Anyway, good news. I found a job! Yup, that's right, as we speak, I'm working as a – drumbeat – English teacher in the beautiful capital of Vietnam, Hanoi. Have to dress up nicely everyday, go into a private language school, stand in front of a dozen or more eager, yet awfully shy Vietnamese and listen to myself speak for a hour or and a half or more. I have been doing this for a week.
It’s actually pretty good fun. Different students respond to different approaches, but one always works and that’s fear. It feels good to be feared. Just kidding. Some kids do the darnest things, but most of the time they’re pretty cool. I’m teaching different proficiency levels and to different ages. Some classes are 11-year olds that require a lot of work, others are mid twenties to thirties and quite eager to learn.
Normal questions I get are: what is aims? How do you spell probably? Where are you from? Do you have girlfriend? We talk about modal verbs, pronouns, articles, pronunciation, gerunds, some stuff I never heard of. Pretty impressive learning material. They don’t know that sometimes I don’t know what the hell I am talking about. But hey, you have to learn quick isn’t? And you can always say: how do you think you spell that word?
It's a great way to earn money. It's a fun, though tiring job – it's been a while since I was working properly, heh.
Anyway, just a quick recap of my previous travels. After slowly heading northwards, and stopping in such magical places such as Dalat, Danang and Hue, we (me and my Dutch friend Wai) arrived in Hanoi. Wai soon had to leave for back home. After a quick visit to that fantastic place called Halong Bay I checked into a cheap guesthouse and locked myself in a hotel room. Hour after hour I was busy sending out resumes, job applications and cover letters. To break monotony I went out and visited one of the many museum's around town.
Luckily an old travel friend of mine helped me battle the loneliness and boredom. Biking buddy Britton showed up after doing the same Vietnam route, only a couple of days later. Many bottles of beer Hanoi later I woke up one day with a job interview.
Unfortunately my camera hasn’t been fixed. Apparently something is seriously wrong with an internal component (prisma? prism? Vietnamese accent’s are sometimes confusing) and the friendly repairman at the official Canon repair centre tried to be helpful and suggested that when I would go back home to Ha Lan (Holland) I should try to hand it in for a replacement. Warranty only works within the country that I bought it. Though, he added joyfully, picture quality has not been affected! That’s real swell pal, but that kite is not going fly for the foreseeable future.
It does mean I can take pictures; I just have to work harder to get a photo that’s showable.
I’m busy trying to settle down here for a bit. Looking for a new place to stay, meeting new people, getting my visa sorted out. Also, I rented a cheap motorbike to get around. Hanoi is not as busy as Saigon, traffic wise, but it’s still quite a challenge sometimes. There’re no road rules, the bigger the means of transportation the more right of way you have. I’ve been taught three rules to successfully navigate the narrow and cluttered streets. One, treat traffic in Vietnam like a river: it flows around obstacles at a steady pace. Second, worry about everything you can see, in front of you and in your peripheral vision; everything that happens behind is none of your concern. And the last rule, when crossing a road or an intersection use “human shields” in the form of other motorbike drivers or cars who are doing the same thing to shield you from oncoming traffic.
Some of the pictures I uploaded are courtesy of Wai, because of the problems with my camera mentioned before. That’s all for today. Hopefully I’ll be able to upload a little bit more regularly when things have quieted down. Gotta go now, classes are waiting.
