I didn’t get much sleep last night, again, because of the Karaoke that plays constantly from about 7.00pm until 1.00am every night and is ridiculously loud and sounds like a dying cat!
I spent the morning being a tourist and taking pictures of the road which I now call home and my new house. It’s hard to imagine that I will be here for the next six months and that I am living on the other side of the world to everything I once knew… I am living in My Dinh, just outside of Cau Giay, one of the outer suburbs of Hanoi, about 30 minutes’ drive from the centre. So there’s very few other expats here except the ones on the program, and no tourists.
I was meant to be met at 2.00pm for my orientation of the teaching program but the girl didn’t arrive until 2.45pm. She was lovely, but I would soon learn that this sort of thing is typical in Vietnam and that organisation isn’t a strong point for the country! She had thought I was meant to be meeting her somewhere else entirely.
She went through the Do’s and Don’ts of life in Vietnam and told me about the company who I was being placed by, and the projects which they run. They have four main projects, Education, Volunteering, Empowering Women, and Climate Change.
They have set up various projects for example a young people’s empowerment project (where young people help disadvantaged people within their community), building new schools, Western teachers volunteering in rural areas, (This is different to the teaching I am doing), Sports with young people and a micro finance project. Here they allow women to take out small loans (smaller than banks will give) and pay back minimum interest in order to set up their own projects/ businesses and build their independence. This can be done with the whole family, including the husbands. They also work with community groups to increase sustainable development efforts within the country, so they can find solutions to lower the amount of pollution created each year.
I was really interested in this because of my background in Community Drama and Youth Work. When I told her she offered for me to get involved, helping to train the young people they work with on how to facilitate and deliver workshops etc. That’s the great thing about teaching in Vietnam, there’s always plenty to get involved with and lots of opportunity!
I had my first Vietnamese lesson today, with basic phrases, some grammar and numbers 1-1000. Numbers is really easy because they basically just say it how it sounds, for example once you know 1-10, you can then say 23 (2 and 3) and 45 (4 and 5). You then just need to know 100, 1000, and 100,000. Then you can say 147 (one hundred, forty and seven) etc. For multiples of ten you say the number plus zero, e.g. 2 and 0 (20).
She said my pronunciation was very good and I might be able to get free Vietnamese lessons once a week from the volunteers, which will be awesome. She is also going to take me to a shop to get a good language book for learning Vietnamese. I was supposed to get free Vietnamese lessons included in the teaching program which I paid over $1000 US to do, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen…
After my Vietnamese lessons my housemates and I went for coffee and tried to buy ear plugs but apparently the shops by me didn’t sell them. They understood what we meant but all said “No, cotton wool!” I didn’t fancy sticking cotton wool in my ears…
I also witnessed Vietnamese rush hour traffic, which is hilarious, the traffic doesn’t move. I tried to capture this on my camera but it’s really hard to understand how much traffic there is, the photos just can’t do it justice!
I didn’t get much sleep last night, again, because of the Karaoke that plays constantly from about 7.00pm until 1.00am every night and is ridiculously loud and sounds like a dying cat!
I spent the morning being a tourist and taking pictures of the road which I now call home and my new house. It’s hard to imagine that I will be here for the next six months and that I am living on the other side of the world to everything I once knew… I am living in My Dinh, just outside of Cau Giay, one of the outer suburbs of Hanoi, about 30 minutes’ drive from the centre. So there’s very few other expats here except the ones on the program, and no tourists.
I was meant to be met at 2.00pm for my orientation of the teaching program but the girl didn’t arrive until 2.45pm. She was lovely, but I would soon learn that this sort of thing is typical in Vietnam and that organisation isn’t a strong point for the country! She had thought I was meant to be meeting her somewhere else entirely.
She went through the Do’s and Don’ts of life in Vietnam and told me about the company who I was being placed by, and the projects which they run. They have four main projects, Education, Volunteering, Empowering Women, and Climate Change.
They have set up various projects for example a young people’s empowerment project (where young people help disadvantaged people within their community), building new schools, Western teachers volunteering in rural areas, (This is different to the teaching I am doing), Sports with young people and a micro finance project. Here they allow women to take out small loans (smaller than banks will give) and pay back minimum interest in order to set up their own projects/ businesses and build their independence. This can be done with the whole family, including the husbands. They also work with community groups to increase sustainable development efforts within the country, so they can find solutions to lower the amount of pollution created each year.
I was really interested in this because of my background in Community Drama and Youth Work. When I told her she offered for me to get involved, helping to train the young people they work with on how to facilitate and deliver workshops etc. That’s the great thing about teaching in Vietnam, there’s always plenty to get involved with and lots of opportunity!
I had my first Vietnamese lesson today, with basic phrases, some grammar and numbers 1-1000. Numbers is really easy because they basically just say it how it sounds, for example once you know 1-10, you can then say 23 (2 and 3) and 45 (4 and 5). You then just need to know 100, 1000, and 100,000. Then you can say 147 (one hundred, forty and seven) etc. For multiples of ten you say the number plus zero, e.g. 2 and 0 (20).
She said my pronunciation was very good and I might be able to get free Vietnamese lessons once a week from the volunteers, which will be awesome. She is also going to take me to a shop to get a good language book for learning Vietnamese. I was supposed to get free Vietnamese lessons included in the teaching program which I paid over $1000 US to do, but it doesn’t look like that is going to happen…
After my Vietnamese lessons my housemates and I went for coffee and tried to buy ear plugs but apparently the shops by me didn’t sell them. They understood what we meant but all said “No, cotton wool!” I didn’t fancy sticking cotton wool in my ears…
I also witnessed Vietnamese rush hour traffic, which is hilarious, the traffic doesn’t move. I tried to capture this on my camera but it’s really hard to understand how much traffic there is, the photos just can’t do it justice!
Over coffee one of the guys and I decided to take a trip away because we’ve found out we’re not teaching until Monday, and don’t have the school orientation until this Friday afternoon. Therefore we’re taking a trip to Mai Chai, which is a small tribal village, in the middle of an idyllic valley. It’s getting more popular as a tourist site but is widely untouched by tourism and still my favourite place in Vietnam. It really is beautiful. We’re going for three days, two nights, it’s a three hour bus journey, and we get all our transport, food, accommodation tour guide and bicycle hire while we are there for $90, which isn’t bad, with our own private room. One thing I’ve learnt very quickly, Vietnam is cheap as chips!
Over coffee one of the guys and I decided to take a trip away because we’ve found out we’re not teaching until Monday, and don’t have the school orientation until this Friday afternoon. Therefore we’re taking a trip to Mai Chai, which is a small tribal village, in the middle of an idyllic valley. It’s getting more popular as a tourist site but is widely untouched by tourism and still my favourite place in Vietnam. It really is beautiful. We’re going for three days, two nights, it’s a three hour bus journey, and we get all our transport, food, accommodation tour guide and bicycle hire while we are there for $90, which isn’t bad, with our own private room. One thing I’ve learnt very quickly, Vietnam is cheap as chips!
