First week of bootcamp

It's Saturday morning and I just woke up with a bit of a hangover. I've finished the first of my four weeks of CELTA training, but this weekend won't be the two-day oasis of repose and refreshment I'm craving—only a chance to catch a quick breather before climbing back onto what is proving to be a grueling 26-day obstacle course.

I had imagined the CELTA course to be this: Me, sitting at a desk, listening to lectures on education theory, classroom methodologies, pronunciation difficulties specific to Vietnamese ESL students, tips on coping with culture shock. In my imagination, I was taking notes, contributing my own brilliant ideas, and asking questions about how to get a good deal on an apartment and where to buy one-a-day vitamins. After a week or two of lectures, discussions, and observations of experienced teachers, I would be given some opportunities to team-teach (me with a trainer in front of a class, then me with another trainee in front of a class). Finally, in the last week, the fledgling would leave the nest and fly solo in the classroom. Weekends would be spent doing short reading/writing assignments and partying with the other trainees.

Here's the reality: Me, one of ten trainees bombarded with a blizzard of important printed handouts to be read "when we get a chance" and forms on which to make a detailed record of everything we observe, do, or plan to do. From the very first moment we're in constant motion, being lead through a rapid sequence of kinesthetic learning experiences in which almost nothing is given to us outright by the trainer, almost everything is suggested or elicited using pictures, gestures, and examples. The trainers are mirroring the same multi-sensory kaleidoscope of activities they expect us to use to engage our students' interest and extend their understanding and skills.

The very first day, Monday, we meet our students and watch our trainer take them through a one-hour lesson. That night, after an eleven-hour day at school, I eat an apple for dinner and then stay up until long past midnight preparing a detailed lesson plan for the next day. I'm exhausted but too keyed up to really sleep. On Tuesday I teach my first 40-minute solo lesson to 8 bewildered intermediate students while being observed and evaluated by a trainer and four peers. Classroom management turns out to be harder than it looks. I bomb, but my peers mistake my zombie-like exhaustion for aplomb under pressure and award me a few style points. On Thursday I teach again. I bomb again. I would be having a better run if the students would just speak English.

Every weekday is jam-packed from about 8:00AM to midnight, a nightmare of non-stop input sessions, teaching sessions, teacher observation, peer observation, student observation, observation feedback sessions, written assignments, and lesson prep.

Lesson preparation is particularly time-consuming. It involves searching books and Web for suitable text and visuals, printing, photocopying, cutting, pasting, photocopying again, etc., while developing, writing, and memorizing a detailed step-by-step plan. It requires such meticulous planning and structuring that it currently takes me about 6 hours to prepare one 40-minute lesson.

Our classrooms are on the 6th floor, the trainees have a workroom on the 5th floor, the trainers' office with resource books is on the 4th floor, the teachers' workroom with the photocopy machine is on the 2nd floor. There's an elevator, but it's quicker to run up and down the stairs all day long. When the power goes out and the AC goes off, it's sweltering.

There are 10 trainees. We are 4 Americans, 2 Aussies, a lovely girl from Wales, another from the Philippines, another from the Netherlands, and a man from Bangladesh. All except the 4 Americans have significant previous classroom teaching experience. I'm the oldest one by far but everybody has been a little surprised to learn how far. Last night Wales, Netherlands, Texas, Colorado, and I joined Philippines and James from Sydney in a drinking tour of the Old Quarter.

We started with a few beers at the Bia Hoi Corner—a small street intersection mobbed by international backpackers where you can sit in a crowd on a plastic chair, drinking beer siphoned into your glass through a hose, and watch more beer drinkers doing the same on the other 3 corners of the intersection. In the street is a non-stop parade of motorbikes, tourists, street vendors, and colorful sights like the guy playing a flute (not badly) with his right nostril and the lovely young Vietnamese girl sporting six-inch incandescent (battery-powered) red devil horns on her head.

We had more beers at Mao's Red Lounge in an upstairs room reminiscent of a hookah bar in Charlottesville (the Twisted Branch). We moved on to a place called Beer Minh where, on a comfortable large terrace overlooking the street, we ate, drank more beers, and watched the human carnival on the street below. We finished—or at least I finished—the evening at Dragonfly, a club that had an actual hookah bar upstairs and downstairs a pool table, a tiny dance floor, and a DJ spinning American hiphop and pop tunes like Sean Kingston's Beautiful Girls. I ran out of gas around midnight and headed home alone.

Picture this: I'm slightly drunk and walking all alone down a dark, narrow street. I'm only vaguely oriented as to direction. The street curves and then forces me to choose a turning. I'm wandering through a maze of tiny streets in the Old Quarter of Hanoi. It's well after midnight. In any other city I'm sure I would feel some apprehension (certainly true of Oakland, but also true of Charlottesville and Cheyenne). In Hanoi I feel quite safe. I can see dim figures crouched in the shadows—a man holding a sleeping child in his arms, a family sitting around a low table having a late supper on the sidewalk, two old women sharing a glass of tea. I turn the corner again into a darker street deserted except for two tiny women sweeping up trash. I can hear a murmur of voices floating down from tiny terraces and dimly lit windows.

