The sounds and backward tastes of Siagon.

As our stay continues in the heart of Vietnam and its fast-paced city living we are learning to read the city through our additional senses which may not be as immediately obvious as those loud, boastful senses of vision and smell.
The very first auditory delight that Saigon offered our ears was at our first guest-house and appeared as a proud cockerel, who shouted its war cry at 5am every morning. Not an overly unpleasant sound to wake to until I add the omitted detail that this particular cockerel had developed a cry which sounded perfectly fine and proud until the end note which concluded with an abrupt squark that must be exactly reminiscent of the sound of a bird being strangled. Every morning for that first week we were subjected to an audio show of fowl torture in which we found ourselves urging on the evil hands of strangulation. Needless to say that if I ever meet that cock again I’ll kill it.
The heavy thrum of thousands of motorbikes, the shouts of street sellers and the shouts of ‘Hello!’ from small children urged on by eager grandparents combine together to make up the distinctive sound that is our current Saigon but this week our soundtrack changed into a strange psychedelic affair.
Following the Christmas party at work, something Tim and I felt was well over due after 2 weeks at work, once our hangovers had cleared Tim quickly realised all was not well, specifically him. Within 24 hours we realised that we had both contracted our first mysterious Vietnamese illness. Something we were assured would be a regular occurrence. I was most pleased to discover my illness through the act of vomiting halfway through a lesson. Thankfully I managed to get out of the classroom before it happened and ruined their carefully designed Christmas card, though personally I think it may have been an improvement. For a day or so Tim and I delighted in the many backwards Vietnam tastes we were subjected to and the sound of non-stop Star Movies, which did its upmost to drive us insane.
As we both tried to sleep in the intermittent hot and cold that the fan provided new sounds wafted into our room. The sounds of pipes and soft drums at first seemed vaguely melodic and interspersed themselves into our respective dreams, making them twist and turn around the music into mostly odd and sometimes disturbing places. This didn’t last long as we were awoken repeatedly whilst the ‘musicians’ delighted us with strange bursts of music with large sections of silence during which I presume the band was staring curiously at their instruments trying to work out what the hell to do with them. If it hadn’t started at 11am and laboured its way through to 8am then we would have probably mistaken them for a group of children who were eagerly trying to form a pop band, if we can assume that the type of music in which instruments aren’t played correctly with lots of large sections of silence is popular with the youth of Vietnam.
I’m not sure if I felt guilty when we later found out that this probably wasn’t a demonstration of musical ability but an emotional outpouring of distress at a Vietnamese funeral, as by this time the ordeal had being going on for 4 days. If the idea was to make any lingering spirit or presence pass over eagerly and serenely to the other side then I can only assume that the mission was accomplished.
PS. We both feel much better.

HAPPY CHRISTMAS
xx

Teaching English as a Foreign Language

Ah yes, Mui Ne. Before we entered into the pressure of actually being teachers, and a year of noise and pollution in Saigon, this delightful km long stretch of prime Vietnam beach was a welcome time to relax and prepare. Those hanging palm trees and rhythmic waves now seem a thing of the distant past now we have been thrown head first into teaching.
It gets easier I’m told, but a little perspective may help you understand our first weekend. When we were training, we were expected to teach about 45 minutes every other day. We had lectures in the morning and lessons to teach or observe in the afternoon. I would say, trying to get top marks, pass and be seen as a worthy teacher, for those 45 minutes most of the trainee teachers would spend between 1 and 3 hours preparing (maybe more as the panic of how little grammar one actually knows sets in). At the end of the course most of us were confident we could take on a class, shut the door and get on with some about standard lessons.
A gap of maybe three months before this teaching job started has not exactly helped me with my teaching skills. We got back from Mui Ne, and were presented with a list of classes. Each lesson will be 2 hours long and on our first weekend we both had 4 lessons on Saturday, and 4 on Sunday. This with just a Friday to prepare.
Let’s do a quick bit of arithmetic – so I’ll assume my planning skills aren’t as good as they were at end of my course. 3 hours to plan a 45 minute lesson! Well I’ll stick with 3 hours for a 2 hour lesson. So 4 X 3 X 2 = 24. Yes 24 hours of planning and I was setting out to do this at 10am on the Friday. Ah, a little problem.
Basically some corners have been cut, and some points in my lessons have been slightly below par. It was in fact Chaos at times. Children screaming, shouting, fighting and heaven knows what else, while I sift through my scribbled notes, giving a less than confident ‘hmmmmm, hang on guys’ to my young learners.
Phew, Christie and I both made it somehow. And already I feel like I’ve learnt a lot and will do a better job this weekend. Plus I’ve had much more time to plan. I’ve also done a couple of lessons in the week, of which the last one I ended feeling like those teenagers (oh yes, happy happy teenagers) had actually learnt something. Funnily enough, before they learnt something, I had to learn something – let’s be honest, for those people who have never studied languages, who knows what the Third Conditional is? I do now, which is a good job, as apparently I am an English teacher.

