Vietnam Ch 3
The little things are a
challenge
Mr Jerry was clothed in his Shelton work attire, and was perched on a stool, which looked too small to take his weight. His bronze, perfectly shaved head gleamed in the light from the kitchen window, on a bright Sunday afternoon.
“Good Morning Giles, how are you today?” he said, still rather husky in voice.
“Very well thank you, and you?” I replied.
“I’m fine, I’m fine.”, he said a little dramatically.
Without further ado, he commenced with his induction. He proceeded to give me a very brief overview of what materials they used at Shelton for teaching the students at the Centre.
I already saw from my class observations the day before that the teachers used Story Central, a “6 level primary program in American English”. He showed me this on his computer and sent me the link so that I could download them.
I realised then that I did, in fact, need a laptop, and couldn’t get by using my iPad, as I’d hoped.
“Damn”, I thought to myself “more money to spend out on”.
My bank account was running very low (once again) having not saved up as much money as I would have liked in New Zealand. I did manage to scrape together two and a half thousand NZ dollars before my visa ran out. (This was from working on kiwi fruit farms.) But, I’d blown through most of that money on my one month’s travel island hopping around The Philippines.
Funnily enough, Mr Jerry himself was Filipino, originally from Manila. He had coffee coloured skin and big round eyes. As I sat there next to my new boss on the top floor of the Queen Hotel, listening to his camp, Americanised English, I was reminded that I was down to my last $5-600.
“Sorry, just thinking about accommodation, am I supposed to stay at this hotel during my employment?” I asked, “and also, how much is it per month? (I already heard from the receptionist it was 6million Dong, but I wanted to see what he said).
“Oh, do you not like it here Giles?” he asked with a hint of sarcasm.
“No it’s not that, I like it, I just wasn’t sure what the deal was living here.”
“Well it’s a good price at 6million a month, we get a reduced rate through working for Shelton, and we’re only 5minutes taxi from the Centre… But it’s up to you! You can talk with Mr Duc about finding somewhere else.” he said, with an air of arrogance.
“Mr Duc…?” I wondered to myself. I’d heard the name used before by Micah. He told me Mr Duc was my “local contact”. Well, he hadn’t made contact with me yet, so I didn’t hold out much hope for him.
As was also the case with Mr Jerry. He clearly thought me an idiot for even considering an alternative place to live. But the thing was, I had no clue of how much different sorts of accommodation would cost in Ha Long Bay. So I wanted to get some idea of what options I had, and see if I could save on money where possible. By the sounds of it though, I wasn’t going to get much assistance with this from him, so I let him go on with his briefing.
Mr Jerry continued by showing me how to create an account. I would then be able to give the feedback I would need to send off after each class. Here, I could also see a timetable of lessons.
To begin with I had one lesson on Wednesday at 7:30pm – 9pm. The students of this class were 13-14year olds. That was scary. Then I had nothing until Saturday, when suddenly I had three classes, and then two on Sunday… That was even more scary.
“Well at least I’ll have time in the week to prepare lesson plans…” I thought hopefully.
Mr Jerry, in seeing my reaction to my classes, said “I realise you don’t have many hours but I’ll put you in the schools as soon as we get your certified documents, police check, etcetera, etcetera.”
It seemed like he thought I was upset that I didn’t have enough hours. He’d totally got the wrong end of the stick, for I felt quite the opposite. I was happy to stay working at the Centre with less hours until I became more confident with what the hell I was doing. I didn’t enlighten him on this matter though, not wanting to seem unambitious.
He said I would need to pick up the rest of the range of Story Central books at some point. He wasn’t fussed when I picked them up; he’d luckily stumbled upon the few books that I would need for my current classes at the Centre the day before.
The last thing Mr Jerry showed me were examples of lesson plans. These contained exactly what was going to happen in the lesson. At the top of the plans were the Lesson Objectives, together with a short list of the vocabulary the students would learn or go over. Then a list of materials needed for the class, such as: the student exercise books, TV, Laptop. (Pretty obvious stuff)
The framework was generally a 5-10minute warm up, a Review of the previous lesson/lessons, introduction of a New Topic/New Vocab, Activities, and a “Cool down”, which seemed like a summary of what they’d learned plus setting the home work.