Eventually I work my way back to Hoan Kiem lake where it doesn't take long to hear a voice say "Hello, motobi". It's too late to catch a bus, so I agree to take my first xe om ride back home (to Vincom Towers). Before getting on the bike, I negotiate a price of 20,000 dong with the driver. He only knows a few words of English but he's eager to try them all out. He covers most of the ten minute ride with his head turned round to me saying things like "shee kah goh" and "wah sheen tone" and when I confirm the place name by repeating it he nods his head vigorously and laughs maniacally. Reaching our destination, I offer him a 50,000 dong note and remind him of the price we agreed on. He pulls out his wallet and looks in it, but won't pull out any bills until I hand him the 50,000. Then he hands back one 10,000 note. I shake my head and remind him of our deal. He feigns absolute bewilderment. Then he tries to show me how hungry he is. Then he goes back to pretending not to understand a word I'm saying.

In the end I got him to fork over another 15,000, but I was tired and let him slide with an extra 25% (30 cents). At my hotel I found the doors locked and three of the hotel employees sleeping just inside the door on a mattress on the floor, surrounded by their motorbikes. I had to pound hard 10 or 12 times on the glass before one of them woke up and let me in.

Physically, I'm feeling much better, though my state is still a soup of mild rib discomfort, itchy insect bites, severe heat distress, mild diarrhea, brain overload, high anxiety, and sleep deprivation. Gordon Heavyfoot seems to be gaining weight, but I'm losing it (no appetite on the days I teach, too little time to eat on the others—plus the diarrhea).

There's a great many more things I want to tell you about, but I just don't have the time. I have assignments to research and write and a lesson to prepare for Monday. I'm already a little anxious about the time I've lost writing this blog entry. I'll fill in more of the details three weeks from now. In the meantime, drop me an email or post a comment to let me know there's still a world outside Hanoi.

A gift from Phuong

Do you remember the ants I mentioned in my August 20 entry? The ones the size of chiggers wearing tiny bamboo hats? Not only did Gordon not take care of this infestation, but I fear the infestation may have taken care of Gordon. I've seen neither hide nor tail of him in days…but I've seen plenty of those ants. I think the AC may have driven them to take up residence in the warmest spot left in the room—the interior of my new Toshiba laptop. Whenever I try to type something, they come boiling up out of the keyboard and swarm across the monitor on their little motobi's.

I've awakened to the sound of pouring rain several times since I've been here, but yesterday was my first chance to go out wearing my rain poncho. On the street there were rain ponchos as far as the eye could see. All my eye could see, though, was my expensive Ecco shoes getting ruined as I plashed along the potholed sidewalk. I'm thinking I should have left the Eccos home and brought the duckboots.

Humidity can be less than 100% when it's raining (look it up), but when it's raining and the humidity and the temperature (in degrees Fahrenheit) are both over 85, an extra waterproof layer is not welcome, trust me on this. Before I plashed from my hotel to the corner I was puffing like a fat man in a steam cabinet. I had to throw off the poncho and continue down the street with the poncho twisted around my head and thrown over my shoulders like an Arab keffiyeh. All in all, I'm finding Vietnam a very hard country to stay dry in.

My CELTA course will be starting tomorrow morning. If the course is as intensive as it's rumored to be, I may not have much leisure for blogging in the next four weeks. Before I go all quiet on you, let me try to correct any impression I may have given you that Hanoi is nothing but one laughable vexation after another. Please remember that I'm a self-confessed curmudgeon and consider it almost a duty to sneer, laugh, or whine at just about everything. But there's a lot to like about Hanoi that I haven't mentioned yet.

A few good things, just off the top of my head:

- Since I've been in Hanoi I've heard no hip hop or rap music, no fast talking radio personalities reading those ads with the stupid 100-mile-a-minute disclaimers at the end, and not one single instance of the f--- word.
- I've seen no graffiti!
- Despite all the visible poverty, urban decay, and pollution the city smells better than New York.
- It might not be a universal pattern, but I see multiple generations (grandparents, parents, teens and toddlers) eating, shopping, and hanging out together as a family to an extent not seen anymore in the US.
- On practically every street corner you can find two men playing Chinese chess with half a dozen kibitzers looking on.
- Many if not most restaurants place a bowl of extra napkins and a container of toothpicks on your table before the meal starts.
- A restaurant check is not brought to your table. When you're ready to go, you get up and pay at the register on your way out.
- You may tip if you think the service is exceptional, but a tip is not taken for granted.
- There is no sales tax.
- Here's the best one: Everywhere you go, people make eye contact with you and smile—this goes for old people, young people, men, women, children, policemen—even teenagers. This feels like the friendliest town I've ever been in.

