Language Link

I may have overdone the twisting, lifting, carrying, and walking yesterday. When I went to bed last night I found I still couldn't lie down and could no longer even lean comfortably against the pillows. The muscle spasms had returned and I was forced to resume taking my Vicodin. I finally dozed off around 2 AM and slept on and off until 6 AM. The sounds of honking horns and crying children faded away during these pre-dawn hours, but were replaced by the sounds of trucks, heavy equipment, pile drivers, jack hammers, and cats in heat. This city never sleeps. Speaking of heat, the temperature might have fallen off to 79F during the night, but the humidity remained pretty constant. I never once pulled the sheet over me or even thought of doing so.

After a breakfast of fruit, cheese, and leathery bread in my room, I stepped out to the terrace to take some photos. In a tiny courtyard three stories below me a chubby boy of 11 or 12 appeared, totally naked and unselfconscious. He filled a plastic basin with water from an outdoor faucet, squatted over the basin and proceeded to wash his bum with a rag. His mother appeared briefly, patted him on the head, and went back into the house. Later in the day I spotted a rat—a large one—sneaking across the same courtyard.

Somewhere a bird is whistling. I've been hearing it since I moved in. It doesn't sound like a bird so much as a human burglar signalling his accomplices with phony whistled "bird calls". I was suspicious at first, but the whistling went on for hours yesterday evening and has resumed again this morning. I'll try to get a photo of the specimen for Fred. I also heard a male tenor singing opera last night. Definitely not a recording, as the voice stopped and started at irregular intervals.

So far I haven't seen a single spider, cockroach, or snake, but there's a tiny gecko who lives behind my wardrobe. I call him Gordon.

I met an American woman at the supermarket today. She has lived in Hanoi for six months, likes it, but couldn't tell me where to find a pharmacy. The supermarket is in a highrise American-style indoor shopping mall—six floors of clothing boutiques, watch boutiques, perfume boutiques, jewelry boutiques, chain restaurants, and video arcades. But there is no pharmacy, no bookstore, no DVD/CD store, no gym, no movie theater. The supermarket carries no sponges, no paper towels, and no plastic bags. I bought a small plastic tub with a lid to keep my bread out of Gordon's clutches. Also, a fruit knife, some rolls of toilet paper I hope will be softer than the cheap stuff provided by the hotel, a plastic plate decorated with a picture of an ancient Vietnamese temple, a package of toothpicks made of plastic or fish bones (I can't tell which), and a washcloth with which to cool my fevered brow and sponge my sweaty body throughout each steamy day and night.

Around 3:30 in the afternoon I received a phone call from Hung, the hotel desk boy, asking (in halting English) if it was okay to clean my room. I told him I was about to take a shower and then go out, so could the cleaning be done after 4:00? He said yes, so I began my shower. As I was towelling off, I heard the sound of a key trying to unlock my door. I wrapped a towel around my waist and opened the door to find two startled maids standing in the hallway. I asked them (while gesturing) to go away and come back (another gesture) in 10 minutes (I held up ten fingers). Then I closed the door on their puzzled expressions. This was my first personal confirmation of something several guide books warned me about—the Vietnamese will assure you they understand what you're telling them, even if they don't.

Language Link, the school at which I will be training (and, very possibly, teaching) is three blocks from my hotel. You're walking along the street—the sidewalk is blocked with hundreds of parked motorbikes, piles of dirt, bricks, and lumber, and people squatting on tiny stools—trying to avoid getting run over while casting glances at the row of low-ceilinged storefronts. In an American city they would be storefronts, and in fact some of them hold piles of strange-looking vegetables, or hundreds of grimy, used cell phones spread on blankets, or a girl with a paper mask over her mouth cutting the hair of a boy perched on an overturned bucket, but a majority of them hold something even more ambiguous—a stack of bricks and a pile of sand, behind which a woman and a child sit on a sofa watching television, or half a dozen motorbikes in various stages of repair, buckets of tools and parts, and a man standing at a stove cooking dinner.

Then, suddenly, the row of storefronts is broken by some wide stairs going up to a modern glass-fronted building. Inside the glass front are rows of plastic chairs filled with young people waiting to be processed by one of six young women sitting behind a long table at individual computer stations. This is Language Link.

I ask to see Malcolm Young, the director of studies, but he's away. Instead I'm introduced to Kevin, a short middle-aged Brit with a foghorn voice, who takes me up to the second-floor teacher's lounge and hands me off to Evan, who, with his broad grin, looks like a young Hemingway. Evan shows me a wall of resource material available to all teachers and points out a small section of books on teaching methodology. He pulls out 5 or 6 items of interest and I ask if I might stay and look them over. Language Link is air-conditioned and most of the dozen or so people here in the teacher's lounge are speaking English. I'm in no hurry to leave.

During the next three hours I take notes on an interesting article about how English differs from Vietnamese and which of those differences give Vietnamese students the worst learning difficulties. At the same time I'm soaking up the atmosphere of the teacher's lounge and making the acquaintance of some of the teachers. All of them, without exception, strike me as attractive, intelligent, friendly, and fun. They are all busy grading papers, preparing lesson plans, culling resource materials, photocopying worksheets, and so on, but they still find time to ask about Evan's holiday, how John's new apartment is working out, make up songs about Sierra's love life, indulge in some goodnatured teasing, and share some chocolate with the new guy (me). I like it here. I like these people. Each of them has a plastic tub in which to keep colored markers, glue sticks, crayons, flash cards, etc. It's the same plastic tub I just bought to serve as a bread box.

It gets dark in Hanoi around 6:30 these days. When I finally left Language Link around 7:30 it felt quite late so I skipped dinner and went straight back to my hotel. I supped on bread and cheese and went to bed early.

Once again I had the experience of feeling considerably worse at bedtime than during the day. I still couldn't lie down or even semi-recline with any comfort. The sheets were clammy and any pillow I leaned against felt like a heating pad set to maximum heat. I dozed fitfully. Then around 3:00 I heard what sounded like steam escaping under pressure. I couldn't tell if the sound was coming from outside my window or from the hallway. I thought at once of the giant beercans on the neigboring rooftops. I can see five or six of them from my terrace. They look like 100-gallon silver kegs of beer but probably just maintain water pressure for each building. I was thinking one of them might have sprung a leak but I couldn't imagine how the noise could be so loud. The noise faded gradually over the next minute or two, but then came roaring back and I suddenly realized I was hearing the sound of a hard rain. I gathered up all my ribs and crept onto the terrace and marveled at the suddenness with which the clouds had released their contents.