By the end of the briefing, as he closed his Macbook and eased his weight with some effort off from the stall, he told me I had one more class to observe at 3pm that afternoon. It was with Abi, the other South African girl I’d met fleetingly the other day.
I asked Mr Jerry if he had any plans for the rest of the weekend. This was the opportunity he was waiting for to tell me how busy he was with work, one thing and another, and now it seemed he’d decided to say how he still was really ill.
The vibe I got from him was gradually making me feel less confident in his ability. Namely, his lack of responsibility. From what I’d seen so far, he had a tendency to complain about things as though no issues were for him to deal with but other people or other things were the problem. Well… the fact was, he was the Head Teacher of two Centres in the area. So this was a little unnerving.
He’d also shown me this from my first awkward meeting with him, when I’d caught him in his shorts while he was meant to be welcoming me to the area. His excuse was that he was too unwell… as he stood there doing his laundry…
I picked up my iPad and notebook, and we both entered the lift in the middle of the kitchen to go down to our respective rooms. There was already an anxious feeling in my stomach due to the anticipation of my upcoming classes and what I would need to do to prepare.
We parted ways as Mr Jerry exited the lift onto the fourth floor. We wished each other a good day as the doors closed, leaving me to descend to the floor below and to room number 17. This ensuite hotel room was to be my current home. I took off my shoes and laid down on the small double bed contemplating what I’d learned from my meeting…
I needed to buy a laptop. This, I realised, was top of the list of things to do to prepare for my upcoming lessons. So I opened Google Maps and searched for places in the area selling computers.
The search came up with, what looked like two main stores of a company chain, and two smaller independently run stores. I thought it safer to start at the bigger stores thinking they should generally be more reliable, hopefully also obtaining some insurance for the first few months if there was any problems.
Looking at where the stores were in relation to the Centre, I saw thankfully it would only be a short walk. They were both situated within 5-10minutes walk of each other and could be found on a street just off from the normal way I would journey home. I therefore decided to pay a visit after my observation of Abi at 4:30pm. (The opening times said the stores stayed open until 8pm!)
I had enough time to amble along to the Centre, again taking in the sights, smells, and atmosphere of my new home town.
Ha Long Bay Marina
Arriving at the Centre, I walked up the stairs to the reception area to find a host of children awaiting their lessons. Some of them I remembered from the day before. It seemed these children had another class over the weekend, which meant they had two, one and a half hour lessons on their days off from school…
These children had a hectic schooling schedule.
Waving and replying “hello!” to the children, I walked up to the classroom doors to see if Abi was there. Sat at a table beside the whiteboard, typing away on the laptop, was a girl with frizzy, chestnut coloured hair, half of which was held up in a bun, while the rest fell down her back. She had on the same green and white Shelton polo shirt that all staff wore.
I knocked a happy little tune on the door. She noticed me looking through the window, smiled and gave a light wave. I could then see properly her pale skinned, freckly complexion and her plain black glasses, which gave her the look of the stereotypical teacher.
“Hi Abi!” I said enthusiastically, as I entered the classroom and walked over to her.
“Hi Giles, how are you?” she said, with just a hint of a South African accent.
“I’m settling in thank you. I stopped by the marina on my walk here: it’s pretty impressive isn’t it. With those huge rocks jutting out of the sea and the colourful wooden boats on the water.
“Yes, it’s a beautiful place to live”, she agreed nodding and smiling. I got the feeling that these words came out rather half-hearted, as though she wanted to say “yes, it is beautiful, but…”
“So how long have you been working here Abi?” I asked.
“Over 9 months now.. so not long until I finish my contract…”
As she said this, though she tried to hide it, her eyes and her energy too, dropped down for a moment to her feet. This behaviour gave away why it was she half-heartedly agreed with me. It seemed like she’d had enough of this place and was looking forward to moving on.
