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Published: December 9th 2012
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So my year in Korea came to an end and you might be wondering where I am now. Well, I decided to head to Saigon in Vietnam for a while and try and get a job here as an English teacher. Unfortunately it was proving very difficult to find out any information about it on the internet, so I decided to just come here and wing it. Some friends had come before me and gave some good reviews so it was worth a shot! I had a great time living in Korea, and wanted to continue living in Asia in a new culture, and Vietnam seemed like a good choice.
I had a long layover in Shanghai, so decided to make the most of it and head into the city to have a look around. After about half an hour, I befriended these two Chinese girls who wanted their pictures taken, and we ended up chatting for a while. They were really nice and we talked for ages about things, and they said they were meeting their friend at a tea festival and invited me along. Always one to jump at opportunities like that, I agreed and we headed off.
Pretty soon we headed down a small road and into a tea shop, where suddenly little alarm bells started going off in my head - I was sure I'd heard about Chinese girls luring people into tea shops and then getting charged a ridiculous amount of money for tea, and this wasn't a tea festival like they said. But they were so nice, surely not?! So I told them I had no Chinese money as I was only there for the day, and was trying to save anyway. I eventually got out of there, wallet still intact, still clinging to the belief that maybe they weren't trying to screw me over, and I was being paranoid. I headed back the way I came, only to immediately be asked on exactly the same spot to take another girl's picture. Well you can imagine what I told her! I hope she wasn't genuinely asking for a photo... And over the course of the day there was no end of tourists taking pictures of Chinese girls. And there I was thinking how good I was at making friends and travelling on my own! I've since heard stories of people getting charged thousands of
dollars for these 'tea ceremonies', even being marched to ATM's to empty their bank accounts!
Shanghai was cool though, it was nice to go to their temples and see a totally different culture, and the architecture was stunning. I wandered around the 'City of God' temple, the old shopping street (which may have been the worst smelling place I have ever visited in my entire life), and the YuYuan Gardens, as well as checking out the night time view of the Bund. I've never really seen the appeal of China in the past, but it definitely gave me a taste for it, and I think I would like to go back and explore the country more at some point.
I arrived in Ho Chi Minh late on Monday night, and pretty much immediately set about trying to find teaching work. I managed to get two interviews organised for the next day, one for teaching maths and science, and the other doing a bit of public school work along with some private tutoring. Couldn't have been easier to get the jobs, I accepted the latter job as it gave me much more flexibility, and by 2pm that afternoon got
a call saying I had a job in a school at 4.10pm that day. It was high school kids, 40 of them, and I had been given next to no material and no preparation. I quickly threw together a Powerpoint presentation, and went there hoping for the best. The headteacher's instructions were to 'teach them some nouns and verbs'. Nice specific lesson plan there. It was honestly one of the worst hour and a half's of my life. Nobody listened to me, they all talked the whole way through, and I had next to no material to even work with. I spent the whole time pointing at things in the class room asking what they were, and racking my brain for things to talk to them about, not that it mattered as most of them weren't even listening. They would even just get up and walk out the room! Definitely a lot different to working with a small class of less than 10 little kindergarteners. Bit of an eyeopener, but talking to the other teachers there they said they had similar problems at that school. Luckily for me that was just a one off class, because there was no way
I was putting myself through that stress again, I don't need the money that much!
Vietnamese public schools work slightly differently than public schools I've come across elsewhere. They only receive about 20% of their funding from the government, and the rest has to be raised in other ways, usually from the parents. So for this reason, they often try and cram as many students into one class as they possibly can. The most I have heard of is 80. Can you imagine trying to control 80 little kids at once?!
I started doing part time work thoughout the week at several public schools, teaching kindergarten again. I was given lots of resources, and everything was done online and on the smart boards. Which is great, as long as the electricity is working and the internet is on. If not, then it's time to rack your brains for things to entertain 30 little kids again! So although it was better than my first class, it could still be quite stressful, and involved lots of moving around the city every day.
Anyway, after a few days, the school where they teach maths and science offered me a part
Vietnamese Classroom
That's a golden Ho Chi Minh in the background - bit different to the classrooms in Korea! time job teaching in the mornings, with much better pay. They were also very keen for me to teach full time, and after thinking about it for a while, I accepted the full time position. It is salary based, $2100 a month, they provide all the transport and food, and I realised that actually this was a very good opportunity that I shouldn't turn down. Not to mention that there are lots of exam periods and holidays coming up, which if I was working part time would be unpaid. Instead, I'm getting paid to do nothing! So I am currently teaching maths and science to Grades 7,8 and 9, and I'm really enjoying it. The level of English is extremely high, in a lot of cases the kids are fluent. So it's really nice to be able to have a conversation with the kids (something other than 'can you think of any
a words?'😉, and it's great teaching subjects that I know a lot about. The company also helped me to find an apartment, it's brand new, pretty swanky and only costs $290 a month all in!
Saigon is nuts though. The traffic is ridiculous. Crossing the road is
like real life frogger. It seems like suicide, but the only way to cross the road is just to step out and not worry about what is coming. Which is difficult when there are 600 bikes and 4 buses coming at you full pelt, but somehow they all seem to avoid you. So far anyway, fingers crossed! Due to the large amount of tourism here (I'm surprised there are any people under the age of 25 left in England, they all seem to be here), Vietnam seems to be much more open to foreign influence than Korea. Definitely don't get stared at nearly as much! Really enjoying the food here too, there is so much international cuisine as well as Vietnamese food. Plus everything is so cheap. I can get a big meal, dessert, and a couple of beers for about £3. Weird things I've seen and done so far include seeing about 5 prostitutes(?) beating up a guy in a bar with planks of wood and steel pipes because of an argument over whether he'd had 2 or 3 beers; people carrying the most ridiculous things on motorbikes such as fridges and huges panes of (transparent...) glass; people falling
off their bikes left right and centre; and eating eel soup (not good).
It's an exciting place to be, and I'm looking forward to spending a bit of time here and seeing as much of the country as possible.
I hope you are all good, keep me updated on what's going on with you! Miss you all, especially now it's coming up to Christmas - it's really weird it being so hot at Christmas time! It's a first for me!
Ross x
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Home and Away
Bob Carlsen
I hope you make contact with your fellow Travelbloggers who also teach in Vietnam...
Cockle [blogger=46288] and Rat on the Road [blogger=23681] are just two of many. I am looking forward to reading your impressions of Vietnam and teaching there. I was a student at a school in Dalat from 1956-1964, and last visited there with my son in 2009. My son loved Asia so much that after college he went to teach in Bangkok.