Red sand dunes, white sand dunes and the elusive red and white sand dunes.

Last week Tim and I boarded a train to Mui Ne, a beach resort close enough to Saigon for our needs and only a little further than some of the less idyllic beaches along the way and idyll was indeed what we opted for. After trundling through Vietnamese countryside we arrived at our destination to be greeted by a vomit of rain from the clouds and an energetic young taxi driver who continually nodded and smiled as he tried to tug Tim’s guitar in the direction of his chariot. We succumbed to his friendly hassling and followed him as he ran off into the rain.
We drove the 22km through Phan Thiet, which is the nearest town, and slowly the heavens showed pity on us and the rain began to ease to reveal the calm beauty of the little settlement by the coast. We spent 6 days in Mui Ne, which rolled by in a steady wave of sun, sea and tiring ourselves out by doing nothing.
On the second day we decided to hire motorbikes for a couple of days and so entered the stabs of fear that make all good holidays. I soon realised that the motorbike and I were not going to be immediate friends as firstly I struggled to find how to turn the thing on, how to keep it uprights during the attempts and how to stop my helmet sliding forward over my eyes rendering me blind on the side of a motorbike clogged street, though thankfully this did mean that I was saved having the meet the eyes of the amused Vietnamese who had draped themselves over their bikes for a rest, flaunting their close human-motorbike relationship. Eventually we set off and immersed ourselves into Vietnamese traffic, which we had been told had very few rules apart from look out for the person ahead and dodge them at all costs. Unfortunately for Tim that person was me quite a lot of the time.
After pulling quite a crowd of curious onlookers when we had stopped for petrol and not been able to undo the seat lock to access the fuel hole thing, where you put the fuel, we set off to explore the village of Mui Ne and find the ‘fairy stream’, which was a stream running through dunes with a covering of burnt orange-red sand which at the bottom gave way to pale white. As we made our way through the village, dodging chickens, school-children, negotiating a round-a-bout and gritting our teeth as a bus charged towards us on our side of the road blaring its horn furiously to let us know that it was over-taking and presumably to apologise for being on the wrong side of the road, we were unable to locate our destination on the first attempt and so dedicated ourselves to the aim of trying not to look so incompetent and not getting ourselves killed.
On the second Tim and Christie go biking trip we set off in the opposite direction to find two towers set on top of a hill, promising great views along the coast. Feeling slightly less nauseous than the first trip we arrived at our destination in the glare of the mid-day sun. We dutifully paid the entrance fee and the additional foreigners tax, which they were calling bike parking, and set off up a dirt track. The towers were old, that’s for sure and the views were indeed impressive but continuing further up the hill we found a masterpiece of a monument in a clearing surrounded by overgrown bushes and trees. It towered over us in dusty pink and yellow showing the beautific scene of an asian family basking in the glory of their socialist government, with the small boy and his father holding onto the large guns in their hands, ready and willing to fight off any threat to the system. It was glorious to behold.
Later in the day we embarked on the second attempt to find Fairy Stream we found ourselves at the red sand-dunes. Although not our original destination they provided us with adequate entertainment as we slid down the dunes on a piece of plastic, what more could you want.
For our last three days we decided to live the romantic beach dream and moved into a bungalow on the beach, which was only slightly marred by my ongoing war with the mosquito community. Needless to say I lost and my resulting battle wounds looked like I had contracted a serious skin disease.
Having returned our bikes to their owners and breathing a sigh of relief that it didn’t enter their heads to check for any scratches or dents that might have occurred during the many times I dropped the bike and I tried to alight, we booked on a jeep tour to take us to the white sand-dunes. Luckily the tour included a stop at the Fairy Stream and so on our third attempt we managed to find it, not after getting a little bit more lost as the our driver was less a tour guide and more just a man who pointed in the general direction from the road. We finally found the entrance guarded by a Vietnamese boy, who had learnt three important things in English. Firstly ‘deep water and dangerous rocks’ followed by ‘I guide you’ as he tried to lead us off. When he we refused he pulled out the last resort of ‘You give me money anyway’. We managed to avoid the deep water and dangerous rocks in the slow moving, shallow water and found our way to the waterfall at the end, with not more trolls to pay taxes to.
We then stopped at a few more tourists attractions on the way and eventually arrived at the white sand dunes, where we set off determinedly to find our Laurence of Arabia moment. The white sand-dunes were surprisingly different in that they were white instead of red. They were indeed beautiful yet I felt a little colour-blind déjà vous. We visited the red sand dunes again on our way back to ensure that we weren’t suffering from red sand withdrawal and to watch the sunset. This last sand experience was slightly marred by the increased wind which coated us in a reasonably thick layer of red sand that took quite alot of skin off during the removal process later.
So to summarise we saw alot of sand, mostly in dune form, in the option of two colours. They were nice, we slid down some.
We got the train back to Saigon in preparation for our first day at work, which is a story for another day.