I guessed she still had 3 months left of her contract here (making up to a year), and yet it appeared she was already counting the days. I wondered why that would be…
I was about to gently ask how she had found it working and living in Ha Long, but at that moment the classroom door burst open, and in clattered Abi’s group of students.
The children looked to be around 12-13 years old; the oldest class that I had observed so far. They were all local Vietnamese boys and girls, 15 in total. Most of them were nattering away to each other in their own language as they came in, not initially paying attention to myself and Abi. Some of the boys shoved past each other as they entered the classroom, acting quite boisterous: the tell tale signs of the onset of hormones. This, I suspected, may be a difficult class to teach.
I took a seat as usual at the back corner of the class. Abi welcomed the students in with a “Good Afternoon” and straight away wrote all their names down the side of the whiteboard as they got settled (They were all given English names). Then Abi split the class in two, creating two teams.
This I knew from my previous observations as the standard Shelton practice. I saw how effective providing a competitive edge was from the beginning of the lesson. The teachers Ligaya and Kelsie used it to amazing effect: maintaining high levels of concentration and class participation throughout.
There was a boy with glasses and a bowl hair cut who sat on a table by himself closest to me. His name was Michael. I had noticed that the boy struggled to communicate, and kept repeating himself. Abi asked how he was at the beginning of the lesson and he gave a disjointed answer, in broken English, saying what he did yesterday. Then he more or less repeated what he said two or three more times. The other students didn’t seem to care for him, some of the boys making a few jibes in Vietnamese and flicking rubber bands his way.
The teenage students were, as I expected, difficult to handle. I could see Abi was trying to focus them on the tasks that she’d set for them, but she had a soft, reserved energy about her, which didn’t keep the teenage students in check. They therefore would often not listen and continued to chat between each other.
Abi was writing on the board for quite a while and the students were to copy what she’d written and fill in the gaps. It felt like she was choosing to spend time writing, her back turned away from the students, so that she didn’t have to keep fighting to engage them. Once she’d finished writing though, she did walk around the class helping individuals with their work.
There was a TA (Teaching Assistant) also in this class; a young girl with glasses and a spotty face. She sat next to the students, occasionally offering a few snappy words in Vietnamese to them, which, I guessed, was to explain the work on the board. Often though, she would be on her phone looking bored, she wasn’t telling the students to stop chatting to each other, and she didn’t move around the class to help the other students. With the students already being quite a handful, I thought this TA could potentially make a big difference in directing the attention of the terrible teenagers. As it was, she didn’t seem of much use.
“Abi should work with her more closely and instruct her how she can help” I thought to myself.
Thirty minutes into the lesson and Michael was starting to drift off.
Abi initially kept refocusing him on what he was meant to be doing, but after a while, it seemed Abi was choosing not to focus her attention on Michael and concentrated on the rest of the class. Left to his own devices, he began to make longer pauses, staring off into space.
It wasn’t long after this that he even put his head on the desk and shut his eyes for a while. I was almost about to say something to Abi but I thought it wasn’t my place to. I was meant to observe, not get involved. I thought I would talk to her afterwards to see her opinion on Michael.
Abi did eventually go up to his desk, squatted down and gently coaxed him back into the lesson. I could see why she’d had enough now. After months trying to get through to the students and not having much luck, I could imagine how disheartening that would be.
Abi pulled through though and set up a game at the end of the class. She drew words on the board with a circle around them, then gave a person from each team a special sticky ball. They knew the drill and both chucked the sticky ball at the board. Whatever word they landed on, they had to make a sentence with it using the right tense learned from the lesson. The students, especially the boys, did enjoy launching the ball at the board. I was happy to see more class participation.
Once the time had reached 4:30pm Abi readily brought an end to the class and some of the students bothered to say:
“Goooodbyyyyyee teeeacher seeeee youuuu neeeext weeeeeek”.
(Another standard Shelton practice.)
“Well done Abi, good class”, I said smiling, trying to show my support.
“Thanks Giles…” she replied, keeping a brave face on and packing up her laptop.
“I just wanted to ask you about Michael” I said.
