the heat is still on in saigon...

october is drawing to a close, and it's over 31 degrees celsius outside. wowsers.

i've been out of commission with my blog for the past couple of weeks, and things are just as hectic as always. i've been given 3 extra morning classes to my schedule, so sleep is something that i'm beginning to cherish more and more each day. sadly, i'm finding myself slowly slipping out of my usual nocturnal gladness... *sigh*

one way to survive amidst the hustle and bustle of ho chi minh city is to take one day at a time and consider it a blessing - because really, you may never know what may happen next. there's been a pesky stomach bug going around the city in the past couple of weeks, and jeremiah was the first one to take one for the team. little did i know that i would be next in line. for a day and a half, i was able to get myself well-acquainted with our bathroom facilities, especially the floor... to say the least, it wasn't pretty. but after a weekend of rest, relaxation and a few pills (...and of course a bit of karaoke), i recovered nicely. by monday i was back in the swing of hectic teaching schedules again.

this week i decided to teach a travel unit to my evening students. as a nice change of pace, i thought that watching "home alone 2" would be a good way of showing them the perks and quirks of travelling, and of course with good wholesome morals on the side. i've seen (read: grumbled at) this movie so many times, but this time around made me a little homesick. as much as i don't mind walking out of the house in a tank top and capris at the end of october without catching frostbite, it still can't beat being able to romp around in the cool crisp autumn air back home. the canadian in me misses being cold, believe it or not. liz offered to throw ice at me on christmas eve as a way to relieve me of my homesickness, but unfortunately it just wouldn't be the same :oP and with the christmas theme surrounding the movie, i couldn't help but feel a little emotional and somewhat sentimental about it... to the point where i found a few tears trickling down the side of my cheek. yeesh. leave it up to me to get all nostalgic over a maculay culkin movie... a SEQUEL at that! :oS i'll be celebrating christmas a little differently over here this year, decorating palm trees instead of pine trees, but nonetheless it should definitely be an interesting experience.

among other interesting experiences, liz, autumn, matt, bill, mercy, and i bought tickets for a 2-day tour of the mekong delta for this weekend (FINALLY!), so i should have more to write about in the next week or so. i'm looking forward to taking a vacation away from the citylife and into the deepest depths of the jungle... which just conveniently happens to have a swimming pool and bungalow resort right smack dab in the middle of it all ... tee hee! :oD

till the next bloggage, hen gap lai (pron. "hyen gap lie") - which means, "see you soon!"

a weekend of culture and class...

saturday evening found most of our team at a nearby restaurant to celebrate liz's birthday. we had the chance to stimulate our tastebuds with a very popular vietnamese dish called banh xeo (pron. "ben say-o") - it's an egg crepe cooked with small morsels of meat (you can also have shrimp and chicken with it), beansprouts and other vegetables that you wrap up in a lettuce leaf and dip in pepper-filled fish sauce (think lettuce-wrapped springrolls). yummy! i also had my first opportunity to try soda chan (pron. "soda chahn") - a pleasant concoction of limejuice, sugar, ice, and soda water... kinda reminded me of sparkling lemonade (read: "LIMEonade" - they don't have lemons here in vietnam!), which was refreshing and oh-so-yummy!

sunday night, the gals all got decked out in our beautiful custom-made au dais and headed out to the opera house for a bit of ballet, symphony, and vietnamese opera. for a little history-check, the opera house (properly known as the national theatre, or the municipal theatre) was built in the beginning of 1897 under an original architectural design by french architect ferret eugene. over the years, the opera house was restored and renewed. the style and design of the opera house was done specifically with the aim to bring a feeling of french style to the french and pro-french vietnamese people under the period of french domination in the south in early 20th century.
our tickets (which were center row, orchestra ;oP) only cost us a nice 80 000 dong each, which is equivalent to just a bit under $6.00 US. in canada, if i were to pay for decent seats at the theatre or opera in toronto, i'd be looking at a whopping $80 bucks or more! the opera portion was composed by various vietnamese composers in response to the celebration of hanoi's 50th anniversary of their liberation day. my vietnamese comprehension skills weren't good enough to understand what the soloists were singing about, but the passion and pride for their country was more than evident. i was very impressed with everything that i saw and heard, and when they were joined by the ho chi minh city choir, the symphony orchestra and ballet company, you just really couldn't get any better than that. after the intermission the ho chi minh symphony orchestra performed their own rendition of mozart's symphony no. 40 - quite breathtaking, actually. for one night we were dressed to the nines, among ho chi minh city's elite and completely lost ourselves in the culture. simply wonderful... :o)

