A New Neighbourhood Makes All the Difference

It only took me seven weeks... but I really do think that my negative opinion and experience of Saigon is beginning to change. Overnight.

On Friday afternoon, after battling to be heard over the ceiling fans and general noisy school atmosphere (and smoky school atmosphere - I saw one of the teachers climbing the stairs to his classroom with a lit fag in his hand - a far cry from NZ's smoke free schools!) my throat is wrecked from teaching 12 year olds how to punctuate correctly. Despite my desire to go back to my hotel and sleep off the week, I allow myself to get pulled out for a 50c can of beer down an alleyway ten minutes from work that I never knew existed. We arrive in a swarm, five female whiteys all working for the same company and each pull up a plastic chair at the local 'bar' while Emma (the ringleader in the know) opens the fridge herself and begins handing out the 'BaBaBa' beers. A Vietnamese fella in a singlet is hanging around smiling while his three beautiful young daughters flounce about, climbing on and off the laps of the ones who got there before us, who all seem to live in this strangely quiet alleyway.

There are four of us all completely sick of living in the land of backpacker sleaze known as Pham Ngu Lao. Now that I've moved and been gone a day, I wonder how I could have stayed there so long, but I suppose it was because a) it was what I knew how to do b) it was easy and cheap, which I needed at the time and c) I really hate hotel / house hunting. But in hindsight, I now know that this was what was making me so miserable about being here.

Besides the traffic and the pollution, that is - moving hasn't changed those things, although they are much less noticeable down my new alleyway, which is too narrow and filled with roadside juice/beer/noodle soup joints for bikes to drive too quickly. The alley is also void of hawkers trying to sell you sunglasses every two minutes, or pester you about motorbike rides, and you are much less likely to get ripped off.

Most long term ex-pats in Saigon tend to opt for apartments because of the lounge factor, but from now on our lounge would be the plastic chaired roadside bar where everyone seemed to meet in the evenings ater work - within ten minutes we had made five new friends and gained valuable information about where to go for everything we needed - except vegetarian food. However, thanks to international veggie website www.happycow.net I soon found three decent local places to chow down in my new 'hood. With a shop selling guitars and pick-ups (which I need in order to do any more gigs here), 50 cent baguette stands, laundromats where a kilo of laundry will cost you 40 cents and where all shopowners will bring out complementary iced tea, this is a local alley in which prices have remained thus. Apparently there have been a handful of foreigners here for a year or so, but not too many to create another Pham Ngu Lao - the alley is too small for that anyway.

It's amazing how much a new home has changed me - I feel like I have an entirely new perspective on where I'm living. Until now I'd been hating on my city in a major way, and it's interesting that things just seemed to be going wrong for me again and again - in hindsight I know it's because I was attracting that kind of business - losing my wallet (or getting it pickpocketed - still don't know...), getting shortchanged and nearly run over - with my attitude. I hope I never forget this again. I probably will, but if so, I hope I can manage to maintain a better balance and acceptance of everything - all of a sudden I am somewhat ashamed of my feelings of helplessness in the past weeks. It's astounding what can change in just an evening...

Now that I'm away from the tourists I'm experiencing a different kind of behaviour from the locals as well. Yesterday, as I explored my new surroundings and tried to find somewhere to eat I was having my usual difficulty crossing the road, until a local man came up and gestured that I should follow him as he stepped out and wove his way through the moving bikes. I think I was much better at this when I first arrived actually, but for some reason I've developed a bit of anxiety about it lately and always sigh with relief when I finally get across safe. Sometimes I feel like living here has taken years off my life! So, the roads haven't changed, but the kindness of strangers has.

Last night, sitting around the plastic table littered with cans one of my new neighbours, a New Yorker named Chris, asked me how long I was planning on staying here. I told him definitely no longer than May when the school year finished, and he just looked at me, smiled and said he looked forward to having this conversation again in May to see how things had changed. I still don't know what makes so many people fall in love with this place - it hasn't QUITE happened to me yet - but let me say that Saigon and I are now in a 'courting' phase. Who knows - maybe we'll discover that we do like each other after all.