“Yes, I know what you mean”, she said suddenly stopping and turning towards me, a look of sad frustration finally breaking through.
“As you could see, he’s not in the right class, this work is too advanced for him… I’ve spoken to his parents about this but they wouldn’t listen, and they wanted to keep him here. It’s ridiculous.”
“Oh dear, that’s really frustrating.” I said, sympathising with her. I started to understand why she’d not attended to him. She went on to say:
“It’s annoying, because Michael needs a lot of help and attention, but I can’t devote all my time to him, then I’d be neglecting the other students… when they should all receive equal attention. So recently I’ve just had to leave him to it… I even report the same feedback after each lesson, that he’s not able to participate fully because it’s not the right class for him!…… That’s all I can do really.” She turned back to finish packing up her stuff.
“Awww, yeah that must be tough,” I said, “… his parents not accepting the feedback… But as you say, you’ve done your job and given the feedback, so you’ve done what you’re supposed to do.”
Turning back to me she continued: “I’ve also told Huong, the TA, to spend some time with Michael but not all of it, because some of the other students struggle with the work too so it’s not fair on them if Michael’s in the wrong class.”
She surprised me by showing how much she was aware of about her class, which initially, I thought that she wasn’t. It sounded like she’d been trying for a long time to work out how best to teach this class, and it made me realise and appreciate her hidden efforts. I could see she really cared for the students and over the time she’d spent with them it must have got her down to see continually (what I expected to be) little positive change.
Once she’d mentioned her TA, it reminded me to say something to her:
“I noticed your TA was sometimes on her phone and she wasn’t really offering help to all the students. Like with Michael, I think she only went over to him once or twice.”…
“… Yeah she’s not been a great help that one” she said with a sigh. “I’ll have to talk to her…
“Thanks for the feedback though.” she said, with another brave faced smile. “I have another class upstairs now, so, it was nice to meet you, and good luck with your classes.”
“Thank you, yes nice to meet you Abi – see you soon.”
We walked out of the classroom into the reception area, then parted ways at the stairs. I remember thinking that she reminded me a bit of myself: quite reserved and sensitive. With these characteristics and from my observation of the lesson, I wondered how I would get on as a teacher…
Using the Centre’s WiFi, I loaded the previous searches on Google Maps to find exactly where these computer stores were. Satisfied with the route, I exited through the glass swing doors of the building.
Outside, the day had turned to night, and the thick clouds overhead caused a heavy set darkness. I walked along the roadside next to the streaming traffic, headlights beaming in my eyes, with the usual honking and tooting of cars and mopeds.
Turning off from my normal route home, just beyond the wide open roundabout with the lack of a pedestrian crossing, or even a pavement, I followed the main road as directed by Google, until I came upon the bright lighting and shining red and yellow sign of the computer store. Once inside the store I had a good look at each of the laptops on display and noticed they were using the upcoming Tet festival in their promotions:
As I don’t know much at all about laptops I compared the price to the main features I understood, such as storage capacity and Gigs of RAM. The other thing I had to consider was USB and HDMI ports.
For my classes I would need to link my laptop to the TV, like the teachers I observed had done. However, when I checked the side of the laptop I noticed the HDMI port was smaller than I remembered:
I mulled this over. I thought I had to be sure I could connect the laptop to the TV. I didn’t want to purchase the laptop just in case I didn’t have the right connection. So I sent a text message to Mr Jerry to ask for his advice on what laptop to buy, including my concern about a mini HDMI port. He replied very succinctly:
“You’ll need a dongle for that mini HDMI. Just need to know Storage. Ram. Connectors.”
Well, my websearch about dongles only made me more confused and I still didn’t really know what sort of dongle I needed. To keep it simple, I thought I’d keep looking for a laptop with a regular HDMI port. I was also keen to see what the other main store had so that I could obtain a better idea of what a good price was for a decent laptop.
Back out and along the road, I reached the other main store… it had more or less the same products and prices as the previous store. There was one possible option there… but I wasn’t convinced.
Plan B! – check out the independent computer stores.