also, to help fit in more into the vietnamese culture, our teaching team decided to take vietnamese lessons every friday afternoons. i used to consider myself pretty good with languages, but learning vietnamese has proven itself to be quite the difficult task. vietnamese is a tonal language, meaning that different voice inflections on any word will change the meaning of that word... there are 5 tones in the vietnamese language, plus one mid-level non-tone (the way you'd normally say things without the accents). i've come to learn that it's absolutely crucial to say things the way they are supposed to be said, because you could easily say the wrong thing without knowing it. for example: the phrase for "stop right here" is "dung le dai". if you pronounce the word "dai" as "day", you are saying it correctly. however, if you pronounce "dai" as "die", then when you tell someone "dung le dai", you are telling them to "pee right here"... a mistake that i've come to experience first-hand. *ahem* it helps a lot when the person you're speaking to has a sense of humor about these things :oP ... nonetheless, my goal is to be able to carry a simple conversation in vietnamese by the time i have to head back to canada :oP

in other less-culturally stimulating news (well, depending on which way you look at it), we've got ants in our pants... well, not really in our pants, but our kitchen has seemed to have been invaded by an army of red ants. jeremiah named it "the ho chi minh trail" - from one corner of our kitchen wall to another, there's a small trail of red ants that make their way down diagonally back and forth across the surface of the wall. well, after a few sprays with our trusty raid can, they seemed to have gotten the hint that they were uninvited in our kitchen... however, last night while eating dinner, i noticed that the army hadn't retreated, but instead migrated to the other side of the kitchen, making a nice path from the garbage can, up the wall, around the door, up into the corner, and finally disappearing into a hole in the wall... yeesh. i actually found it more amusing than disturbing... until i opened the fridge door and saw a pink smartie walking away from its bag.

... yep, always an adventure here in ho chi minh city ;o)

... they call me "teacher"

when i was in high school, i used to think that teachers had it easy. i mean, how could i possibly think differently when all i really knew on the surface was that they worked almost only 20 hours a week, and on top of that had weekends, march break, and summer vacation off? little did i know that it's a completely different reality behind the scenes. the naive frame of mind that i once had in high school was completely turned upside down once it was my turn to step up to the plate. as of this past tuesday, i now work the full 20-hour weekly workload; but with prep-time and lesson planning, it feels more like i'm working 45 hours a week - if i'm not teaching, i'm lesson planning. if i'm not lesson planning, i'm reading the class material. if i'm not reading the class material, i'm marking quizzes or journals. if i'm not marking, then i'm sleeping... my weekends are precious - something that i've come to take for granted while i'm at school, what with only a 3-day courseload and all ;o)... but it's a healthy kind of humbleness that i've come to welcome with open arms and an open mind.

it's actually a pretty interesting thing to see how the educational system works here in vietnam. students start their day as early as 7am and then finish class around 9pm. it's funny to think that we all complain about how long our school days are, and how they never seem to end - just imagine having to wake up at 6am to be ready to learn by 7am, and keep the academic drive going till 9pm. usually they have 5 min breaks in the morning classes (that are usually 1.5 hours long), and then 15 min breaks in the evening classes (which are each 2 hours long). the school that i teach at is actually a private high school with 2 campuses (from what i hear, apparently it's the largest private high school in ho chi minh city), both boarding schools, and the children belong to the more well-off people of vietnam. so from monday to friday, these children live on-campus, and then on the weekends have the option of going back home to their families. some students that i've talked to have parents handling business in the states or in canada, and so they live there at the campus for months, with the occasional parental visits here and there. they all wear uniforms, and are "trained" to greet the teacher at the beginning of classes and at the end of classes... i remember my first day teaching, i was almost thrown to the wall by it all - just imagine 30+ students standing in military formation, yelling at the top of their lungs "Good morning teacher, nice to see you today!". not something that you'd expect in north america at all.

