Life as an Expat

Highlights from September 18- October 3

Xe Om Drivers: So I know this is probably getting redundant, but the traffic here is out of control, making it very difficult at times to walk around. I am happy to report I have really gotten over a lot of my fear from riding on motos. A xe om driver (pronounced say om) is basically a man that waits around on his moto and harasses you on street corners, asking you if you want to go somewhere. Well, about two weeks ago, I again set off to go the gym. I hadn’t made it since my past experience of being stuck in the monsoon, but deciding to be a big girl, off I go. I was all set on walking when this nice-looking xe om driver asked me where I was going. I was all set on refusing, but he made me an offer I couldn’t refuse. And it was great. He was so nice and we had a nice little chat about his family and what I was doing and how he was so grateful for me to be in Vietnam to teach people English. After this ride I had a skip in my step. I had survived, I had gotten a good deal, life was good. So on my way out of the gym I look around hopefully for my xe om driver, but he is nowhere to be found. Another man flags me down. He doesn’t look quite as warm as the previous driver, but whatever, I just worked out. I ask him how much, he says, 20,000 dong. I laugh and say no, I got here for 10,000. He scoffs and starts flailing his skinny arms, his helmet bobbing up and down. I shake my head and walk away. “Ok, Ok,” he calls back and ushers me over. Hooray to me, I gloat at my stellar bargaining skills. He shoves the helmet at me and then kicks on the moto. “Hmmm…” I think, “maybe he wasn’t the best choice.” And he wasn’t. He is so mad at me for only paying him half of what he wanted. He is darting in and out of buses, he is smoking and blowing his cigarette in my face, he is yelling at his friend who drives up next to me about how cheap I am. I think I am going to die. And then, just as I’m counting down the minutes until I will arrive back home I see my first moto driver. “Hey you,” he calls, “you shouldn’t ride with him, he’s a bad driver.” “I know,” I yell back, “he tried to charge me 20,000 and wouldn’t believe me when I said I got there for 10,000.” My moto guy laughs and says, “stick with me next time.” I laugh and answer back “I would have, but I didn’t see you.” My moto guy guns the engine and glares at the other moto guy and starts yelling at him in Vietnamese. So maybe it wasn’t best to criticize the guy’s bike I’m on I realize as he pulls over. He glares at me as I get off and asks me where I’m from.“Everyone is rich in America,” he says, which is true compared to Vietnam, and then I feel bad, because it’s true, I do have enough money to spend another fifty cents to give to him.

After that crazy moto ride, I decide to take a break for motos for a while. My new house is in a great location. I can walk a lot of places, especially as it is right in the middle of two of the campuses where I’ve been hired. But of course, despite the fact that both of my roommates are working at these campuses, I am working at a campus clear across town. When I ask the man in charge of HR how I should get to this campus he tells me to get a reliable xe om driver. “A reliable xe om driver? How do I do that?” I ask. “Oh you know, I’m sure there’s a guy across from your house who can take you.” I think back to the previous afternoon when running late to meet a friend for aerobics in the park I take a moto driver who doesn’t understand a thing I say/can’t read the address I had given him and took me on a crazy ride during rush hour traffic.I am skeptical, but as luck would have it, I found a great driver who drove me around Friday morning. I am so happy. He will be able to take me to work Friday night (my first day of work was yesterday and my schedule was 6-9 PM). He pulls at my gate at the scheduled time. Cuc, my maid, had helped me right out and practice asking him to pick me up at nine. But, no, of course my luck had run out, he lives far away and can’t pick me up at night (a nice neighbor was translating for me). “Ok, no problem,” I think, “I’ll just find another guy when I leave.” But then, my kind neighbor starts warning me to be careful with my bags and my things because the school where I’m teaching is in a bad area. Perfect. So now I’m even more of a nervous wreck before my first day of teaching. It all worked out last night, I ended up taking a taxi home because of the five bags of books they had given me for lesson preparation, but tonight will be another adventure. I’m getting quite spoiled here. I have a maid and a driver. Amazing. So now I only have to find a xe om driver to take me home from school at night. I’ll be teaching evenings during the week and on Saturday and Saturday and Sunday mornings.