I brought them up on my phone again and followed the route to the nearest one. It seemed to be closed. The next one a bit further away, I went up and down in the street four times because I couldn’t find it. I came upon a small shop with no markings to identify it as a computer store (from what I can read in Vietnemese… which is nothing).
Peering through the glass shop window I could see some laptops lined up along the left hand side. So I had found the right place. However, it was also closed…
Bugger.
After this escapade through the streets of Ha Long, I was getting hungry. I called it a night and gave up the search for a laptop until the following day. Finding my way back to the unnerving, wide open roundabout, I turned in the direction of home and looked out for something to eat on the way.
As I approached the time square roundabout, with the clock tower showing time zones of various countries across the globe, I noticed something that I couldn’t believe I’d missed. Looking through the glass front doors of one of the buildings, I saw tables and chairs laid out. The sign printed on the front in large letters read: COM CHAY. Below this read: “Vegan”.
I’d found a Vegan restaurant!! And it was situated fairly near to where I lived!! This was fantastic news!!!!
I tried to open the door, but it was closed… I wasn’t having much luck that night. So I resorted to coming back very soon to check out the food.
Crashing into bed after my busy day, I looked up the opening times for the Vegan restaurant before going to sleep. The name of the place itself was:
“The Loving Hut”. The opening time said from 9am…
At 9:30am the next day, this was my view:
I had to make sure with the staff member there that the food was in fact all vegan. As you can see from the photos it looks like some of it has to be meat… but none of it was. It was all soy based products and vegetables. And it was so tasty and nutritious that I felt a lovely contentment come over me.
It wasn’t just the satisfaction I had from eating. On top of that was the knowledge that this vegan restaurant was only 10minutes walk down the road from where I lived, on the way to work!
A young Vietnamese girl around my age (at this time I was 28) came into the restaurant and took a seat adjacent to me. She wore a large mustard yellow coat with a fluffy hood. She had the dark hair, brown eyes and lightly tanned skin associated with Vietnamese people.
I watched her as she calmly chose some food from the trays, brought the plate to her table and slowly ate. I felt a reserved sort of energy from her. She wasn’t like other girls I’d met in Vietnam who would be on their phone the whole time. She seemed to be there by herself, not waiting for a friend, and was simply and steadily going about her day.
I was moved to talk to her and asked her if she spoke English. She looked up noticing me for the first time. Normally when a local looked at me I could feel their judgment towards my foreign appearance. This girl however, showed no reaction whatsoever and answered my question:
“Yes, I can spek Eng-lish.”
She had an accent, and spoke with short sharp syllables, but she was understandable.
“Great, I’m new here, I just arrived in Ha Long a few days ago. Do you live here?
“Yes, I live here. I live not far a-way from here on ‘Nguyễn Đức Cảnh’
“Where did you learn to speak English? Not many local people who I’ve met speak it.
“I lear’ Eng-lish in schoo’, an’ I also lear’ on course. Yes. I rea-lee lie Eng-lish.” she said with a little smile to herself.
Conversation turned to the food we were eating and she started telling me that “The Loving Hut” was a chain of restaurants and there were many around Vietnam. We went on to discuss why we ate a vegan diet.
A passion came into her voice as she said she ate vegan food because she felt eating meat wasn’t healthy. She thought the energy of the dead animal was a low vibration and negatively effected people when they ate it. She also wanted to live as peacefully as possible and share the world with animals without harming them.
Which led her on to her vision of the world, which was one of sharing openly with one another. She explained one of the things she was doing at the moment was making sticky rice every morning and sharing this with anyone passing by. Then she invited me to come and see her for some sticky rice!
I said “Of course!” What time?”
She said “I ush-a-lly fin-ish at aroun niye thir-ty”.
“OK! I’ll see you tomorrow before nine thirty. Do you have a phone number I can contact you on?”
So we exchanged numbers.
“I still don’t know your name” I said, laughing.
“It Christine” she said.
“I’m Giles… Well, it was nice to meet you Christine.” I said as I got up to leave.
“Nice to meet you Gi-yel”
This ‘all you can eat’ buffet was a grand total of: 80,000 Dong… equivalating to around:
£2.50!!