Oooh look more loveliness

Look at the loveliness

I'm here too

Christie has kicked off this blog site with a drive that reflects her attitude to most things. I have done a very similar thing. My attitude is some whet less, motivated you could say, or perhaps considerate for those who may be concerned of my well being. Luckily as Christie is so motivated, I have hopefully by default had reassurance past to those worried parties (hi Mum) through her informative, and hugely entertaining entries.

It is time I wrote something because, honestly, I’m here too, and I have opinions and emotions as well. Perhaps I will lack the wit and concise imagery Christie carries, but I will take opportunities where available to poke fun at the things I see and the people at home.

So much to say, and from so little time. Well, I can write ‘so much to say’, but when it comes to the part of saying it, I find I’m unsure what to say, where to start, and in fact what it is I’ve been doing. Hmmm – right, Ho Chi Minh City - that’s the thing. Firstly, it’s bigger than Exeter. Really. Compared to Exeter I would say it is, bigger. With this insightful fact, you may now be unsurprised when I also let you know it is busier than Exeter also. Whoa! I mean much busier. Now this is quite a valid statement I’m making, but perhaps this is hard to comprehend if you haven’t been to Exeter. I guess these points are always going to be relative to something, so when I think ‘WOW, this is a busy place’, anyone sat in the centre of Cairo maybe thinking, ‘Well, I’ve been to Saigon and I thought it was quite quaint’. I don’t even really care, I seem to be writing any old thing now just to have something on this bloomin’ blog.

So it’s big and busy, got it? It also crazy. Unlike other cities I’ve been to, this one has a ratio of about 1 car to every 20 billion mopeds. They are crazy and follow the rules of the road in so much as there appears to be none. It makes for a constant streaming, beeping, swerving road for every street, everywhere. The bikes all park on the pavements (of which there seem to be about 10 complete ones), and if it’s not bikes it’s mini food stools and seating, so there is nowhere to walk but within the beeping, swerving crazy rule-less bikes. Crazy.

These bikes and noise are the first thing that hits you in the city. They make the city as well. The bike seems to be one of the most important things to all locals. It seems they are an extension to the inhabitants body, and as essential as the air you breath, which, it is fair to say, in Ho Chi Minh city is not a lot thanks to these bikes and there heavy fumes.

So, as a writer it is clear I ramble. So far we have big, busy, bikes and crazy. I haven’t said anything and I certainly don’t intend on boring you or myself any further right now. However, let me stress that like Christie I am here. We are both settling in and enjoying things. We start teaching in a week, but before that, a trip to the beach is in order. You can trust Christie will update you on the happenings at the beach, and I will at some point right some incoherent waffle about something, sometime.

The trials of being so sweet.

Having obviously noticed that Tim’s vascular system is a river of evil the mosquitoes of Vietnam have singled me out for their car-bombing attack, for some strange reason specifically targeting my feet and ankles. The result being that my right foot looks like I’m the latest victim of the bubonic plague. At least it’s not rabies, thought it may well be very localised bouts of malaria. They do itch and I’m sure that’s a symptom.

Although we are still in semi-holiday mode and it is permitted to increase your alcohol content on such occasions it is still a worrying state of affairs when beer costs the same as water and you are determined to immerse yourself in the life of the city, regardless of the fumes. Tim and I have spent many a happy dusk watching the city transform from dusty vibrancy to neon shouts from plastic deckchairs on the pavement with aforementioned beer in hand. The natural light begins to dim slightly about 5.30pm, hovers for 20 minutes and then seemingly plunge headfirst into darkness, when the strain is taken on my the street-lights. With the night is brought some semblance of calm, well the best HCMC in the centre of the tourist area can offer, and a slight breeze to make watching the world go by on a dirty street a very pleasant pursuit indeed. As in the day the street vendors are an indominatable force and we have been debating their probable hierarchy since arrival. As soon as they lay eyes on a Western face, as in many other places in the world where tourist numbers are high but can do nothing to match the population of the poor, you are offered everything for the normal and the expected; such as cigarettes, sunglasses and Vietnamese trinkets to the slightly strange; such as dried squid, which look uncannily like saline drips and photocopied editions of many English to the bizarre; portable height and weight machines attached to wheelchair wheels, so that fat Westerners can be appalled at their excess.

The trials and tribulations of eating are getting easier and we no longer feel as if we are paying 3 times the price of locals for simple street fare, just about twice the price now. As we begin to step out of the tourist areas and get a motorbike – which seems to be a passport to less hassle from street-vendors and motorbike taxis (obviously), we should work out soon how much strange meat is actually worth in this town.

At some point maybe we’ll teach an English lesson.