Ever since I’ve moved in, I’ve always been bothered by the rats. We didn’t have a cat, neither did the old fellow lay out traps, so I did get a bit annoyed by rats the size of squirrels running under the kitchen table while we watched TV.

Last week I was at home in the afternoon, as is normal for me, planning on going to work soon.  As I went to the garage to get my bike, I heard a shrill chirping or bleating sound. I paused, and heard it again, and began to look for the source of the sound. Behind my motorcycle in a small bird cage were two scrawny kittens who couldn’t have even been weaned. They had no food, filthy water, and no litter-box. Apparently the landlord had decided to get some cats, but these were so small and emaciated, I think that the rats would eat them if they were allowed to roam the house.

Knowing that he hadn’t been in the house for almost two days, I surmised that I had better look after these little flee-bitten felines before they starved to death. There was a much larger cage in the top floor utility room, I moved the cats into it, and bought them some cat litter, and some good quality food. I hated leaving them in the cage, but it would be for their own safety, so I checked up on them a few times a day for the next week. The landlord returned but I couldn’t be sure if he was looking after them.  One of the kittens had runny eyes, and was smaller than the other. I noticed over the days that it was getting weaker, and wasn’t eating as enthusiastically. There wasn’t much I could do, you can lead a cat to milk, but . . . you get the idea.  After about 8 days, I went up to the cage and noticed that the runt kitten was gone, only one remained. Apparently it had died in the night and the landlord had removed it early in the morning.  Oh well, I tried.

It is odd, some people in this country have the nicest animals, healthy dogs, sleek coated cats, but others treat their “pets” in a way that would appall the western “animal treatment” sensibilities.  The concept of humane treatment, vs animal cruelty is not really well defined as a general value.  On the one hand, it can be disturbing, but on the other hand, one doesn’t have to deal with some of the sentimental absurdities endured in the “advanced countries” related to people being more compassionate to a rodent then their fellow man. I remember my Hindi teacher in Wisconsin addressing that subject from an Indian perspective, “Most people have enough trouble getting food and shelter for themselves, so providing that for their animal’s comfort is a low priority.”  Yet I think that I and my housemate can afford that luxury.

Bangkok and the Beach

It had been chilly and damp in Hanoi since Christmas, and I hadn’t seen the sun in two months. What’s more, my visa was running out. I had moved from my host family around Christmas time to a house closer to my work, which had a lot more room. The problem was, I needed my landlord to sign a document and have it validated by the local authorities for my next visa, and she hadn’t been able to do this. Rather than risk having my visa expire in the country, I decided to do what is commonly known to many foreign workers in Vietnam – a Visa Run. Due to the immigration laws, a person must leave the country in order to get a new visa, and I had already done this in Cambodia the previous fall. Yet, I decided that it would be easier and cheaper to head out to Bangkok.

A few days before my visa was set to expire, I lifted off through the foggy air of Hanoi, and a short while later, landed in Bangkok. It was late, but I was travelling light, and was able to find a hotel in short order.

The next morning I took a walk around Sukhumvit, which is the major shopping area of the city. It was warm, much warmer than Hanoi. In addition to this, there was this bright blazing orb in the sky which I hadn’t seen in Hanoi and made me feel like a troll or vampire that had crawled out of a cave, “It burns us, it burns us!” Oh never mind – it was the sun. There were other strange and amazing things in this city which I didn’t normally experience in Cloud City. The buildings were wide and not shaped like hallways, the food was full of interesting flavors and smells, the streets were wide and lacking the continual horn-honking serenade. Motorcycle drivers practiced strange rituals – like stopping at red lights, and looking both ways before pulling out onto a street – weird!  What really blew me away was that people accepted my attempts to speak their language without looking at me as if I was a two headed reptile from Mars?!?! It all took some getting used to.

In a larger sense, Bangkok hadn’t changed in character since I last visited in 2004: big, cosmopolitan, gregarious and busy. After two days of sweating in the sun on the streets of this gregarious metropolis, I decided that I may as well get away from city existence while I had the chance, and head to the beach. Now Thailand is known for its crowded beach towns of Pattaya and Phuket, but I wanted something a little more quiet, a little more close and a little less meretricious. It wasn’t too hard, I checked out a few travel agents, and the next day – rode an air-conditioned train for three hours to a little town called Hua Hin.