😀 An absolute bargain. What a start to my third full day in Ha Long Bay!!
I’d found a fantastic place to eat that served the food I was looking for; it was in a very useful location, and was super cheap. Plus, I’d met a caring young woman, with whom I shared an interesting interaction and planned to see again.
So I happily went on my way leaving The Loving Hut and moving onto the next course of action for the day – finding a laptop.
I discovered another laptop store that was just around the corner from the vegan restaurant. But again, it looked pretty much exactly the same as the previous ones I’d visited. I therefore spent only a brief time there checking the different products and prices before going in search of the place I’d found at the end of my quest the day before.
As I came upon the little independent store I saw the lights were on and a young Vietnamese man was sat inside on a computer. I was relieved to see the store was open.
Entering through the front door, I took in my surroundings. The store itself was about twice the size of my hotel room, and if you’ve read Ch2, you’ll have seen my hotel room was pretty small. The majority of the area in this store was taken up with a selection of desktop computers. Here was where the man was sat.
He was in fact gaming, and fully engaged with some first person shooter. A lot of rapid clicking on the mouse and rapping on the keyboard was the only sound I could hear. I wondered if he worked here or what. I was in plain view but he didn’t make any acknowledgement that I was there.
On my left next to the wall was a narrow plastic table with 7 or 8 different laptops perched on the top. I walked over to take a look.
One of them that took my fancy; it ticked all the boxes for what I needed. As Mr Jerry adviced: “RAM, Storage, Connectors”. This one had it all:
4GB RAM, 250GB Storage and a normal sized HDMI port. So I took a picture of it:
I hadn’t withdrawn the cash yet to pay for it. Thankfully there was a cashpoint or bank between every other building it seemed, so I found the nearest one easily enough and withdrew 6million Dong.
On my return to the store I was wondering how I could haggle the price down a bit. The trouble was, I am pretty terrible at bargaining with people. I cave in too easily. This time though, I would see what I could do.
Entering the store I noticed a middle aged Vietnamese woman sat nonchalantly at a desk top computer. Compared to the average Viet lady she was rather plump, and was clothed all in black except for her crocs, which were a dirty translucent white. To top off the look, she wore a pair of teacher esque glasses perched on her nose.
She looked like she had attitude…
I guessed she was the one in charge of the shop so, trying to keep my cool, I walked over to the laptops, caught her eye and gave a confident sounding “Hello”.
She replied with a “Hel-lo” and I caught a very brief look come over her face before she turned back to her computer. This look was the usual surprise and intrigue I received from locals due to my distinctly foreign appearance.
I checked over the other laptops again before settling on the one that I was interested in buying – the HP Elitebook. I read again the information on it and saw it said HDMI. Looking at the sides of the laptop, it had a number of different ports. On closer inspection, this HDMI port wasn’t actually the same as how I remembered it should be either!… Shit!!
I waved a hand at the woman to gain her attention and she came over to me. I pointed at the questionable HDMI port and asked simply:
“HDMI?”
Without saying a word she turned around, pulled a box out from under a table and rifled through a mishmash of cables. Plucking one of them out she turned back to me and slotted the cable into the port.
“Yes. It HDMI.” she said, nodding her head seriously and pointing at the cable.
I checked the end of the cable and to my relief, finally saw what was definitely, 100%, a normal HDMI port… Thank God.
“OK, Thank you.”… I said, then with a moments pause I asked… “Bao Tien?” in my best Vietnamese accent. (How much is it?)
She actually smiled! I was so happy to see that. I was thinking she was going to hit me with a ruler or something, like some stern teacher. So, excited with the sudden show of emotion from her, I started to haggle.
She replied by saying something in Vietnamese, which obviously I didn’t understand and she knew it. She pointed thus at the price on the laptop information. I therefore hastily got out my phone, typed 5million into the calculator and showed it to her…
She took one look at it and immediately came out with a bark of laughter and shook her head. She turned away from me once again to have another rummage through the box of cables.
