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Published: November 26th 2006
Saigon Temple
Lovely Giac Lam Pagoda in West Central Saigon.Guess who’s back?
We have been meaning to blog Saigon for ages. We
are living here now and people
are curious about our lives in Vietnam. We have plenty of photos below from the city, our schools, our flat, our friends and various other stuff too. There are also a couple of short
videos just to the left of this text (if you take the time to download them). They will give you some more insight into where we are living right now and how things are for us..
So.. George W, Angelina & Brad have all been and gone. It feels like Edinburgh after the Fringe! Still, life goes on and it does so with a vengeance. I (Warren) will tell you a bit about my life here and Sof will hopefully be forthcoming at some point..
Teaching Life
So I arrived in Saigon back in March while Sofie was in Beijing. I started working in April with private teaching and started my Primary School job in May at Singapore International School. My typical weekday starts at 8am and finishes at 5pm. I occasionally work a half-day Saturdays. I do the private tutorial work with two children in
Buddha - Giac Lam Pagoda
Huge Buddha statue in grounds outside Giac Lam Pagoda. the evenings three nights a week where previously I did five nights. The privates are well-paid and the family I work with are very generous. One day they brought me three bolts of material to choose a shirt from and got a shirt tailor-made for me. The next day they gave me a card and $50 for Christmas (it was the start of November). When I said to one of the children I must return the favour she replied "you don’t have to, Mr. Warren, my mother says you're one of the family now." How nice is that?!
Teachers’ Day has just been and gone in Vietnam and I ended up getting a load of stuff including clothes, a tea-set, shaving foam and a bottle of 12 year old Scottish Single Malt! There was other stuff and as Sofie was celebrating Teachers’ Day the same day it was quite fun to compare our hauls!
I don’t want to sound like a mercenary but things are very different here with regards to how teachers are treated. It is one of the highest regarded professions and parents have high hopes from a foreign teacher. In all I have fourteen children
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Ping and Jacky monkeying around.. in my Primary School class at the moment, an excellent Vietnamese co-teacher, Miss Hang, and the children (even the wee trouble-makers) are all lovely. Ages range from six to nine years old. My pupils come from Vietnam, Korea, Singapore, China and Jordan. Last year they had four different class teachers and were really messed about so I don't want to leave them before my contract is up in July. The other foreign teachers in the school are from Singapore, Canada, New Zealand, Australia and China. We go out pretty often for Karaoke or drinks and enjoy the relaxed atmosphere.
Uneasy Riders
Every day I make the crazy commute to and from work. At
quiet times (Sunday morning only!) this should take 10 minutes. In reality it can take three times that and a relaxing journey can quickly become a nerve-jangling lung-burning struggle for survival. There are an estimated three million other motorbikes on the streets alongside me. I rent a new 110cc motorbike which is great but I am considering buying one as that would work out cheaper.
Anyway like I said there are no quiet days here and during rush hour the drive requires nerves of steel.
At home
Staring at the sky from terrace. Luckily Saigon has a lot more motorcycles and bicycles than cars but all that is set to change as Vietnam joins the WTO next year. I really have no idea what the traffic will be like then but it will certainly not get any better. Today it is just bearable but to be a safe driver on the mean streets of central Ho Chi Minh one has to remember some simple rules. It would be easy to say "There are no rules." but that's not really true. Yes, I can be driving down the right side of a street and see a stream of traffic coming towards me at speed on the wrong side of the street or trying to veer towards their correct lane. Yes, it is possible to see all sorts of vehicles run red lights and get stranded in the middle of busy junctions as police look on. Yes, it is likely that the motorcyclist indicating right is going to veer left in front of you. The main thing is
never to stop, not to change direction too quickly and always to watch those in front of you and pray that those behind are following that rule International Day
Some of my kids all dressed up. ZaoChi Vivian Jacky Natan (l to r) too! The final rule is one also advocated by the Hitchhikers’ Guide to the Galaxy -
“Don’t panic!” Somehow it all works. I have not actually seen too many accidents although this is possibly the most dangerous country in the world to drive. I wear my helmet at all times and always look left and right before going through a green light junction. I’d like to get some footage of rush-hour for you but am worried about the camera being nicked off Sofie while we are riding. It happens all the time. I've even heard of people being pick-pocketed while on their bikes!
Food
Both of us ate some fish when we first arrived in Vietnam but have gone full veggie again. It has taken a while to figure out where the good places to eat are and I have had some real disasters like the time I thought I was eating vegetarian
pho with ilken tofu or noodle soup to find out that I should have been in the Buddhist place next door and I was actually eating pig heart, liver and kidneys! Still, one of the highlights of Vietnam, and Saigon is no exception, is the food.
Whether on the street or in more expensive places, whether eating breakfast, having coffee or eating dessert there is something for everyone. Kieran brought us to a restaurant when we first came here where field rat, scorpion and snake are all on the menu. It is also possible to find dog, porcupine and all sorts of bugs. Apparently the 14th day of the Buddhist calendar is a great dog day!
