Utopia. Heaven? This is a place where you can drive on sidewalks, eat four-star meals for ten dollars and carouse past sunrise at your favorite 24-hour haunt. My commute includes bagged goldfish and purebred puppies for sale on the backs of motorbikes. Here you pay $1 to have the use of a beautiful pool while sipping $1.75 house brewed, dark pints from the swim up bar. I make good money for the standard of living; my lifestyle is essentially unrestricted. I can afford the best of what the city has to offer and still walk away saving more than I did back home. I live in a great apartment and can travel to breathtaking destinations for very list cost. I rent a motorbike, delivered to my house, and without a license for fifty bucks and my signature. When will this get old?
Driving around Saigon on my motorbike is beyond exhilarating. My pulse quickens the moment I lay my hand to the throttle and begin propelling myself through this wild city. Sometimes, in 90-100 degree heat, it takes a lot to roll out of my air conditioned bedroom and start my day, but once I get the motorbike out of it’s mini motorbike room/garage and start ‘er up, it’s fantastic. Wind on your face, moving yourself from place to place. It’s the closest thing to flying I’ve felt. With a little bit of being-in-a-videogame thrown in. I’m really looking forward to taking a few road trips with my bike in the month of April. I can’t imagine anything better than a solo mission ride through the Vietnamese countryside. I’m thinking about checking out this hot springs resort and adjacent nature preserve about a 6-hour drive to the northeast from Saigon. It will definitely be my first trip as an official resident and tax paying employee of the country of Vietnam.
Teaching. Yup, I’m a teacher. Of children. WEIRD! But it’s pretty great, actually. And, in my case, it’s also pretty damn easy. I work every day, but only on the weekends do I peak 6 or 7 hours per day. Mostly, I work 6-9pm every night. Sometimes that’s one 3-hour class, sometimes it’s two 1hr20 minute classes. The school I work at, VUS (Vietnam-US Society), employs both a Vietnamese teacher and a native English speaking teacher for each class they enroll. The Vietnamese teachers are responsible for teaching the hard stuff: grammar, structure, testing, etc., and the teachers like myself (from Australia, America, England, Ireland, etc: any native speaking English land) are responsible for encouraging and correcting speaking and listening. Really, they are paying me a good wage just so I can be in the classroom with the kids, speaking English. So, that means I can exercise my long winded nature and show a lot of movies. Which is pretty sweet! Obviously I’ll be showing films I have not yet seen myself (Wall-E and Happy Feet were the first premieres). Additionally, the school encourages the English teachers to play lots of games with the kids. Which is roughly equivalent, on hilarity scale, as paying money to attend a comedy show. It kills me! These kids go INSANE for competition and there’s just something about Vietnamese kids and physical comedy…They beat the shit out of each other, but they seem to like it. I’ve never seen a kid cry and let me tell you, there have been several instances of heads hitting concrete floors that I was sure would lead to paralysis. So that’s fun. The teenagers are another story. I hate them. And they hate me. But, that seems to be an age old precedent, so, what can ya do? Luckily, I have more “Backpack” kids (the name of the textbook for the 6-12yr olds) than I do “Solutions” kids (textbook for the teens). I’m still figuring out the discipline aspect of being an authority figure, but I’m hoping that some time, trial and error will get that straightened out.
SO. In conclusion, I really like it here. Pictures to follow. I’ve been very bad in the past month about photography. I’m gonna head out on my bicycle one of these days and commit to a day of picture taking.
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