How to Make a Good Transition into a New School and a New Country-according to Janet

The count down to the last day of work at our current school is on. (75 days as of this blog posting) We are excited to close this chapter in our lives and to move on to greener pastures.  I have been thinking a lot about the transition to our new school.  This year alone, I have observed several new staff members begin at our current school.  Their success at the school depended on how they transitioned into the school and the city.

Here are some good transitional behaviors-in my opinion:
1. Get to know the local staff-they have been here the longest
2. Learn and say everyone's name correctly-practice it until you get it right
3. Ask questions- what is already working well-no need to reinvent the wheel
4. Look at the big picture-myopic viewpoints are problematic
5. Ask what makes a good leader/teacher/person according to the local staff-Here in Hanoi, a smile makes you an effective leader regardless of what you actually do.  Even if you don't understand it, you need to respect the local customs.
6. Get out into the city you now live in.  Explore!
7. Respect the experience and insights of staff members who have been in the city longer than you, but also take their advice with several grains of salt.
8. Be honest about your work history and your reasons for teaching overseas
9. Know that you do not speak for your entire country, you only speak for yourself but people will judge your country by what you say and do
10. Shake off any negative things  you may have gone through at your last school-new country, new school, new outlook

Alright, now all I need to do is get through the next 75 working days and then I can use my own advice.
~Deep breaths~

Student Driven Whiteboard Activities

    I'll be the first to admit, usually I write about traveling, but forget about the teaching side of this blog's title.  So, teaching...
    A few months/posts ago I wrote about our trip to the Vietnam Tech Conference.  I wrote a little about what I did.  First of all, my part was about .03% of the whole thing.  The folks who put it on did an incredible job.  Some parts were quite innovative: a cheap conference, teacher run, unconferencing and speed geeking.  I'd loved every part.
    I was surprised at the positive responses I got for my part.  I had a 2 part speed geeking presentation.  Of the two things I presented on, I'll write about one.  I'm sectioning out the Green Screen part for the sake of space and limited interest. I talked about 2 websites I use a lot. First, let me explain my schedule.
     The bell *Ding a ring a ring a brrrsss* at 8:15.  Kids make their way up the stairs and come into class.  BUT!  School doesn't start until 8:30.  Busses and cars are still arriving until 8:30.  What do I do with an uneven drifting in of 10-11 year old students over 15 minutes?

      Simple, I hand the first one (or if it is the same student for a few days, the 2nd or 3rd) through the door an IWB pen.  I have a Mimio bar and a website setup.  I use two websites for 99% of things; funtrivia and wishball. These are great activities for kids to join into, and they are not just time fillers.
     It took about 20 minutes to introduce the IWB to them.  A little longer for them to learn to type - with a pen, on a board, on an on screen keyboard (In Windows it is Start-Accessories-Ease of Access- On Screen Keyboard).  Now, they launch the keyboard from a start-menu pinned location.

    Wishball is a great game to teach place value.  The one linked is for the ultimate challenge.  Simpler versions are available for use with younger kids.
    The funtrivia link I gave is to the word play for kids section.  It has been helpful to my 15 ELL students and my 1 English speaker.  It bridges the link between a game and some basic warm-up activities.  I also believe that my students need a bit of transition time from the native/home language to the mix of languages they speak on the bus and playground into the full English classroom that they go to school in.  I'd rather ease them in through a shared activity than just throw them into the academic world of learning in English.  Although the link points in the language area, there are many other kid friendly topics.  I've used quizzes on Greek mythology and science, of course not as quizzes, but as a "remember that guy in that story we read yesterday about those old Greek people?"
     I hope to keep up post like these in between pictures of our trips.

So, you've got vacation time...

We have finished our term break and took today (Monday) off.  The students have all of these days off but we had to work last week and use one of our vacation days for today.  We did go to Cat Ba island for a night.  We had a wonderful hour at the beach and I had some good sea food and our hotel came with a complimentary in room beat-bass-dance-party until midnight courtesy of the club downstairs.  I also would like to go back,plan differently and do different things there.

