Dung Lai!

Omg, it's been like, for ages since I blogged.  Huge apologies for the anticipation with which you must have checked every day, sometimes twice a day for news and updates.  I know how dedicated you all are.  How?  Because even Bridget Clay has now figured out how to comment, the day before she herself hits SE Asia to partay partay in true noodle and chopstick style.

Laura, I have lost you.  Whatever you're doing better be more interesting than me flying along a Vietnamese back road on a barely stable, two-wheeled vehicle.

Many of you have asked in private and highly confidential emails whether I am doing any work at all whilst I'm out here as all my blogs are about diving and mopeds.  I am, in fact, doing lots of work between the hours of 7am-6pm on weekdays.  I stop for cake at break and baguettes at lunch and today I had coffee which made me feel strange for the rest of the day.  However, it's not advisable to blog about your workplace in case the Professional Police catch up with you and sue you for slander and libel and stuff so I shall just ask you to assume the following three Universal Truths:

1. The children are angelic.
2. The class sizes are small.
3. The staff are friendly.

In teacher terms, this is paradise, so any other issues that may or may not arise are generally eclipsed by the blinding glow of all-round goodness and productiveness.

A small anecdote, however: today I worked out a very good deal.  I teach a very small year 8 Extra English class.  These students began the term very shy, but we all soon realised that we are kindred spirits in craziness.  I play them music to get them to talk to each other, they make hilarious mistakes when they misunderstand what's going on in their mainstream English lessons, they double check tenses with me, I correct them in their speaking and writing, and I make them draw pictures for all their vocabulary.  We have an overall lovely and pleasant time.  On Friday we are going to the library, all bakers dozen of us (including me) to pick a book to create a book blog on to practice our past tense.

Sitting in a taxi at the weekend, and having sat in taxis for the last five weeks, frustratingly indicating with my hands where I wanted the taxi driver to go, and on one occasion drawing a picture of the highway and indicating with arrows, I suddenly realised that I was completely neglecting an untapped resource of Vietnamese children who can actually help me to do something about this for free.  So today, I practiced my following key phrases (spelled phonetically) with my Extra English kiddies :

- Well fi - turn right
- Well ji - turn left
- Dee tang - straight on
- Cam uhn - thank you
- Shin ciao - hello
- Sin loi - sorry

And learnt 'Yung lai' - stop!  It's actually spelled 'Dung lai' or something like that, but I will not remember it unless I internalise it in a visual way.  They laughed at my pronunciation, but I don't know if this is a good thing or not.  I've told them that they will have to test me every week like I test them.  The girls (who love to mark each other in coloured pens) seem delighted by this.

In tourist news, I spent my Saturday morning at the Cu Chi Tunnels a little outside Saigon.  This is where the clever Viet Cong hid from American soldiers during the war: in a series of tiny, claustrophobic tunnels with occasional cooking, sleeping and hospital chambers.  Even though it is panic-attack inducing to scramble through them, it was really quite a sensible idea at the time because the earth that the tunnels are dug into is predominantly clay so the more the Americans bombed the area, the harder and more protective the soil became to the people in the tunnels.

As an aside, there are a lot of sensible things that the Vietnamese do: they are really quite a sensible peoples. For example, I got my hair cut the other day and instead of having those horrible chair-basins where you end up with a dislocated spine because you have to lean your head back for ages whilst the hairdresser shampoos you, the Vietnamese have beds that lead into basins so you're lying down whilst your hair is being washed and it doesn't hurt at all!  Genius!  Also, in Vietnam, if you're on your moped and it starts to rain (it does this a lot), instead of motoring on because they're British and think this is the only possible option, they simple pull over onto the side of the highway in droves, unpack their big plastic ponchos, put them on, and then carry on.  I watched them enviously on Tuesday as my new blue shirt from the wonderful Saigon Cheap Square Market began to bleed into my tan trousers, but I didn't have the balls to pull over on the highway.  I barely have the balls to ride on the highway.  I only get through it by drifting around very slowly and repeating to myself, 'They can see you.  They know what they're doing.  They can see you.'  It's comforting.

Anyway, there are some very amusing photos on Facebook of me on a tank, and of me in a tunnel looking through my legs and being photographed by a good looking Chilean boy.  Alas and alack, none of these photos were taken by me so I can't post them on here.

I will, however, endeavour to steal some of these from my new pals to include post-blog publication.  I'd like to promise some moped-in-action photos, but that would be definite suicide.  All and both hands must stay fixed on the controls at all point, with knuckles turning slowly white through tension and fear.