Hanoi Hannah

2006-06-12T02:21:00.000-07:00

Pho Bo for the city streets
Pho Bo for the hip hop beats
Pho Bo, oh I do believe,
Pho Bo is all we need...

... my students were very impressed with my Vietnamese version of Blue's "classic" - One Love.
Pho Bo is beef noodle soup and for many Vietnamese it is literally all the need. They were also the only people over ten to ever have been impressed with the fact that I have actually met, and been kissed by, members of Blue (at 14 and I didn't want it even then, honest). This was my way of leaving a lasting impression of just how cool a teacher I was.

My last week of teaching is over and while I didn't exactly go out on a musical high (witness "My heart will go on" at karaoke with my students and the macarena out clubbing with the other teachers), it was a high. I spent most of the week throwing sweets at my students, receiving presents (a hankerchief and a 16 greatest love songs cd, anyone?) and gorging myself on six course ice cream meals.

We also got into the routine of being shown off to students parents: take off shoes, go in, smile and say "ciao ba ba" which we think means hello dad, sit down, eat a bit of what is offered, pose for a photo and voila - out in ten.

But when I rolled my bicycle back into the university for the last time, told my class they could leave, and walked down the street alone, I cried.

But I don't regret a minute of it.

2006-05-11T13:58:00.000-07:00

For Richer, For Poorer

I am swimming in a private outside pool in the mountains above Hanoi. We had been invited to the University Principal's "European style" country house. Earlier, we were shown around a neighbouring artist's house which George Bush is to visit in November, where I was distracted by the incessant urge to place booby traps everywhere. After the swim we drunk wine, a rare luxury, by the pool and were served fruit by his "staff". Later, we were wined and dined back in Hanoi at an expensive seafood restaurant. (The rather predictable reason for all this extravagance from a man we've never met? Our manager from Britain was here).

The next day the bubble that is the Vietnamese upper class life, burst. At least for us, as we learnt that my fellow English teacher's Vietnamese boyfriend was hospitalised after a motorbike accident. She found him screaming as he was bundled down the corridor on a metal stretcher, having had no painkillers since he was found on the roadside five hours before. Blood was pouring from the cuts on his head, soaking the pillow when he finally got one for his bed without a mattress. Judging by the five other patients sharing the tiny room, there would be no one to clear it up.

It is a world away from the international hospital we would be sent to if the same thing happened to us. A bright, white, air conditioned clinic with magazines and toys for children, and yes, adequate medicine.

Living here means you build relationships with people here, and the harsh contrasts in your lives, even when you are in this country as a volunteer teacher, and he is a doctor's son, are incredibly hard to cope with. As are the contrasts between the increasingly rich Vietnamese upper class, who are reaping the rewards of the IMF reforms and can afford the international hospital, and the public hospitals whose resources have been cut to ensure their prosperity.

2006-04-29T04:15:00.000-07:00

The graves stretch on, line after line. The red and yellow stars look sombre here. The Dien Bien Phu cemetry shows the great sacrifice the Viet Minh made to overthrow the French.

And outside? On the grass in front of the cemetry the young people of Dien Bien Phu are learning to ride motorbikes. Older women shout and point at them as they skid all over the place in the rain.

Everywhere in Vietnam things are moving on. When I first arrived here someone asked me "What is the first thing people in England think of when they think of Vietnam?" and I had to answer, the Vietnam War. (He first thought of tennis when he thought of England, a surprising change from football).

But the Vietnamese are careering towards the future, at breakneck, if uneven speed. And many see the future as the West. Some parts of Hanoi could be London or Paris, and even in the countryside the wooden huts are populated with satellite dishes.

Sometimes it is hard to remember how poor people here are, and when I find myself slipping into health and safety mode - lamenting the massively overcrowded buses (I'm talking three to a seat) or the lift where I live which has to be pulled up by hand whenever it breaks down, I try to remember that I don't want to paint the West as paved with gold.

Because its not, and if it was, why would I be here?

2006-04-24T16:37:00.000-07:00

"I'm not looking for condoms, I'm looking for UHT milk," yelled my roommate Clara.

She is describing a scene in the not so aptly named "Western Canned Foods" where as we'd finally given up the luxury of gone off fresh milk (no freezer motorbikes as yet me thinks), she was searching for the UHT variety. However, due to the rising AIDS problem in Vietnam, and the fact that Vietnamese condoms are less than reliable, Western Canned Foods is more concerned with importing Durex.

This could be handy though, as after two and a half months here, some of my fellow teachers have Vietnamese boyfriends. Already boyfriended myself this was not going to happen to me, but it does provide an interesting insight into Vietnamese relationships. Within five days, one friend was told that her beau was in love with her, cheesy text messages are very much the order of the day, so are, of course, the obligatory trips to the lakes and park (following the rule that no kissing can take place unless it is within five metres of water or grass, and preferably on a motorbike or a swan pedal boat).