Anyways......
We have Tuesday and Wednesday off!  Starting last night Janet was proposing short trips, a day or so in Sapa, Cuc Phuong national park!   Both things that we have wanted to do for a while (yes moms, we would go back to Sapa with you.)  Now here is the reason that I'm blogging and not on a train (and about to finish the title sentence)...You've got vacation time...and so does everybody else!
It is Reunification Day tomorrow and International Workers Day on May first.  It may not surprise you that Vietnam celebrates this day in a different way than the trust-a-farians who used to block traffic in Lawrence, KS to prove an unspoken point.
Side note for the aforementioned farians - This is a real holiday for a real socialist country.  If your parents pay your rent and send you to college that they pay for, please stop blocking the traffic of capitalism/leisure that funds your Tibet-prayer-flag buying fund.

So we are stuck here, in our apartment.  Rightfully so, I have no ill will against these holidays (the residents of Saigon Ho Chi Minh City apparently see Reunification day as a free day off, but nothing to celebrate).  Although, I'm on vacation and other people also being on vacation has really put a lemon in my plans.  To be fair, Janet is the wonderful planner, I just nod and agree and always enjoy the trips she plans.

Long story short, there are no buses or trains that return on Wednesday and we have to work on Thursday.

We ran into this issue when Honorable Uncle Jon was here during Tet.  It was a great, quiet time in the city.  There was not a lot to do, and in his limited time, we wanted to do a lot.  Luckily we had a great time just chatting and catching up, but it wasn't the best time to be a tourist.

*****Addendum.  I just couldn't find the other bus schedules for the holidays.  Hanoi was not as on-vacation as it could have been, just slightly quieter.  I guess I just typed to soon.*****

Preconceived Notions About Vietnam

About a year ago, we were interviewing for international teaching jobs.  Once we accepted our current post, I began reading.  I mean READING about Vietnam.  From internet blogs to every.single.book. in our city library and some I purchased from the internet.

Here is a list of things I found to be commonly held beliefs about Vietnam:

1. You (big fat Americans, or anyone over 5'8") will not be able to find clothes or shoes to fit you.

False!  I bought an absolutely cute skirt and a pair of boots last weekend.  It was in our 'western' part of town, but it is a part of Hanoi: 2012.  Plus, you can get anything you want tailored.  If I wanted to, I could get shoes cobbled.  Seriously, cobbled.  I just have to go to Shoe Street or Hoi An (a city famous for their tailors and cobblers).

2. There are no imported foods like cheese, cereal, tortillas, or salsa.

False!  Our local shop has most of these things and I know where to find the other items....just down our road.  Prices are high and selection is low, but these things are available.

3. Everyone is going to scam you.

False!  Admittedly, some Vietnamese people are trying to scam you .  By saying that everyone is, you are painting an entire country with the same brush.  Who hasn't been scammed in some other city, (by gasp), a non-Vietnamese person. Just be careful and pay attention to where that taxi is taking you.  If you see the same side of the lake twice or they don't run the meter, get out!  Otherwise, there are a couple of other scams running in the Old Quarter run by girls who speak English really well-they ask you to buy toothpicks and then try to snatch your wallet.  Just walk away from these girls.  If you don't stop, you won't get robbed, by them at least.

I've heard some people say that the higher prices for foreigners is a 'scam'.  I disagree.  Yes, the prices are a bit higher for us here than they are for local people.  However, prices are super low here on everything except for gas.  I don't really mind paying a couple of extra cents more.  That is all it really amounts to.  Quibbling over a nickle is not worth it to me.

4. Street food will make you sick.

Jury is still out on this one.  Jeff and I haven't been very sick while living here but we mostly go to places were we can see them cooking the food.  Plus, we cook (ahem) Jeff cooks a lot at home.  I don't really understand people's fear of street food.  I love Bun Cha and they cook it all on the side of the road with couple of hot coals.  Love it!  We get chicken on a stick from our "chicken on a stick lady" and she laughs at us and our attempts at speaking Vietnamese.  I think we are a novelty and she expects us to speak Vietnamese because we eat like Vietnamese people.  Pull over our motorbikes and get a couple of sticks of meat.  Get back on the motorbikes.

5. You will get robbed.
True- Most people I know have been robbed here.  Including me!  I know part of the blame was me and the way I was holding my purse on my motorbike.  The other part of the blame was the robbers (of course).  Now, I do things differently when I get on my bike.  I have down sized my purse so it fits either in the seat of my motorbike or inside my jacket. I think for hot weather, I will put it in my bike seat.  Of course, I have to remember to take it out of the seat when I get off the bike.  Breaking into my bike seat is easy.