When I was taking photos in Lenin Park today, I noticed a group of young people milling about some sort of crafts display. One of them approached me and naturally I expected a sales pitch. But to my surprise, the young woman merely invited me to take a photo of the display and in turn have my own photo taken in front of the display. Then she gave me, as a gift, a figure made of rice reeds and paper. Maybe it was a marketing ploy—turn the customer into a friend, since a friend may buy what a customer will not—but I shook hands with Phuong and all her colleagues and then they all, though I offered no money for the reed figure, gave me a warm and friendly sendoff with my gift. Tomorrow I'll take the figure with me to Language Link and get my friend Ninh to decipher the words written on it. Could it possibly say: "This person is a skunk. He accepted a gift and gave nothing in return"…?

Please don't dynamite the books

When I mentioned to Kevin, an Englishman who works at Language Link, that I was writing a blog, he said a perceptive thing: "Ah, yes, good idea. It's those first impressions that are the most valuable." It's taken me some time to see what he meant: as the days go by, Hanoi has begun to look less and less exotic, i.e., more and more normal. Disparate features—conical bamboo hats and ATMs, bicycle taxis and escalators, pig's feet boiling in a pot outside a Givenchy salon, are starting to blend and average themselves out in my mind. I can see now that eventually the odd, extravagant details will become mere embellishments on a pattern not that different from the one underlying any large city anywhere in the world. Even novelty has an expiration date.

In the meantime, though, let me share a few more of the weird, wacky things I'm seeing with my beginner eyes:

A moment ago, while returning from a run around Ho Bay Mau, I was privileged to witness a prize-worthy display of daring and totally irresponsible recklessness on a "motobi". I had paused a moment to allow a man to emerge from an alley with a wooden case of bottled beer (36 bottles). The man posed the case on the seat behind a motorbike driver. It was a narrow seat, the case heavy, its perch precarious. The heavy beerload tilted to one side and I instinctively stepped forward to catch it, but the driver reached back with one hand and managed to steady it. Meanwhile, the first man had gone back for a second case, which he now stacked on top of the first. Still reaching back with one hand to steady the wobbly stack of beer, the driver gunned his motor and putt-putted off into a heavy flow of swarming, honking vehicles.

When I returned from my run on Wednesday, I passed what I thought at first was another ten-foot wide hotel, but a large sign announced it to be a campus of the University of New South Wales. (That would be an Aussie school.) I couldn't resist stopping in for a minute to drip on their floor and inquire whether they had a library at all. As I expected, there were no Aussies about, but I was given the address of a rumored library on Pho Trang Thi (Trang Thi Street). I went there yesterday and discovered…hurrah!…the relocated National Library.

You'd think that a National Library, relocated, would be relocated into a brand new building, but this five-story building was at least fifty years old and may have been at one time a public secondary school. The first floor was given over to an open reception area and card catalogs. The second floor appeared to be special collections and reading rooms. The third floor had a large, nicely appointed Korean Room with a few hundred books, presumably in Korean, plus several rooms apparently not in use. The fourth and fifth floors had student study areas—dozens of tables and about 18 computer work stations—but no more than a few hundred shelved books. I went up and down the stairs several times, exploring each hallway in search of the main book stacks. There didn't appear to be any more books in the joint than the thousand or so books distributed throughout the reading and study areas. I did locate one reading room—the Friendship Room—which appeared to be devoted to foreign language publications. It was closed, but I could see a few shelves of books through the window. Library rules posted on a sign by the door included this disquieting admonition: "Personal bags, printed materials, explosives should not be taken into the reading room."

Once around the ho

My broken ribs have knit to the point where I can towel-dry my own feet, cough halfheartedly, and/or sleep through the night with only mild discomfort. The only thing I can't do yet is lie flat on my back (somebody with a working knowledge of anatomy please explain to me why). The true measure of my recovery is that today I went for a run around Ho Bay Mau (Bay Mau Lake) in Lenin Park. It's about half a mile from my hotel to the park and about a mile and a quarter around the lake. I've lost a lot in the way of conditioning in the past four weeks, but that's okay because there's not much competition around here. The few runners I saw in the park were either barefoot, wearing sandals, or running in low-cut Keds with missing shoelaces. I passed them like they were standing still. Actually, they were running in the opposite direction, but it was still exhilirating. And it felt good to be sweating in silk shorts and tee shirt instead of in cargo pants and dress shirt. I suppose my pun-loving friend David would consider me now to be a rib-knit sweater.

