I am really enjoying the time off to relax!! With such a small amount of hours the small children aren’t too bad either… I also found out I am teaching one to one on Monday for two or three hours which is going to be insanely boring and I have no idea what they level the student is or how old they are…. Because the school doesn’t seem to know either!
Found out from the school that I need to go to the hospital and have a medical check and have my teaching certificates stamped at the embassy and verified for the work permit. I was off that afternoon and so headed to the embassy at 1.30pm because I was told to go then, however when I got there (30 minutes later, 70,000 vnd down) they told me they were only open to the public at certain hours and I had to make an appointment. Annoyed did not cut it. I sat and ate ice cream in a little café and then came home again…!
The next day I taught body parts, which resulted in singing heads, shoulders, knees and toes countless times. The kids loved doing it really fast, and it was actually quite a fun class, but the novelty had worn off by the fourth lesson…. I got my time table and noticed that I wasn’t teaching Thursday or Friday afternoon either, and only doing two hours on Thursday morning. This is great in terms of trying to sort out going to the Embassy and getting the hospital appointment sorted, but not so great in terms of getting paid at the end of the month, as this month I still have to pay my rent, even though I’m only being paid a quarter of the wage…. next month will make up for it though.
After class myself and the other Western teachers went for Pho (chicken noodles) at the local street food café and he showed me the apartment I will be living in. It’s very spacious, and the rooms which have been cleaned are very nice…. The rooms which haven’t are not so nice… and the biggest room is currently taken up by furniture and a broken bed. The sofa was un-useable due to the amount of dirt on it, and the floor needs a good clean. However, there is a large TV and kitchen and air con in every room. I sent a polite email to my boss telling her the apartment was lovely…but could it please be cleaned?!
I was then rung by my boss to ask why I wasn’t in lesson at 2.15pm and remembered my classes had been changed (I usually always start at 2.30pm). Damn it! I left in such a rush that half way down the road I made my xe om driver stop, so I could run back to get my laptop, only to find that I had actually packed it. By the time I arrived I had completely missed my first class. Fail. I then also remembered I hadn’t booked my appointment with the embassy for the next day. I arrived at work very stressed. Luckily, I was told that the kids were too young to answer any questions so I should just sing songs with them the whole time…. At least I didn’t have to think!!
I finally had my first Vietnamese lesson and it blew my mind, learning the ten ways to address people and having to use it whenever you talk. To add to this, it changes, so for example “em” means “younger than you” for a girl, and “chi” is someone 10 years older than you or less who is female. So I say “Em chau chi” to say hello to someone who is female and older than me by less than 10 years. But if I talk to someone who is younger than I am, I then am no longer “em”, I become Chi. So I would say “Chi chau Em”. Then, to talk to a seven year old girl I say “Chi chau chau”. (Chau means hello to a person who is much younger than you…and yes it’s spelt the same!) And then for my male xe om drivers I say “Em chau Anh”. Confused yet? And this is just to say hello…. It also doesn’t help that she is not a teacher (one of the local Vietnamese volunteers is teaching me) and so sometimes goes too fast or offers too much information at once. At one point she added in how to say “also” and “as well” and then I got really confused!
She was not impressed that by the end of the lesson, when we had wrote all this down, that I couldn’t have the conversation with her off by heart… I told her I needed time to learn it! So… that’s my challenge for this week.