'sbeen something of a rough week. Getting ripped off in my local shop, having my wallet disappear within a matter of minutes on a quiet(er) street the following night (I'll never know what really happened),realising I'm almost maxed out on my credit card and that my first proper pay check will only just cover the repayments, leaving nothing left for a deposit on an apartment... financially, it's not been a great time for me lately! But tonight, Friday, 'teacher's day' (which is actually on Sunday although kids and schools have been celebrating all week),I'm post five-course dinner at the school for the gifted where I work in which I could only eat sticky rice and lettuce, drink beer and represent the pasty faced teachers in the karaoke, and I'm actually feelin' okay! (They tell me the deer, squid and other meaty delicacies were delicious. Pretty amazing treatment in a third world country, don't you think?!)

This leads me to wonder if my problem with Saigon up until now has, in fact, been not enough beer?! For, two nights ago, after all my financial woes were woven, I went for a beer with a workmate in the same restaurant that saved my ass after my wallet went missing on Tuesday (they took me in, made me drink iced tea, waited for my hysteria to calm the hell down). As we walked home afterwards, I noticed that the traffic didn't even make me flinch. Oh, the numbing beer factor... so good at the time, although within an hour I'd lost my sense of taste and smell and wanted to fall asleep by 8.30 - just can't drink very much these days. It's a good thing.

Anyway, tonight I feel some sort of majesty and sense of the mystery of it all returning to my life. I ate my favourite dish of vermicilli noodles with spring rolls (rice and lettuce not really cutting it to be honest...) and stared at the lizards climbing the peeling walls, looked out at the makeshift kitchen twenty metres from where I sat with crates of local produce hanging in baskets form the bamboo ceiling, and realised that actually, life's not too bad after all... Even though I love to complain about this place - and wouldn't choose to live here again given the chance - I look around me and see xe om (motorbike) drivers earning a few dollars per day, children going to school for ten hours a day, six days a week without a complaint, and Vietnamese teachers earning a tenth of what I earn. It all kinda puts things into perspective and all of a sudden I feel ashamed for my hysterical rants about the polluted, maniacal motorcycling nature of this place. Yeah, it's true that it isn't really the place for me, and that I should have known better before buying a ticket here, but the truth is that I can't really afford to leave just yet, having got myself into this rather crap financial situation by choosing to have the year of a lifetime and gallavanting around the world until the very last minute (and cent), credit card be damned...

So, I suppose I'm learning to live with the consequence of my actions just now. And, slowly slowly, learning to deal with the noise of 10,000 motorbikes screaming around the streets at 2 a.m when Vietnam has won the football, learning to cope with the corruption of this place and the sleazy backpacker scene - learning to ADAPT, really... It really is the best thing one can do.

I'm excited about possible future ventures. Working in Jordan or Lebanon or another part of the Middle East.. or even India (just caught the end of a documentary on Indian private schools)... and visiting my homeland sometime after May next year for a while... There are definitely things to work towards at the moment, while I learn to live IN the moment and ENJOY the moment more... it has been so easy all year to do this and it is only now, when I am struggling again for the first time in a long while, that I remember how easy it is to preach presence and peace and harmony, but how much harder it is to practise these things in times of despair. BUT... I know I am strong enough to do so.

SO, I'm off to sleep off this beer haze and dream of brighter and more positive futures... and to do my best to appreciate what I do have rather than moan about what I'm missing. All very humbling stuff.

Enough said. It's bedtime. Time to climb the stairs back up to my fourth floor hotel room and earplug out the nighttime concerto of bikes, dogs and hawkers. Night night everyone xx

One month in... (still in Saigon, Vietnam)

I reached my month's anniversary of being here the other day. Can't say I've fallen in love with the city yet, and don't know if I ever will, but I am starting to live with certain aspects of Saigon life a wee bit better.. like the noise, for example...

Whether it be a whole class of Vietnamese 11 year olds performing an ear-splitting dance routine in their breaks, or another teacher making himself heard over the tug-of-war by shouting into a microphone, or the incessant hooting, tooting, throttling, pulsating cacophony of motorbikes 24 hours of the day and night, there is rarely a peaceful moment in this city, it seems...

