Leaving Saigon

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So, my time working in Vietnam has come to an end. The last few months have been incredibly busy, hence why I haven’t really been updating the blog. Also, school really has been the same old same old, with nothing really of much interest to report. My weekends too are normally spent recovering from the long week, and not really getting up to anything exciting – just trying to relax and recover ready for Monday morning.

Although school has been tiring and hard work, I have really enjoyed the challenge. After teaching kindergarten in Korea for a year, I was beginning to feel like my brain was beginning to waste away a bit. I loved teaching the little kids, but it never really presented me with much of a challenge. Teaching in Saigon has been at the opposite end of the scale. These kids are ridiculously smart, and I’m often only a lesson ahead of them – particularly in Biology and Chemistry. This has often resulted in them asking difficult questions which I can’t answer, and have to tactically be turned around to get them to find out the answers for themselves as their homework! In general, the behaviour of the Vietnamese students has been excellent. Normally, the most annoying thing is just them talking in class, which is easily dealt with. I did however have two classes which were a bit more difficult to teach as there were a few students in each class who would cause problems. This was made a million times worse by both classes being combined into one massive horrific class, who were almost impossible to control. Unfortunately there were a few ringleaders in the class who just didn’t want to be there, didn’t care, and led some of the others astray. This job is difficult enough without having to deal with kids like that! My respect for teachers has grown exponentially – how teachers in England survive I don’t know. Especially when I think back to how they got treated back when I was in school! They all deserve medals for the work they do, they definitely don’t get enough respect!

Another job I was given to do was to write a play based on something to do with Science for the Grade 8’s to perform at the end of the year. This was going to be performed in a 4000-seater stadium in front of not only a few schools from the city, but their parents, some of the government ministers, and the vice-president of Vietnam. No pressure on me to produce something good then… In the end I ripped off a version of the English TV show ‘Blind Date’, where the contestants were elements from the periodic table, and they had to find out information about each other to see if they would go well together. Unfortunately, this was deemed by the management to be too risque, had too much double entendre, and if there were going to be important people around there couldn’t be anything to do with love or dating. So I had to change the whole thing to the ‘Find a Friend Show’. As it happened the whole thing got cancelled anyway and all that work was for nothing! Typical Vietnam!

Anyway, I have learnt a huge amount from this experience, from organisation (on a completely new level!) to teaching difficult and complex subjects to students in their second language, and I’m so glad I had the chance to teach here.

As I mentioned earlier, my weekends have normally been spent relaxing and trying to recover from the previous week. Long lie-ins, coffee by the river, and eating at some of the many good restaurants found in Saigon is the name of the game. I have occasionally managed to get out of the city though. One weekend, me and my girlfriend headed to Can Gio – a mangrove forest not too far from Saigon. We went with a tour group, and as there isn’t a huge amount to see at Can Gio, they dragged it out by taking us to a swimming pool by the sea for the morning. Although that doesn’t sound great, it was fairly relaxing…The afternoon was spent going through the monkey forest and feeding the monkeys (where there were also some particularly upset looking black bears in a very small cage), and going crocodile fishing. This involves dangling a piece of meat tied with a piece of fishing line to a long stick, and holding it above the noses of the crocodiles until several of them will leap out of the water and try and snatch it. If you’re quick, you can pull the meat away just in time. When they do get it though, they don’t let go – those things are strong! Eventually the line snaps and it’s game over. After that, we took a speedboat through the mangroves to an old army base. The ride was so good, the driver was going full pelt down these narrow waterways, then throwing the boat around 90 degree bends right at the last second!

Some good friends of mine from Korea, Tom and Claire, also came to visit for a few days which was great. It was a good excuse for me to take them to all my favourite restaurants, coffee shops, and secret places I’d discovered over my time in Saigon. We also went on another trip up the Mekong Delta, much the same as the first trip I went on, but enjoyable all the same.