Here are some other precautions we take when going out and about.  We don't pack more than one ATM card.  Either I take one or Jeff takes one but not both of us.  That way, if we do get robbed there is still an ATM card at home.  This isn't only because we might be robbed, but getting a new ATM card is a huge pain due to banking hours and locations.  We could leave both at home but sometimes we need extra cash.  Depends on what we are doing that day.  Jeff puts his wallet in a buttoned pocket or his front pocket.  We try not to have a lot extra cash with us.  Just enough for the day's activities.  A lot of the time, I won't even take a purse if we are going to the Old Quarter.  Although, thieves wouldn't notice me in the sea of backpackers walking around the Old Quarter with their backpacks and giant cameras screaming rob me instead of Janet.

Those are just five things I read again and again about Hanoi and Vietnam.  I'm not sure if they were written by people who were just here for a few weeks or by people who generally didn't like Vietnam. Regardless, it is nice to see how things really are for yourself.

Thanksgiving

I (Jeff) almost forgot about Thanksgiving.  Well, I didn't forget about it, but I was a bit absent minded about the date.  We did not have a day off - which is fair, it is an American holiday and we don't live in or work for Americans.  I saw frozen turkeys and turkey legs at Metro.  I picked up the turkey and quickly realized that we have no oven.  Bag 'o' turkey legs, sure, we can cook them in our little convection 'oven' that I got at Metro a month ago:

Why am I cooking turkey legs on the floor in a glass broiler?  I live in Hanoi, there are no rules...and no counter space!  We had potatoes boiling (no instant potatoes - which would be great since we had to work till 5:10 tonight) and we had zucchini frying.  So the cutting board, resting halfway into the sink, was taking up our remaining counter space.

Most expensive thing we bought: 3 buck can of Campbell's gravy.

All in all, I'm just pointing out the crazy situations we get put into in order to keep our traditions alive.  We had a nice evening.

(Yeah it's a fake tree with fake snow... it makes us feel at home so we are happy with it)

Saturday we are joining a colleague at his home for Thanksgiving.  It should be a great day sharing Thanksgiving in Hanoi with them.  The best part is, because it is an ignored holiday... we get to celebrate it more than once!!!  Having Turkey Day a few days late in the USA would be a felony in certain states.  Here, we get to have our Thursday night (not evening - we didn't eat until 8pm due to cooking after school) and we get a lovely afternoon enjoying Thanksgiving at a friends house.  A friend who has a stove! Not the normal Hanoi "you are an expat-we put an oven in your house-oven"  but a real oven, big enough to cook a turkey!  Ovens like this are few and far between here.

Where ever you are reading from, Happy Thanksgiving!

We are thankful for Skype - we may be far away, but we have been able to talk to our family and friends a lot more than the old days of barely-audible, expensive Jakarta - NY phone calls and 2 month postal waits.  We may be far away, but I think we couldn't have lived in a better time to be close to family through technology.

Gracias SkyNet.

As we approach league play.... ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK!!!!

Rules?

I think I've posted this quote before.  I know I mention this quote 8-11 times a week.  In The Big Lebowski, John Goodman utters the phrase: "This isn't Vietnam...There are rules."
Although he was talking about the Vietnam War (American war as it is known here) the comment still holds true, there are no rules.

Coming home from school on Wednesday I saw two things.  One, in Ciputra where the school is (a very nice, gated community) a 4 year old girl was squatting and peeing into the fountain.  Nope, it was around the back of the fountain.  Nope, her dad wasn't shielding her from everyone watching.  He was simply sitting on his motorbike, not even pulled over all the way.  The fountain, by the way, is the center point of a round-a-bout so she was dead center in the middle of traffic.  Two, we see this everyday, but it really struck me this time.  We come home on the lake road.  All along the road lovers stop on their motorbikes and cuddle.  Enterprising women sell drinks and snacks to people who are lounging on floor mats.  And...cars think that they are tiny.   No cars should be allowed on the road.  It is often barely wide enough for 1 car.   Two cars passing each other is common though.  Both hike a wheel up on the sidewalk and at about 2km an hour they ease past each other.  The motorbike community can't seem to understand why they must go slowly so from both ends, people honk through the whole ordeal.  This happened about 7 times on Wednesday.  It is terrifying when an SUV (overkill of a car in a city where the top speed is 45km and roads are repaired quickly) and a bus passed each other.  Restrictions on where to drive: none-there are no rules.