Typically we eat breakfast of fruit and muesli and lovely Vietnamese coffee at home. At lunch I often meet Sofie at a Buddhist vegetarian restaurant which happens to be next door to a place dealing in offal soup! For a huge bowl of Thai curry (
ca ri), noodles and ice tea it costs 8000 Dong or 25p. I usually drink an iced ‘milk’ coffee (
ca phe sua da) while Sofie likes the hot drip Vietnamese coffee with ‘milk’ (
ca phe sua nom). The
milk in question is actually artery-clogging ‘a-moment-on-the-lips-lifetime-on-the-hips’ palm oil.
Most Sundays we go to a French deli-café called Au Parc. Whether we make breakfast or lunch it is great. Proper café latte, fresh fruit muesli with yoghurt, freshly-squeezed juice and Emmental cheese on
toast costs the equivalent of an M&S sandwich at home. Check out the video of us with our brunch buds!
Sofie enjoys the home comforts of cooking curry or dhal some evenings. Sometimes we order in pizza, Mexican or Vietnamese. I am as lazy as ever and enjoy eating and occasionally clearing up after Sofie though she disputes this!
Appartment
One of the best things about living here is our lovely apartment. We live in a split level penthouse with great views from our terrace. We are in District 4, a small island, in the middle of the Saigon river. Saying we live in this part of Ho Chi Minh usually elicits worried glances from Vietnamese people we tell. It is also known as the
District of Thieves and the HCMC mafia live around here somewhere. The area is prime real-estate now and is quickly being developed as a more up-market residential area. Unfortunately this is displacing real communities of low-rise housing lining the river in every direction. Buildings are thrown up quickly to replace these ‘ghettoes’. I suppose we are part of this development by living here. We have yet to really explore the local area fully
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Cooling off under a sprinkler. it's so hot here now that the wet season is over. but it is a very different Ho Chi Minh to the city where most people are living.
As our flat came semi-furnished we decided to get some furniture made. If there is one country in the world to get good reasonably-priced handmade furniture it is Vietnam. IKEA have a huge factory as do many Danish furniture companies. We bought a king-size bed, dining table and chairs, shelves, cabinets, desk and various other storage all for about $500 US. It’s all bamboo and rattan now - how colonial!. Add in a few pieces of lacquer art, a painting from Kieran and Hiromi, our framed travel photos, DVD, TV, karaoke combo and we are set up very nicely indeed.
The apartment is very bright but also hot as hell as it is south-facing. Our terrace has a few plants but it can be quite windy out there at times and they are still adjusting. Still, I am greening my fingers and trying to do something about my carbon footprint at the same time by adding some O2 and taking away some CO2.
We have also employed a girl to come in for five half days every week. She
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Ping up a tree... helps with the apartment, cleaning, watering plants, shopping, paying our bills and doing ironing. Yes, it is nirvana. I’ve changed my tune about hiring someone to help us. She works about 50 hours a month and earns what some Vietnamese doing similar work earn in 200 hours or more. We are happily contributing to Vietnam’s high inflation now.
Down Time
While Sofie masters the Vietnamese language in the evenings and has enrolled on an Open University course I have to think about what I am going to do with my evenings. Kieran and I had been managing a few games of tennis a week when I first arrived but our schedules don’t match like they used to. We play soccer most Saturday’s and are trying to get a regular thing going at the University where Kieran works. Apart from that I get 15 minutes of exercise with the kids at school every day. I have run the 15 flights of stairs up to our apartment a couple of times and done laps of the building we live in, but this is occasional rather than frequent.
As I mentioned above, taking the camera out is a bit of a
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Soaked: RongPing, Trisha, ZaoChi (l to r) lottery, especially on the bike. But there are places to visit and snap. I haven’t done much but will make more effort in the months to come. Saigon is a really vibrant city and really when you know where you are going it’s a photographers dream. That’s what I like about Saigon -
it’s a real city. There are more beautiful places with nicer temples and less traffic but they are full of tourists and don’t reflect Vietnam or Asia the way Ho Chi Minh City does. This is the throbbing heart of Vietnam even if Hanoi is still the head.
Evenings, at the weekend, we eat out, go for beers at some of the more trendy places but can easily kick back at Vietnam’s great Bia Hoi street-side joints where dried squid and counterfeit cigarettes are delivered to your table while you sit. It’s easy to get lazy here. Plenty do. Life is easy and there are plenty of people want to learn English and that doesn’t look like changing any time soon. With 85 million Vietnamese, most of whom are young, education is key. Whether it is the street kids wanting to pick up some words of
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En garde! Minky.. English or the rich-kids learning so they can go to University in Singapore or Australia they all want qualified teachers who are native-speakers like Sofie and myself. Long may it continue.
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