This time she holds up a charging cable, evidently it’s for the HP laptop. After that she stomps off into the back of the store leaving me hanging, wondering what on earth she was doing.
A moment later I understood, as she came back holding a laptop bag. With a pen and paper she then wrote down some numbers:
400,000 (pointing to the bag, and attachment HDMI cable)
6,100,000 (pointing to the laptop and charger)
6,500,000 total…
This is equivalent to approx £210. This would have been a steel if it was England, but for Vietnam, I was sure I could drive the price down a bit more. I had to try anyway because I had little money to spare.
I wrote down 5,700,000… She rolled her eyes but reluctantly pointed to the original 6.1 price for all of it. I shook my head and wrote 6million as my final offer.
“OK!” she shouted, and started preparing the paperwork.
“OK” I confirmed, nodding triumphantly. “That’ll do”, I thought. I’d managed to bring her down by 500,000 Dong. I felt rather proud.
She showed me the paperwork… and I was pleasantly surprised! Apparently I had 3 months insurance with the purchase! All my focus on driving down the price had completely distracted me from asking about insurance. I suppose that I also hadn’t expected there to be any from this kind of independent store.
I handed over the 6million Dong and she placed the laptop into the bag along with the charger and the HDMI port cable. I noticed the bag looked a decent size too, comfortably holding these items with storage to spare.
“Cảm ơn” I said to her, smiling. (Thank you)
She gave another little smile and a nod before turning back to her computer.
Beaming from ear to ear, I stepped out of the small store in Ha Long with my new laptop. I felt an uprising wave of energy in me. A strong sense of independence, freedom and confidence.
There I was, setting out on this adventure in an overtly different country, all by myself, interacting with the locals and successfully finding a quality, cheap laptop. And I felt so pleased with how the transaction went. The lady was unexpectedly sweet and helpful after breaking through her apparent tough exterior.
I also need to mention something here to give you a better sense of what I was going through:
My experience of working and travelling prior to Vietnam had been in two countries: Australia (1 year) and New Zealand (2years). The transition from living and working in England to Oz and NZ was different in many ways and had its challenges… However, these were Westernised, English speaking countries and held close customs to what I’ve been brought up with in England.
Vietnam, on the other hand, was a whole different kettle of fish, and varied on so many levels. The Eastern way of life, with it’s alternate perspective and Vietnam with its vastly contrasting history compared to England, creates new levels of complexity for a foreigner like me to deal with.
Even the most basic of things such as finding the right kind of food to eat for me, was a mini challenge in itself, so after finding the Loving Hut and purchasing a new laptop, you can appreciate how excited I was.
As I say, with strong feelings of independence, freedom and confidence.
As I strolled leisurely down the street towards The Queen Hotel, I was eager now I had a laptop to start to organise all the material I would be teaching with, so that I could then properly plan my lessons.
Back in my hotel room I fired up the laptop and set to work. The only thing was… everything was in Vietnamese!! Thankfully though, I managed to figure out how to change the settings without much hassle, and from there set about downloading all the relevant material that was sent to me via Mr Jerry.
This took some time. After looking through all the files and programs downloaded, including the whole Story Central program, I’d quickly been overwhelmed with information, and needed a break.
I left my room to go upstairs to the kitchen and made myself a sandwich. Relishing my avocado, tomato and tuna sarnie, I sat enjoying the view from the fifth floor.
From up here I could look down upon the street below and, through the window, could hear the usual honks and toots from the traffic passing by. I could also see the tops of the locals green, grey and red rooves, with most of the houses and flats containing balconies. Further in the distance was a couple of larger buildings, possibly businesses or maybe more up market accommodation.
Over on the right was a hill with a ferris wheel perched on top. I recognised this to be what I saw upon entering Ha Long for the first time, when my VIP limo driver had taken me across this bridge. I remembered the stunning view of the sea, a giant gondola and a ferris wheel…
I couldn’t believe that it had only been three days ago!! So much had happened in such a short space of time. It occurred to me again how life can be a rollercoaster with so many ups and downs, twists and turns.
And the next drop of the rollercoaster came the very next day…