The Sunday crowds of childen were absent, but Lenin Park seems to get a lot of weekday use. There was a battalion of teenagers in identical blue and white uniforms playing badminton under the trees, rows of fishermen along the lakeshore, and dozens of young lovers making out, each couple on their own private bench, in the shade—aptly enough—of a roller coaster. Small groups of small women in big hats sat here and there on the lawn, cutting the grass with scissors.

Recent newspaper item: A study shows that Hanoi's rivers and streams contain about 600% of the maximum safe level of bacteria plus enough heavy metals and toxins to kill off any fish other than a few freakish mutants. The study found that 50% of the local hospitals make no effort to detoxify the waste they dump into public waterways. This makes me wonder uneasily what the Ho Bay Mau fishermen do with their daily catch.

Gary reports that the DVD movies he bought for a few pennies apiece are worth what he paid for them. Spanglish crapped out about halfway through. Gary returned it to the shop where he bought it and had no trouble exchanging it for another copy, which also wouldn't play all the way through. Same story with Ghandi. Same story with The Deer Hunter. Several other movies did work, however, so the decision to buy or not to buy pirated software from China is not cut-and-dried according to Gary.

Either the rain pouring down outside is being accompanied by thunder and lighting or saturation bombing of Hanoi has resumed. Whatever it is, it's shaking the walls. Gordon Heavyfoot, though, doesn't seem to care. He's patrolling his window with aplomb—and a hearty appetite. My friends, if I could capture the sound of this rain, you'd think it was a waterfall.

Nose flattened against the language barrier

Rather than close down on the weekend, Language Link ramps up—Saturday and Sunday are the two busiest days of a seven day school week. Right now, though, the school is closed for a three day holiday and most of the staff are gone away on buses to Quang Ninh, Vietnam's northeasternmost province. The neighborhood seems deserted now, except for me and the two Gordons…and a couple hundred thousand Vietnamese neighbors.

So I was delighted that Thanh showed up this morning for another friendly status check. He always comes by too early in the day for me to take him out to lunch, but we always have a good conversation and he's patient in his responses to my exasperated questions about Vietnamese pronunciation. Here's the kind of thing I find so exasperating:

The Vietnamese word for 'no' or 'not' is 'khong'. The 'kh' is pronounced sort of breathy like a French 'r' or German 'ch', but that's not the problem. There's an accent mark over the 'o', which is pronounced like the 'o' in 'from', but that's not the problem, either. The problem is the 'ng' at the end. I've heard this word pronounced on a Pimsleur CD and it sounded like 'come'. Several phrasebooks and dictionaries I've consulted render it phonetically as 'kawm'. When Thanh says it, it sounds to me like the English word 'come'—or maybe 'kawm'. The point is: it ends with an 'm' sound.

But when I repeat the word, Thanh shakes his head no.

"The 'ng' has an 'm' sound," I say.

"No," says Thanh, "It doesn't."

"Say it again," I tell him, and he says quite clearly: "Come". I can see his lips close the way lips do when you make an 'm' sound.

"Come," I say, and Thanh shakes his head no.

"Ng…ng," he demonstrates with his lips apart.

"Cung," I say.

"Yes, that's it!" he says delightedly. "Come."

"You're not saying 'cung', Thanh, you're saying 'come'. I can see your lips close at the end of the word."

"Come," he repeats.

"Come," I say. He shakes his head no, endlessly patient but not wanting me to fall into bad speech habits…like him.

I have this kind of laughable communication difficulty every day with hotel and restaurant staff. When a young boy name Thu came to pick up my laundry I tried to make him understand that I didn't want to pay the extra charge to have my pants and shirts ironed. Pantomime seemed to confuse Thu even more than English, so I led him to the telephone and indicated that he should call Hung, who mans the front desk and understands a little English. Thu made the call but instead of passing the phone to me, he summoned Hung up to my 4th floor room and then hung up the phone!

When I ordered a beer today, the waitress asked me if I wanted a bottle of beer. Assuming the alternative would be a glass of draft beer, or conceivably a can of beer, I told her no, no bottle. She was dumbfounded. She asked me to confirm that I wanted beer.

"Yes," I said. "One beer."

"In a bottle?" she asked.

"No," I said. "No bottle."

She couldn't believe it. "You want beer?" she asked again.

"Vung," I said. "Yes."

"Bottle?"

"Khong," I insisted. Or maybe what I said was "Come."

She called over the headwaiter who continued with me in the same vein for several minutes before I came to my senses and agreed to have beer in a bottle. It all ended well with smiles and good cheer all around.

It's supposed to be cooler this week, but don't ask for corroboration from me. I still can't walk from my hotel to a café two blocks away without arriving in a serious sweat. While I eat my com heo xao dua (stir fry pork and pineapple with rice), I can feel sweat rivulets trickling down my sides and I lean away from my plate to keep my wet sleeves from dripping on the table. Later, when my shirt has dried over the back of my desk chair, salt deposits will cause it to look as if a tailor has marked it up with chalk for alterations.