Hua Hin was a vacation spot for Thai royalty in the early 20^th century, and I could see why. It’s a small town, fanned by strong sea breezes, and has a beach several kilometers long. I found a little hotel on a quiet alley that was about 60 yards from the beach.  For $27 a night, I had a big room, air conditioned, a balcony and large windows which let in the wonderful sunlight. Not bad, plus I could walk down to the beach whenever I wanted to.

During  those two days in Hua Hin, I spent most of my time relaxing on my balcony, wandering around town, and of course soaking up the sun and saltwater. The beach was fairly good, but it seemed that I was surrounded by mostly sun-burnt European retirees. Well – this did mean things stayed fairly low key, fine by me.

Eventually, the reality that I was actually on business to Thailand caught up with me, and I headed back to Bangkok to finish my visa paperwork. Soon, I had landed in Hanoi, which was still just as cool and misty as I had left it, and it was as if the only evidence that I had visited a warmer clime was my darker skin and lighter wallet.

I didn’t do too much else in Thailand besides the beach trip and the visa paperwork; but I did check out a few of the tailors, and it seems to me that the clothiers and shoe makers warrant another visit to Bangkok in the future. Too bad I can’t get paid as much in Thailand as I do in Vietnam.

Helmet? What for?

“Mr. Caleb! Can we go for walk?” the kid said to me between breaths – having just pounded down the stairs from his room to my door. The Kid is what I sometimes call him, well his name is Tom – he’s the nine-year-old son of my host family. In the past few weeks he’s been on a kick of going on walks with me, and since he had the entire week off from school – The Kid had become a regular presence at my door, badgering me to watch TV or go on walks with him.
How-about we go on a motorcycle ride across the river?” I suggested, “Go ask your dad for permission.” “OK!” he responded, then pounded back up the stairs shouting up to the next floor because waiting to reach the top of the stairs before asking to go on an excursion would just be too long to wait. Life’s too short for that kind of stuff.
About 20 seconds later, he came down with his helmet. Like most Vietnamese – he thinks of helmets as an inconvenience which serves no other purpose than traffic ticket avoidance. After checking to make sure he was actually wearing it, and actually had the strap put on, we were on our way through the hosts of drivers who seemed to have received their driver’s training from the insane clown posse.

The weather had cooled, 21 degrees C and sunny – November is a welcome relief from torrid July, and we headed for one of my more favorite thoroughfares over the Red River, the Long Bien Bridge. The Long Bien Bridge is a long creaky-looking cantilever structure of steel girders and rivets built by the French in the early twentieth century. It was bombed out several times by the Americans in the sixties, but was always repaired, and today it is open to trains with narrow motorcycle roadways flanking the tracks as well as concrete sidewalks for pedestrians.

The kid likes the bridge because midway out we can stop at a spot where the road widens and have some tea at a “roadside café”. Well, when I say roadside café, I mean a lady with a cooler full of drinks, and a line of seven-inch plastic stools placed on the road where one can sit with scooters flying by only arm’s length from your back. There is also a stairway we sometimes take down to an island in the river, full of farm fields – one of Hanoi’s few quiet areas left.

We circled off the main road up the ramp and onto the bridge. About a third of the way over, traffic quickly slowed to a crawl, there was a distraction across the tracks on the other roadway, a little crowd had formed. “What is that?” The Kid asked. At first I wasn’t sure, but within about three seconds we drew close enough for his question to be answered without me needing to speak. About 8 people were gathered around a crumpled form on the roadway. It was a man – or what once was a man, lying face down on the sidewalk, his legs in the road, his stomach on the raised steel rim that separated the sidewalk from the road. He was lying on his right arm and his left arm was out beside him, and of course his plastic cap of a helmet was lying a short distance away undamaged – like the kid, he apparently didn’t didn’t like to strap his helmet on.
“Stop!” The Kid shouted, looking very hard at the scene. “No, Tom,” I said, “People are already there.” “No stop, I want to look!” he whined even more loudly. “Yes I know, you want to look – which is exactly why I’m not stopping. Either we stop and help, or we get out of the way. We don’t just stop and stare.” I had my hands full trying to avoid all the people who were stopping to gawk.

“Was he dead?” Tom asked, thirty seconds later after a short pause – we were midway across the river. “Yea, I think so,” I told him and continued, “that right there is the reason why we wear helmets and put the strap around our necks.” Granted, a helmet doesn’t protect against internal injuries which the poor man could have certainly gotten – yet I’m sure that bare head on the concrete had something to do with the whole situation.