Except during lunchbreak. Here, the city stops sometime between 11.30 and 2, eats their main meal of the day, and SLEEPS... Shops close... shop keepers ignore you.. even the men selling sunglasses on the street (8 of them approached me as I ate breakfast this morning! EIGHT!!!) take a break. Even our air conditioned office is eerily quiet after we pick through the dubious yellow lunch trays (tofu for the vegetarians every bloody day of the week - I've gone off it for good now) and settle in for a rest. My Vietnamese co-workers all pull their soft toys out, use them as pillows on their desks or just slump down into their seats, put their heads back and open their mouths for a sleep they're used to having since birth.

My afternoon classes begin at 1.50 pm, right after nap time is over. It takes a while to get the classrooms back to normal - for all the sleeping mats to be folded away into the cupboard, the desks to be put back, the heavy teacher's desk to be dragged back into the room... and while the children are rubbing sleep from their eyes and devouring their leftover lunch, some are frantically memorising their spelling words so they'll get ten out of ten, even if they have no idea what the words mean... I'm struggling with this cultural love of memorising and rote learning. When I ask for volunteers to read aloud something we're studying, I get a seas of hands and a show of reading as quickly as they can to prove their cleverness. When I stop the kids after every paragraph and ask them what has just happened in the story, the sea of eager faces suddenly turns blank. It seems they know their letters and how to read, but have no idea what the words mean.

I have to hand it to them though. At school 9 hours a day, 6 days a week, and learning in a language foreign to them. Keeping all this in mind, they're doing amazingly! And yet, I wonder how they'll cope with the Cabridge English exams they'll eventually sit. Even at the gifted school where I teach every afternoon, regurgitating knowledge has been given paramount importance. Frustrating to say the least, but we'll get there...

I teach at one other school three mornings a week, with kids at a much lower level. They greet me every morning with a "GOOD MORNING MISS SHARON" spoken very mindlessly and in unison, to which I reply "Good morning class, how are you?" before a very collective "WE ARE FINE THANK YOU, AND YOU?" comes back at me. This class doesn't understand much of what I'm saying, but there are small victories - like the kid who has been named 'Harry Potter' being able to string a few letters together on his own. As I congratulate him he looks up at me with big hopeful eyes and asks 'Stick-er?' , a most important word for these kids who work so hard and get little acknowledgement from their Vietnamese teachers who control with the cane alone(in general, I'm sure there are some exceptions...). At first I wondered why the kids were sitting stock still and listening while their other teachers wrote in perfect cursive letters on the blackboard with their backs turned, and where I was going wrong, until someone told me about the quality of the punishments.

I've taken to teaching through a microphone myself sometimes when my voice is tired and I love it, no longer competing with the noise from the ceiling fans or drills going off in various parts of the school, OR the monsoon - it hit the other day halfway through an afternoon class and the noise was deafening as sheets of rain pounded the open air school, past the three floors and down onto the stone courtyard where teachers conduct activities (through microphones) in breaktimes.

It hit last night too as I ate, the gunfire of the thunder no longer making me jump. After waiting for half an hour and failing to hail down a taxi, I decided to leg it and had my clothes clinging to me within seconds. I eventually found a roadside stall who sold me a flimsy polkadotted plastic raincover for 7000 dong (about 40 US cents). No raincoat could prepare me for crossing the streets though - the water was halfway up my calves and I tried not to think about cockroaches (one ran up my arm the other day!!!) or the rats whose sewer homes had been flushed out once again.

Anyway, being here is still a valid experience even if I'm not having the time of my life. Career wise it's fantastic, I'm still loving the job and the teaching - but lifestyle-wise, gimme clean green New Zealand any day. I'm hungering for some BEAUTY and REAL greenery, not the skinny parks filled with exercise machines and statues. Someone told me that every foreigner here is here for a reason and I'm certainly not here to enjoy the aroma of pollution, or risk my life crossing the road every day or fight off the cockroaches. I'm going to stick it out until May, learn as much as I can about teaching English as a foreign language, enjoy simple pleasures such as fresh coconuts and origami cranes from students, and practise being content...