Living in Saigon is intense. It is complete sensory overload, 24/7. You are constantly bombarded by the roar of thousands of motorbikes, the ceaseless energy of everyone’s daily life that assaults your eyes, the relentless heat and humidity, and not forgetting the pollution. Yes, you can even taste the air! Add to this the long hours at work of preparing lessons and experiments, organising equipment, marking tests and homework, and meeting with the parents, and it was beginning to leave me more and more drained as the weeks went by. The expat scene in Saigon is a lot more varied than Korea. There are people living there from all over the world, in many different jobs, old and young. In Korea, if you saw a young foreigner, it was more than likely that they were a teacher. In Saigon, it’s anyone’s guess. However, I feel that expats always fall into one of two categories. Of course this is generalising, but I feel on the whole it’s fairly true. One group are the kind of people that are excited about living in a new culture, learning about the country and the people, and experiencing a new way of life. The other group are the people running away from something. They want an easy life, constantly moan about how things work in the country, and just want to live as they would at home, but without the problems they have left behind. Unfortunately I found Saigon had a lot of people from the latter group – much more so than Korea. Vietnam doesn’t have the stringent checks that Korea does when foreigners come to the country, as it’s possible in Vietnam to work on a tourist visa. I frequently have had to put up with listening to people moan about how it’s annoying how the Vietnamese sometimes pay less than foreigners. Trying to explain to these people that we are earning ten times the amount the Vietnamese are, and the prices are more than fair, rarely makes a difference. As another example, one of my friends from work got stabbed one weekend trying to stop a guy from hitting a waitress repeatedly in the face. Not by a Vietnamese guy, but a Western guy off his face on drugs (my friend was OK after a few days in hospital). Saigon has a lot of drifters – Westerners that have been washed up and have nowhere else to go. They can earn money fairly easily, and everything is so cheap they can live a good lifestyle. I have also had to constantly battle with people (foreigners once again) trying to split me and my girlfriend up by spreading lies and rumours about me which just aren’t true. It can be quite stressful at times, and I get quite fed up with it. I have never experienced anything like it at home, and I don’t believe that these people would behave in the same way if they were back in England.

My decision to leave has been a difficult one, as there have been a few different factors involved. Fairly soon after moving to Saigon, I met an amazing Vietnamese girl, Dung (pronounced ‘Zum’), who I began to spend a lot of time with. Her English was perfect - often correcting me on my grammar and leaving me to look up words in the dictionary later - and her attitude to life was spot on. This was a Vietnamese girl with such huge ambitions and drive to succeed, and we got on like a house on fire. I know many people have stereotypes about Westerners dating Asian girls (particularly in South East Asia), but one thing I have learnt when travelling is that people are just people everywhere you go. There may be some cultural differences, but as long as you can communicate well and get on, then it's no different to dating a girl back home. We began to spend more and more time together, and after a while we ended up dating. As the months went by, I realised I had a problem. I knew that I had to begin my career in civil engineering sometime in the near future – if I left it too long then I knew that the opportunity would pass me by, and I would never end up doing it. On the other hand, I was really falling in love with this girl, and wanted nothing more than to stay and try and make it work. It was a confusing and difficult time, as I wanted to make the right decision. Did I go with my head, and choose the career path, the path that would give me security in the long term? Or did I go with my heart, and choose to live a life more unknown and risky, but get the chance to try and make a go of our relationship?

Eventually, the decision was made a bit easier. As a flight attendant, she had been offered a job working for Aeroflot in Russia, and would be moving there soon, as for a Vietnamese girl this was an incredible opportunity. As gutting as this was, it made the decision a lot more clear-cut for me. Without Dung there, there wasn't really anything left for me in Saigon. In the end, I was offered a job with Mott MacDonald based in Bristol, beginning at the end of September. Dung would be leaving in May, and so I decided to also leave in May, and spend a few months travelling before I came back to the real world in England. Having to leave like this has been really difficult. Having to split up because we will be in different places in the world, and not over a real reason, has made it so much harder.

Anyway, after going to Borneo for a few days, I arrived back in Vietnam and set off travelling on the same day. I’ll write another blog about my trip through Vietnam in the next week or so.

So my travel plans for the next few months are as follows: Vietnam, Laos, Northern Thailand, Malaysia, Singapore, Sri Lanka, Dubai, Iran, Turkey, Eastern Europe, Belgium (for my cousin’s wedding), and then back to England around the end of August. So, I will have about a month before I start work – start clearing your diaries as I will be making an effort to come round and pay visits to everyone I haven’t seen in the last two years!

Anyway, as always I hope all is well at home! And keep me up to date on what you are up to!

Love Ross x

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Comments

[Home and Away]

What a year!!!
Thanks for the informative wrap up. And sorry to hear that your relationship didn't work out, even though your decision to start your career in civil engineering was made easier. As a civil engineer I think you made a difficult but good choice. And who knows...your paths may cross again. My son also found a girl friend while teaching in Bangkok. Now he will be in law school in the UK and she will be in Thailand. Not sure how that is going to work for him or her.

[Ross Parker]

Thanks for your optimism - I hope so too! I have just read a book called 'The Dragon Apparent' by Norman Lewis, who travelled through Indo-China in the 1950's. It's a great book with some interesting stories - he talks about travelling through Dalat and I seem to remember you saying that you were at school there in the 50's? Maybe you have read the book - if not it's definitely worth checking out! I bet you have some great stories from Vietnam during that time - reading the book made it sound like a fascinating place!