Mom/other concerned family members: My xe om driver (whose name is Mr. Seven I found out today, because he is the 7^th son in his family) is an excellent driver and always very early and very worried about my helmet safety etc.

Karaoke/Country Time with Our Vietnamese Friends

This falls under the category of I never get what I expect in Vietnam. In the last e-mail I talked about how our Vietnamese students/friends from training were going to take us to karaoke. It was fabulous. We sang. We sweated. We ate roasted sweet potatoes off the street and had about a thousand “mo, hai, ba, yo’s.” Well, over dinner, the Vietnamese students began discussing what they wanted to do with us. They asked us if we were free on Sunday. We said sure. They then begin having an argument in Vietnamese (broken by clippets of English where they informed us of a new plan (there were about seven during this fifteen minute discussion)) about whether we should go to the beach for a day or for three days or to go to the countryside and go on a hike. They finally decide we should go on a hike the next day. They tell us to be ready at 5 am (It is 11 PM at this point) because a bus will pick us up at our hotel and we will go on a hike.So at 5 AM we had eaten breakfast and were dressed in hiking shorts and t-shirts, ready to go on a hike. When we get on the bus (how they chartered a bus in six hours is beyond me) I look around in dismay. The girls are wearing flip-flops and nice jeans and nice shirts. “Hmmm…I think…. what kind of hike is this going to be?” Well, it wasn’t necessarily a hike; it was more like a climb up a lot of stairs in very humid weather. And it was a mountain, but it was also a theme park of sorts with crazy statues of animals and a roller coaster down the mountain and a cable car to go up the mountain if you don’t want to climb. The Vietnamese people are not the most active of people, and so all of our new friends couldn’t believe we didn’t want to take the cable cars. Half of the people took the cable car up as we climbed the stairs, and one girl didn’t even make it. At the top of the mountain was a pagoda of sorts. After the hike, we were told to get back into the car where we went to another pagoda and then we stopped for lunch where they again ordered for us. After that we went to one of the girls’ childhood homes where we ate fruit and played cards. Our new Vietnamese friends were so hospitable and sweet to show us around. Yet, the day was exhausting as at least half of what was said was lost in translation.None of us had any idea of what was happening next, and we were literally on display the whole day. At the girl’s house her entire extended family came over to see the “Westerners.” We then went to the Cuchi Tunnels and then went back home, but along the way, had to stop at another one of the girl’s houses, where she showed us pictures of her as a child and had her entire family meet us. It was so great, and weirdly hilarious, and definitely a treat to see more of the real Vietnam.

Book Buying in the Backpacking District

Many of you know that I love bookstores. I will often go into one and buy books, even though I have about twenty books at home I have yet to read. Before I left for Vietnam I bought about ten new books to take with me and lamented the fact I wouldn’t have access to English books.How wrong was I. There is no need for bookstores here, for all you have to do is go sit at a café/restaurant and women/children will be carry around stacks of about 20-50 photocopied books for you to buy. I quickly learned I just needed to cover my eyes when they came by or they wouldn’t leave me alone because they would see the gleam of desire in my eye. Yet, I cracked. There was this one small boy of about twelve who I always saw on the street. We had a very love-hate relationship, because for some reason whenever he would come up to my friend and ask him/her to buy something, he would look at me, hit me, and then run away. But, on my friend Dave’s birthday when we were at a café celebrating, he came by and lit and melted candles on a coaster as a makeshift birthday cake. So needles to say, I forgave him for his abuse.And about two nights before we packed up out of the backpacking district he came up and presented a stack of books to me, and I actually found one I liked and offered him 30,000 dong.He said no, 60,000. I laughed and said 35,000. This went back and forth until after neither of us would relent he finally stalked off. Well, the next day as we were hanging out at a cafe, waiting to catch our train, celebrating the closing of our house, he sees me as he’s prowling up the street and calls out “50,000.” I say, “35,000.” He pouts and says, “yesterday you said 40,000,” and goes off. “Oh well,” I think, even though secretly I wanted the book. About ten minutes later he comes back to the restaurant, sits down across from me, placing the book on the table. “Ok,” he says, his eyes round, his face grave, “let’s play for it” he says, as his hands motion rock, paper, and scissors. “Ok,” I say, secretly thinking how great I am at this game. I forget that he’s a street kid and can read people like a book. First round, he wins. “Let’s play two out of three,” I insists. He laughs. Second round. He wins. I fork over the 45,000 and he skips away, hitting me on the arm one last time.