We drove around a bit, and parked in a field where we practiced spitting for distance into a small lake – he’s still not good a chucking a good loogie. I had to take him back after a little while so he could go to piano practice. The incident we had witnessed had clearly left his mind soon after, but it stuck with me for a little longer. I didn’t get much of a look, only about eight seconds of total “viewing time” of the whole affair. But I got a good enough look to see – he wasn’t moving, I don’t think he was breathing, blood trickling out his head and down his left elbow onto the pavement.
In Hanoi, you’ll see about an accident per week on average. I’ve seen plenty, but not one quite that severe nor quite that close. I’ve never had any serious bang-ups, and this is another reason why I do those strange things like look over my shoulder before I change lanes, use mirrors, stop at red lights, use the strap on my helmet, don’t text on the phone while driving, and turn my light on before it gets completely dark at night. All of this can strike a great deal of my fellow motorists as unneeded and even laughable. I can’t make anyone else do likewise – they’ll have to figure it out I guess.

Dill with your dog meat sir?

“Ong Tay, an com!” a small voice cried out from the other side of my door. One of the little girls that stays at our house while her mother works, she came down to tell me it was time to eat. Literally translated, it is something like, “Mr. westerner, come eat rice.” That is my name, since most people in this house can’t pronounce Caleb; “Tay” – west or westerner has to suffice. How refreshing!

It’s about 7:30 in the evening on a Saturday, Bing’s sister and brother-in-law have come over – as they so often do – for supper. It’s an impressive spread, dishes crowd the table, leaving little room for maneuvering – and I sit at my unofficially assigned spot next to Mr. Tang the master of the house. At first glance the selection of cuisine seems to be not too unfamiliar, rice, rice noodles, a saucer of pickled white and green onions, a plate of tangy lettuce. As for the meat, a pile of fish nuggets fried to a golden brown finish all seated on a bed of fried dill leaf, chives and basil; cuts of chicken with a salt and lemon dipping sauce; and a thinly sliced red meat I hadn’t seen before.

After the family gathered and sat down, we began to reduce the culinary archipelago, one chopstick click at a time. After pouring me a glass, Bing’s brother-in-law pointed to the red meat and said, “Hey, eat, it’s dock.” I wasn’t quite sure what he said it was on account of his accent so I verified, “You mean duck?” He shook his head, so I looked at him a bit blankly – not sure what sort of meat it was. Then a thought crossed my mind, “Oh, you mean dog?” I asked and followed it with a barking sound. He smiled and said, “Yes, good!”

Well, I knew this would happen sooner or later, so, I took a slice of juicy red dog meat, dipped it in a dark grey and cloudy fish sauce which smelled like death itself, and began to chew. I must confess, Lassie tasted great, much better than I expected, it was just a beef-like meat with a bit of a strong “gamey” flavor. I could feel the reproach of the millions of “Tay” pouring upon me at that moment. So naturally, I went for more dog meat to assuage my guilt. To be honest, I wasn’t feeling that bad, but perhaps I did feel a slight twinge for the poor pooch who “took one for the team”.

After polishing off the Pomeranian (or whatever breed it was), we had a delectable dessert of rambutan and mango – another benefit of living near the tropics, and I went back downstairs to my room. I have to consider myself fortunate to have a host family, and I would recommend it to anyone the first few months that one lives in a new country. Having a maid to cook such a kingly feast is something I couldn’t manage if I lived on my own, so I eat whatever is put on the table – even if it is dog meat with dill weed.

Finished CELTA & Opened Doors

For the past several months I had been working a few hours at an assortment of English centers teaching an assortment of ages from small children to adults. The hourly pay was good, but the number of hours I could get was low – and I also felt as if there were some skills lacking on my part.  One thing that I noticed was that the major institutions in the country all required something from its teachers beyond just a college degree. I found that even though I had a degree in Linguistics and Communications, this was still not sufficient. So in May, I made the decision to take an English teacher certification course known as CELTA; this would allow me to qualify for a more steady job at a more reputable institution.  I had again run into the problem of, “get the piece of paper,” which seems to be the barrier of all too many things. Despite making this decision in May, the training course in Hanoi didn’t start till mid September. In the mean time, I kept working at my current jobs and managed to make a visa trip into Cambodia as well.

Finally, during the second week of September, I started the course from Cambridge known as Certificate in English Language Teaching to Adults, or CELTA for short. I had heard a number of things about the course from people: that it was extremely hard, that it wasn’t very relevant, that it was very helpful, etc.; so I wasn’t sure what to expect. There were a total of 12 students, and two instructors, we worked eight hours a day, five days a week, for4 weeks. The course consisted of practice teaching to an actual class, watching instructors teach, planning lessons, listening to lectures and doing written assignments. The course was fairly tough – I had to drop all of my other commitments for the duration, but not more difficult than a full time class load at University during midterms. In the end I passed, and although I thought there were some areas that could have been better – I would say that it was a positive learning experience. What’s more, I got the piece of paper that I needed to unlock doors to employment across all of Asia – the Certificate. 