Today Burger King opened!  After our softball games (one planned, two against a Taiwanese A/B team who happened to be on the adjacent field) I went to the new Burger King with our school's PE teacher and his kids.  Oddly enough he lived 3 doors down from me in Indonesia in the mid-90's.  I was so excited for BK that I didn't think about the price.  Whopper JR in the USA: $1 Vietnam: $4.  Large coke in the USA: actually large Vietnam: size of a US small.  Anyway, I was just so pleased that it tasted exactly the same.  So price gouging: no rules.

Janet's motorbike ran out of gas on Friday (gas gauge doesn't work).  It was a surprisingly easy problem to fix.  I took a large water bottle, went to the gas station, and they filled it.  The attendant's only question was: "full?"  and "How long you live here?"  It was not the least bit odd to him that I was getting gas put into an unapproved container that would actually melt if I left the gas in it overnight.  He also asked if I spoke any Vietnamese, his English was good, good enough that he should have asked: "Why the hell are you bringing a water bottle to get filled with petrol?!?!" and "You crazy American, you are going to start a fire!"  Nope, I just strapped the green liquid (petrol is yellow in the USA, green here) to the rack on my bike said "Com-un" (Thank you) and zipped off.  There is a rule against this everywhere else in the world!!!!  In Vietnam, there are no rules.

Cooking Vietnamese Street Food

We had a fun weekend of playing tourist again.  We took a class at the Hanoi Cooking School with some fellow teachers and some tourists.  The menu was Vietnamese street food which was makes sense.  We started off with some iced-...tea(?) made from a licorice tasting fruit that smelled like figs.  It wasn't bad, it wasn't good, it was unique.
First, we went to the local market in the Old Quarter.  It is a big version of the market that we shop at with a few more animal parts available.

How we buy our veggies if we don't go to Metro - we stick with cucumbers, tomatoes, onion, potatoes, peanuts and cabbage.  We don't bother with the muddy greens or tofu.  The veggies are fresh as ever, but you have to wash a lot of dirt off most or them, especially potatoes and onions.

Bored of chicken eggs that have been laid?  No problem, we've got chicken uterus and un-laid eggs.  They are... fresher(?) than laid eggs?

We also had some eggs that were on the other end of the spectrum, but we'll get to that later.

Could one of these toads escape?  Of course!  One was hopping along the ground just seconds after I took this picture

In the market that we shop at, the toads aren't in bags.  They are tied together with plastic string and left to hop around.  If they could only hop in the same direction, the could escape, but alas, toads don't cooperate with each other.

Plastic string is used to tie up these crabs.

Tripe being made into sausage.

Chickens.

Prawns!!!!!  Not to cheap though, 7 bucks a pound.  Still less than half of what it would be in the US though.

If you're tired, just sleep next to the fish.

Escargo.

 Fish.

Clams in large flat shells, not sure what kind of clams they are.

Goose eggs in the closest basket.  Chicken eggs to the right and fertilized duck eggs in the bag in the second basket.  (we'll see the inside of those eggs soon).

Piggy ears.

Quail eggs are cheaper than any other type.

Lungs, intestines and everything else you find inside a pig.  I've never seen lungs for sale but everyone here had them.

Squirmy eels.

This pig is missing his eyes.

Pig face, should your recipe call for it, it is available in Hanoi.

If you're not into everything else.  You can also get normal cuts of meat.

We went back to the cooking school.  The class was a mixture of demonstration and preparing our part of the meal.  Everything was in dishes (sugar/fish sauce and such) and we did a bit of cutting and mixing.  It was fun and informative.  We had looked at other menu options that may have taught us more about cooking, but this was the most appropriate menu to learn even if it was quite easy.

 Rice vinegar with sugar dissolved into it.  Then add fish sauce, diced chili and garlic and fancy green papaya and carrot.

Those eggs I mentioned.  The fertilized duck eggs were weird but delicious.  It was boiled for about 15 minutes.  Long enough to cool the yoke and the tiny baby duck.

 

See the little duck guy in there?  With a dash of dried chili and salt it tastes like hard boiled egg and duck.

We also made some normal food.  Spring rolls:

Vietnamese green papaya salad (with the same sauce as the dipping sauce).

Flambeing some bananas covered in sugar.  These were later simmered in coconut milk with nuts.

West Lake Prawn cakes are a batter that is mixed with sweet potato strips.  Stick two prawns on top and deep fry  - eat without peeling the prawns.  The exoskeleton just adds to the crunch!