Halfway there and back again

Yesterday we were halfway up the country and almost three quarters of the way through our backpacking trip. Today we find ourselves back in Saigon under the most fortunate circumstances…(drumroll, please)…we got teaching jobs in Danang.

Our plans to continue heading north to see Hanoi, Sapa and Halong Bay have been put on hold until a later date. With the logistics of having to come back to Saigon to get the luggage we left behind and then back to Danang to get settled and start teaching observations before March 21 (Marc’s birthday), we opted to enjoy our last week or so of vacation with some friends in Saigon, rather than rushing through some abbreviated northern travels.

Now a little about our new place of residence: centrally located, Danang is the fourth largest city in Vietnam with a reported population around one million. It straddles the Han River and is only five minutes from China Beach, a 30 km stretch of white sand leading back to Hoi An, the tailoring and shopping heart of the country. It is also home to an international airport, for those who want to come and visit us! There are hardly any tourists in Danang, as it doesn’t contain many cultural highlights and is often ignored because of the popularity of Hoi An to the south and Hue to the north. We will be working for ILA -- the school where we took the CELTA training -- and are signing 10-month contracts ending January 2009.

Things have certainly changed, considering that when we first arrived in Vietnam we planned to teach in Hanoi. And then we thought we had our hearts set on living and teaching in Saigon, as we’ve been missing the city since the day we left for vacation. We are definitely happy to be back here visiting our usual haunts and seeing familiar faces, but the timing of the opportunity in Danang, our compatible teaching schedules, and our initial impression of the city made us really think about why we came here - the experience of living and working somewhere absolutely foreign to us, the complete submersion of ourselves in another culture.

Living in Saigon would be amazing, but also pretty easy with such a large ex-pat community and access to many Western amenities and comforts. Living in Danang will be challenging, and we will certainly need to learn more Vietnamese to really get by (our current vocabulary includes greetings and polite phrases, coffee and pho, which we generally avoid using and hardly ever pronounce properly). Maybe the fact that Danang seems like the most unlikely place for us to live and work put it at the top of our list.

We are going to do a little more sightseeing while we are in Saigon, including revisiting the War Remnants Museum and we plan to provide you all with a more detailed account of that experience in the near future.

Enjoy the photos from our trip to Hoi An, and a few from Danang.

Thinking about you,
The Smiths

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