Sleeper Train/Bus

When we booked our first-class tickets for the sleeper train to Nha Trang, I had images of classy, sophisticated European sleeper trains in my mind. I was so excited. I love trains. But European sleeper trains is not what we got. All the first class-ticket meant was that we had a mattress instead of just the hard wood frame. The bunks were small and cramped, and of course we all were separated. “Oh well,” we think, “we’ll just sleep.” But the train was extremely jerky and the beds were extremely small (and I’m only 5’2”). As the train started each cabin started blaring Vietnamese opera, which was followed by a history lesson. With the first terrible chords of music blared, I shot up out of bed and started hitting random buttons to turn it off, which I’m sure annoyed the people sleeping below my friend Erin and my bunks. But of course, that did little to stifle the noise from all the other cabins. Somehow, I fall a little to sleep when I wake up in the middle of the night to Erin throwing up in a plastic bag. I hop out of my bed to find her another bag or try to find a bathroom for her to go to. When I find a conductor and motion with my hands someone getting sick, he points to a door. I look in and see a toilet full of liquid, which would be urine. I want to vomit at the smell, so I can’t imagine what Erin would do. I ask about a trashcan, because I can’t see one anywhere. He just barks something at me and walks away. So after our experience on the sleeper train, Elizabeth and I decide to go by a day train. Well, after visiting five different travel agencies/hotel receptionists we discover that the blue line (the fancy line that everyone had sworn by) had been canceled. Of course, there is not a train site or a brochure for a train schedule for us to find out this information. So, what are the alternatives? A sleeper bus of course. The woman who worked at our hotel booked it for us and told us it was great. We don’t know what to expect, but we decide to do it. Well, the sleeper bus was actually hilarious. Think of reclined seats on the floor and that’s what you get. It was a nice ride, except that the driver didn’t like us using the bathroom on board.

Nha Trang Boat Tour

Nha Trang was absolutely beautiful. Uncle Mike, this is where you want to go. There were mountains sweeping down into blue ocean. And while the coastline would be covered in trash in the afternoons, in the morning it was crystal clear. We would go to the beach in the morning and rent a chair on the beach for the entire day for only 25,000 VND ($1.25). Two days after we got to Nha Trang we decided to take a boat tour of the nearby islands. Everyone who had been to Nha Trang told us to do this, so we booked it through our hotel as soon as we arrived.Pictures of a boat full of other touristy Westerners who would swim and soak up the sun with us floated through our minds. But when we got on the bus that was taking us to the dock to catch the boat, we didn’t see any fellow tourists. The boat was full of Buddhist nuns and Vietnamese women who were putting on gloves and sweaters to keep the sun off of their skin.“Oh no,” we think “we are going to be display all day.” Already people were taking our picture.“And who will swim with us?” When we got to the boat dock, they ushered us into a corner where we sit trying to wake up, wondering if we booked the right boat tour. Boat after boat begins to take off as we sit there, until a bus full of tourists arrives and off we sail. We went on about a seven-hour tour of the islands where we swam and had food and drink provided. It was great. There were about eight Austrians we became friends with who later joined us out at night. They served us a delectable lunch and beer and fruit before we went back. After lunch, a band complete with drum set, which rose from the floor of the boat, came on the entertain us. There were people from all over the world with us, and at every stop, our boat would be sandwiched in between two boats full of Vietnamese people. When the entertainment portion came up they called each of us up from different countries to sing, while the boats full of nuns and other people laughed and clapped along. I guess we were part of the entertainment too.