So the next week, two days after finishing CELTA, I was pounding the digital pavement looking for jobs in Hanoi. Now Hanoi is a rather crowded city with a not-so-nice climate, so why was I focusing on it? For one reason, I was already living there and didn’t want to take the hassle of uprooting myself and going somewhere new. For the second reason, not working during 4 weeks and paying for the course had left me quite broke. I really couldn’t have gone anywhere else if I had wanted to. 

As anticipated, the little paper key opened up three job interviews at different English centers well respected in the area. One Monday I was looking for work, the next Monday – I signed a full-time six-month contract at one of the top four teaching institutes in the city. Mission Accomplished. 

But of course (as the old cliché goes) this is not the finish – but only the beginning. Over the next six months I will try to work on improving my teaching skills in class; as well as work on some other projects such as my writing or videos. Although I’m not one to buy into the idea of the absolute necessity of Certifications, if it is required by a great number of employers, by all means – get the ticket to access the field.

Kids, Chaos and Crisis

The house I live in is so full of people, living, coming, staying and going – it’s hard to keep track of exactly who lives there and who is just visiting. I’m on the second floor, grandma and one of the maids live on the third, the couple who owns the house lives on the fourth floor as does their youngest son, as well as another maid. The oldest son has a room on the fifth floor, but he was only around for the summer and has since then left for university abroad. Additionally, we have a hand-full of little girls running around the house from time to time – their mothers are relatives, and they need a place to stay while both parents work. One of these little girls has a chubby face – her name slips my mind – and when I see her, she smiles and says the only English word she knows, “heyo, heyo” that’s about as good as she can do for a ‘hello’.
A little while ago I was sitting at the lunch table with grandma, the maids and Bing – she and her husband own the house. Little “chubby cheeks” was sitting on a low plastic stool next to the table, eating rice out of her bowl with a spoon. As we were eating we heard a little groan escape from the girl, and her plastic bowl hit the floor. This wasn’t too surprising to me, she sometimes doesn’t want to finish her food, hence the reason grandma keeps a large cooking chopstick handy to keep junior in line. The women looked down and by the surprised looks on their faces, I could tell this was different.
I jumped up from the table to see what the problem was, quickly I could tell this was no tantrum or pout – she was on the floor in her food. Her limbs were twitching her head was rolling around and her eyes were staring blankly ahead. Bing jumped up with a yell and picked up the child; but didn’t seem to sure what to do. It looked like a seizure to me, but my language skills in Vietnamese wouldn’t suffice. I motioned to lay the child down, I was afraid she might choke on any food in her mouth. Bing rushed her to grandma’s room and laid her on the floor, but on her back. This was not quite what I had in mind; I wanted to put the child on her stomach. I got a good look at her eyes, not rolled back, but the most blank thousand-yard stare I’d ever seen. The maids were talking in a rapid-fire rhythm; I could see their confusion and fear. I can’t say I knew exactly what to do myself.
Fortunately, Bing seemed to anticipate my next thought because she immediately picked the girl up again and shouted to her husband upstairs to get the motorcycle. We all went downstairs, the girl spat up food on the bottom steps. I wasn’t sure if that was good because she had cleared her windpipe, or had she not? They quickly hopped on the bike, child still writhing in Bing’s arms, and drove off.
I didn’t quite know what to do, so I decided to head back up and finish my lunch – what else could be done? No one else was hungry though; the maids asked me what was wrong, but I couldn’t really say much, I don’t know much about such things and I don’t know the language well enough to explain it if I did.
Three days later, I still wasn’t sure what had happened, nobody knew enough English to tell me clearly, and I certainly didn’t know enough Vietnamese. Yet, on that day, the child’s mother pushed aside the dining room door and at about knee height, around the door sill popped a familiar chubby face with big smile and a familiar, “Heyo, heyo, heyo!” Her mother prompted her, “Thank you for helping me,” but all junior could manage was, “tang khyew.” I was relieved – told her, “You’re welcome,” and to her mother, “I’m glad to see she’s OK.”
So, every once and a while I see her – running around the house, not eating her food at meal time, etc. When she looks up at me and smiles with a barrage of “heyo”s, they have a little more significance and charm.