on mondays, wednesdays, and fridays i teach conversational english evening classes from 5pm-9pm. on tuesdays and thursdays, i teach morning english grammar/pronunciation classes at the high school from 7am-10:35am. what i didn't expect the first time teaching in the morning was the ridiculously huge class sizes. some of these classes that i'm teaching consist more than 40 students, a few reaching almost 50 students in one room. and the rooms aren't comfortable at all - imagine having to cram 50 students into a room with 3 sections of picnic tables - yikes! and for us waterloo people, you thought sitting in the PAS was bad. it can definitely be a bit overwhelming having to teach and talk over so many voices in a language not known well to some of them, if not most of them, but the TAs in each class have been more than helpful helping me out with everything. as expected in any class, there are a few students who aren't as eager to learn as the rest of the class, but i've come to appreciate the challenge :o) on the whole, these kids have such an eagerness to learn, which makes any teaching job so much easier when you know that some of them actually want to be there to learn something from you.

in the past few weeks, i've been really interacting with the children of this city, and it's just been wonderful, and once again humbling. on tuesdays liz and i have made it a routine to head over to the phu my orphanage in the ben thanh district to spend some time with the children there. the phu my orphanage specifically takes care of abandoned children who are mentally handicapped or challenged, and their facilities help educate and support them in preparing for independent life. it's amazing to see what joy these kids have the moment you step into the room - their faces just light up with so much happiness in knowing that they have visitors. there was this one 16-year-old boy who i met last week. it was "bubbles" day, and the kids really love it. sometimes you don't really think about it, but just a smile or even a light pat on the back can definitely go a long way - they can really knock the wind out of you, but the hours spent with these kids is well worth it. these kids are so beautiful, it really didn't take me long to fall in love with each and every one of them.

... in other news, we have two new teachers on our team! nick, who is from australia (and has a nifty accent!), and tammy - of which i'm proud to say is CANADIAN and a fellow mississauga person just like me :o) good times! they've been just awesome the moment we met them :o)

liz and i finally made it inside the notre dame cathedral in district 1. to be honest, it's not as "architectually pretty" as i thought it would be in comparison to the outside, but it was still pretty interesting. i wasn't sure whether i could take pictures inside the church, but it's definitely something to see. there were prayer chambers that were lined up along the two longest sides of the church, and inside them were many marble plaques engraved in french - a lot of plaques had read "merci" and "pour Jesus", and they all surrounded old statues of saints and other sculptures of Jesus and Mary... some of the ave marias were brightly lit around the edges with neon lights of all colours - i didn't really have much appreciation for that, but it was still pretty interesting to see. if you look at some of the rooftops and shops that are in ho chi minh city, neon-lit ave marias and other roman catholic statues are the same way. it's kind of hard to explain in words, but hopefully i can find a way to get a picture of it to show everyone back home.

and in my last entry, i mentioned rain. well, it's been raining hard these past few days too - floods everywhere. but it's gotten to the point where i'm used to walking around with my pants folded up to my waist ;o) just the other day i had to go make photocopies at one of the shops down the street, and it was literally like crossing the red sea. when it rains, it RAINS. but thankfully, rainy season will be ending sometime in mid-November *cross fingers* :o)

also, another blessing that i've had in the past week is that we now have hot water running in our bathroom - and running hot water definitely makes all the difference! :oD as much as i do appreciate being woken up by the somewhat overly-cool refreshing showers, this is quite the nice change. apparently liz and i just forgot to flick the switch of our water heater... and didn't realize that until this past weekend - oops :o) you learn a new thing in vietnam everyday ;o)

this weekend a bunch of us are going to celebrate liz's now-belated birthday on saturday, and check out the ho chi minh city ballet company and symphony at the opera house on sunday night. this will give us girls a chance to sport our new au dais - the cultural dress of vietnam. there will definitely be some photo opportunities for us on the weekend, so hopefully i'll be taking some memories home to show you. :o)

i sent some of you guys postcards in the past week or so - i hope you got them okay. i was planning on sending more, but then realized that a bunch of you didn't give me your addresses :oP ... which could make things a little more difficult ;o)

but until the next blog,
estelle :oD

ps - if i don't blog before (canadian) thanksgiving rolls around, then HAPPY TURKEY DAY IN ADVANCE! :o) methinks i'll be dining a little differently than the usual turkey-stuffing/springroll dinner with friends and family, but i'll be thinking about y'all back home :oD

pps - a few entries back, i mentioned an ice cream parlour that had "dalat strawberry" flavour. the name of the parlour is "bach dang" (pron. "back dung") - while motorbiking around district 1, i stumbled upon it again and just had to write it down ;o) so there ya go - another piece of useful info about ho chi minh city ;o)

ppps - i've been in vietnam now for 1 month and 4 days... WOOT!