Day trips

We went to CuChi for a day with a group of teachers we work with.  It is an amazing system of tunnels they used during the war to hide from the Americans.  The tunnels have kitchens, bedrooms, and storerooms in them.  They lived down there for years.  You could crawl from Cambodia to downtown Saigon!  The tunnels are so small that American soldiers could not fit.  (The one Julia's in has been dug out more)  Pretty amazing.

We took a little roadtrip with 7 friends about an hour and a half out of town to visit a waterfall.  It was kind of a "state/national park" type place.  You could rent a big tent and stay there overnight; that's our plan for next time.  It is the middle of the rainy season, so the waterfall was raging and full of sediment.  We got into a small part of the river, but the current was still strong.  Philip took a ride down the stream and one of the rocks took his wedding ring clean off.  Unfortunately it was the day after our 5th anniversary.

Around Town

Working full-time in a school, we don't have too much time off.  We are trying to make the most of it by going places close-by.  One of the sites in town is the Reunification Palace.  It's the site of the old French palace when they used to rule and it's the place the North took over to end the civil war.

Typical Saturday night traffic in Saigon.  They say there are about 34 million motorbikes in Vietnam.  Sometimes it seems like more.

Since we missed the 4th of July, we celebrated during Vietnam's independence day.  There were fireworks and a big production in the park.

This is the "Floating Pagoda," a pagoda on a tiny island in the middle of the Saigon River.  It was beautifully decorated with shards of pottery in mosaic.  We took a tiny boat out to it.  There were a lot of turtles living there and a friendly cat.

Saigon has a great zoo.  It has every animal imaginable: monkeys, tigers, hippos, giraffes, leopards, and a lot of rats.

Our first vacation

We got 4 days off from school and of course that means fun! We got to take our first trip in the country and we decided on the beach at Nha Trang. The ride there was about 10 hours by bus. We luckily found a sleeper bus where you had enough room and the seats folded down so you were almost flat. The beach was hot, but very beautiful and they had tons of loungers on the beach with palm umbrellas to stay cooler under (and so Philip did not burn).  The food was great, we got fresh prawns that were huge from a lady on the beach.  She let us pick them out, then barbecued them for us.  We also went to a temple and got a good view of the port.

When  you are in clear water out in the islands what do you do? Of course you do a day trip out to visit other islands! We spent 1 day with about 45 people on a boat stopping at 4 locations.  Amazingly and as usual, we were the only Americans. There were about 5 people that spoke English and the rest were Vietnamese. We started off snorkeling at an island for about 1.5 hours and there was some good sea life and coral. Next we went and did Karaoke on the boat for awhile. We then swam in the open water and they made a floating bar for us and we all had wine and rafted about.  The last stop was the aquarium and instead of going in, a few of us just lounged around.  Now it's back to teacher orientation for a few days.  School starts on the 25th.

We are looking forward to our next trip soon!

What Now?

Now we have to find jobs.  There are plenty of jobs here for foreign teachers, but you have to sift through and find the right ones.  At first it was a little slow, but then Julia got offered a job to teach summer school starting 2 days later.  http://www.apu.edu.vn/  APU is where she is working, teaching kids that didn't pass their classes in the regular school year for 3 hours, twice a day.  They don't want to be there, so that makes her job pretty hard.
I searched around for a little longer and have been to many interviews and demo classes.  One day I got a call from Horizon http://hibsvietnam.com/ and went in.  The administrator asked a couple of question and then said, "do you want to start tomorrow?"  I took it and taught 9th graders for 2 weeks.  This summer school was all about having fun.  I was encouraged to play a lot of games with the students, while speaking English of course.  I had fun and got some more experience and confidence from it.  It was a nice international school and I enjoyed the kids.

ABOVE: taking the ferry across the Saigon River & a crazy monsoon rain brought down some trees and power lines (people just drove under it)

Finding a Place

We spent the next couple of weeks settling in.  We found an apartment on the 23rd floor that we like.  It has a great view of downtown, especially at night.  If you look back toward the right in the picture, you can see the tallest building in Vietnam, the Bitexco Tower.  The Phúc Thịn apartment building has 3 towers and is 24 stories tall, but it is right on this tiny road.  A lot of small open shops line the street:  tailors, small stores, electronics stores, eateries, a small bakery, coffee shops.  There aren't any indoor, much less aircon restaurants or shops for a few blocks.  Many of the people keep their roosters out in front with a basket over them.  We're pretty sure there's cock fighting nearby.  Just yesterday I heard a funeral start up at 6am.  It involves hired mourners, lots of flowers and decorations, and a very loud band with a drum and a trumpet.

Vietnam, finally

We made it to Ho Chi Minh City, or Saigon, to finish our training for 2 weeks.  We learned some basic Vietnamese in our morning class and got our first taste of teaching in the afternoons.  We came over from Cambodia with 4 other people.  We got help planning a lesson and we taught students the first day.  It was a little rough in the beginning, but we got the hang of it by the end.  

The first two weeks in Cambodia

Cambodia was great.  The highlight of our time there was definitely the trip to Angkor Wat.  The complex is so big it would take weeks to see all of the smaller buildings.  It truely is one of the wonders of the world.  There is no written history of the people who lived there, only carvings, so not much is known about it.  Archaeologists have been putting the temples back together for many years.  They were all partially or fully damaged by the trees breaking them apart.  

Phnom Penh is a city in transition.  A gas station is an old person with a few liquor bottles of petrol on display.

There is a lot of construction, so the city is changing quickly.  There were about 20 of us in the Languagecorps group in Cambodia.  6 of us went to Vietnam.

The journey begins

Yes, we did bring a few things with us.  More than anyone else, but we're moving and figured we should bring some stuff we might need.  What we didn't know is that we'd be in a fifth-floor walkup room once we got there.