What do the Spice Girls, Shakespeare and Mr Bean all have in common? They are all my student's answers to the question "What do you know about the United Kingdom?"

Now I have never been known for my nationalism, but I can't help but despair at this bizarre picture of my country. And my city, London, which I feel much more strongly about, has been reduced to a glorified roundabout - Piccadilly Circus.

I have tried to think up positive things to tell all the expectant faces staring up at me, but all I can come up with is the traffic management system, which is hardly inspirational. I now cycle to Hanoi University of Technology, where I am teaching, and I arrive having scarcely escaped the grim reaper every day.

Everything else about Vietnam I love - the noodle soup which is eaten for breakfast, lunch and dinner; the whole streets dedicated to selling photocopied money to "sacrifice" at the pagoda, and the people who meet you on a plane and then insist on showing you round their city.

That was Phuong Anh, who was my tour guide today - we prayed at the pagoda together (the first time I have even pretended to pray since Primary school), went cosmetic shopping through aisles and aisles filled with whitening moisturiser, sure to make me look like death, and ended up having hot chocolate on a boat in the lake.

I did not ask her which British artists she knows, for fear of running into Mr Bean again, but she did tell me about some famous Vietnamese - Uncle Ho was obviously number one, and "his teacher" Lenin.

If only the Spice Girls and Mr Bean had such great beards.

Bagpipes in Saigon, Happy Valentine's Day.

We are on the roof of our hotel, looking at the higgedly piggedly sprawl that is Ho Chi Minh City. Buildings jostle for space as the motorbikes swerve in and out of each other on streets below. Valentine's day is big in Vietnam. Couples speed through the city, the women side saddle in their dresses or ao dai. They are hurrying to the park in the centre, the one place it appears that the vietnamese tradition of not showing public affection does not apply. But we are up above, trying to get to grips with the heat, the pollution and the views, and yes, the Scotsman in our group is living up to the stereotype and playing the bagpipes.

Front page news: "Roses sell out on Valentine's Day", reads the Saigon Times. So for now we are dependant on our Amercian TEFL teacher for news. The classes are going well though, and are proving a real insight into Vietnamese life. On the first day, our teacher asked the pupils who had been in a traffic accident, and surprise surprise, all of them had. Traffic doesn't stop here.

Tomorrow we fly to Hanoi, and I am looking forward to the drop in heat, the slower traffic, and finally becoming Hanoi Hannah.

"What you are about to say is distinctly lower middle class," my boyfriend's dad interrupts his wife. We are having a discussion about how certain words can denote one's class. In particular, how faux posh words mark one lower middle class with upper class aspirations. For example, scone, the traditional English accompaniment to tea with the vicar, I pronounce "scon" but if I were lower middle class I would, rather pretentiously, call it a scone, rhyming with bone.

As we move on to grape scissors, (apparently these are special scissors for cutting grape branches off the stalk, so as to avoid an unsightly tree like structure dominating one's fruit bowl), I think about how growing up somewhere means one can instinctively understand the country's customs, and even place them within a very specific section of society. And I wonder how I am going to cope in Vietnam, where the dominance of different religions, “communism”, and a dramatically different history, could make negotiating their customs a minefield.

I have tried to get to grips with these anxieties by reading "Culture Shock: Vietnam", which provided me with some very useful, if hard to remember, rules about what colour and what type of gifts are appropriate for whom, and at what time of year. Above all, I remember that the golden rule is that if you want anything off anyone, bring them some fruit.

However in between this I was distracted by the book's insistence that if you are going to live in Vietnam you are going to hire at least one maid, a cook, a driver, and a security guard. And of course, leave your children in an English boarding school eating scones.

This book was written only ten years ago. While I was prepared, even with my backpacker budget, to be rich in comparison to most Vietnamese, I certainly won't be hiring staff. I wonder how it feels not only to have the west's businessman locking themselves away from you in guarded compounds, but also to have the west's teenagers using your country as a playground to "find themselves".

I really hope that through teaching English I’ll be able to find ways of getting to know some Vietnamese people, and break through these barriers. I want to make friends with my students and fellow teachers; and only resort to the backpacker trail when I am in desperate need of some home comforts. So I'll be filling my pockets with fruit, rather than scones, however you pronounce them.