This makes me wonder whether they are just more open about their feelings and quick to fall in love, or they are doing it to keep the English girl status symbol on their arm, or even whether it is just the failiure of English teachers like us to teach them more suitable vocabulary?

However one teacher is being introduced to her boyfriend's family, and in a country where a woman over thirty is considered unmarriable, and I am regularly asked if I have children... who knows where it could lead.

Not to mention that he's a student at our university.

2006-04-23T21:37:00.000-07:00

The streets are alive with the flapping of Vietnam flags

Suddenly one Saturday morning they all appeared. Every house, shop, and even the buses had red flags. The yellow stars shone across Hanoi. In England, the only explanation for this would be some national illusion that we might win the football. In Vietnam, we looked to the Voice of Vietnam.

Not yet fluent in Vietnamese (ahem to say the least) I turned to my Vietnamese friends to explain. Apparently that morning the Voice of Vietnam, not much heard around central Hanoi (disturbs tourism to wake people up at 5am) boomed out of loudspeakers and ordered everyone to put out their flags.

But why? The Central Committee are coming to town. They also warrant: new flower beds around the lakes, huge statues reading "Dai Hoi X" - Central Committee Congress 10, balloons making Ho Chi Minh's mausoleum look eerily like a Quiditch pitch and talent shows featuring monkeys standing on their head.

See this I don't really understand. A big government meeting in Britain might warrant a banquet, and some limousines, and basically too much money being spent - the aim: to look rich and important. But what exactly is the Central Committee's aim with the acrobatic monkeys?

2006-04-23T04:38:00.000-07:00

It finally happened. The inevitable traffic accident.

There I was riding along returning to the University for another lesson. The rain was beating down and I had just crossed a terrifying junction, but other than that life was merry.

Suddenly a motorbike whipped in front of me, the driver's rain poncho caught on my bike, pulled me along and knocked me into a puddle. I was smothered in rainwater, grit and bricks.

He pulled me out and was on his way, leaving me to stumble down the road alone to get help at the university. I limped along bleeding and crying.

Except it just really wasn't that dramatic and now, four days later, all I've got to show for it is grazed knees. But I can't say I'm that disappointed.

2006-04-18T19:27:00.000-07:00

And so I find myself wearing a conical hat. Not just any conical hat, mind, but a red and yellow, Vietnamese flag conical hat.

Of course, I have become accustomed to being laughed at. We get laughed at simply for being westerners, the laughing becomes hysterical when we ride bicycles, and side splitting because we wear helmets. However this was a different kind of laughter, an almost approving laughter as we donned our vietnam gear to support them at the football.

It was Vietnam v. Australia, or as we were getting into the spirit of it - Viet Nam v. Uc. Of course the Australians with us were less amused at our vietrnamese chanting, but everyone else in the stadium was on our side.After living here for two months it is amazing how similar it felt to an English match. But there are still some differences - we drunk beer, but out of plastic bags, there was no hostility, only bewilderment, and of course instead of an England baseball cap I had donned a conical hat.

Similarly, at the other mass gathering I went to this week, Easter Sunday at the Cathedral, everything was so familiar - the European built church, the shepherd like Bishop and priests' outfits, the amens and the hallelujahs - but there was also the buzzing of the fans, the hymns and sermon in Vietnamese and the ubiquitous plastic stools.

I am starting to wonder what it will be like when I return to England, will I find it hard to cope with being somewhere familiar yet different? Will I freeze? Will I long for a plastic stool? And most importantly, will I walk out in front of the traffic and get run over?

2006-04-02T21:10:00.000-07:00

"A tortoise!" I squealed as I once did when I found an orange in my christmas stocking as a child. Looking back, I'd say a tortoise in my classroom was perhaps more shocking than an orange in my stocking.

Of course, there wasn't just a tortoise, that lesson I'd already told B12 to put away four mobile phones and three mp3 players, that they'd brought a tortoise to my class was just the icing on the cake.

Although I might wax lyrical about the wonders of teaching it is true that sometimes, as I stand in front of B12 with my teacher's "you must be quiet or i'll be scary" face on, I would rather go back to bed. Their English is poor, but their parents aren't, as they stump up the $200 a term fee to go to the university ($50 is the average monthly wage in Vietnam). In fact, I encounter much higher standards of English on the street here; people whose immediate livelihood depends on it master English without much if any education.

Last weekend I went to Sa Pa, a market town in the Northern mountains famous for their ethnic minority population. Even with the onset of tourism, these people still live a near subsistence life, with little formal education for their children. Yet their English far outstrips that of B12, who'd rather be playing football in the corridor.

Before I arrived here, I thought that the students would be very well behaved, eager to learn, and that maybe I'd feel ashamed of the people who don't make the most of (the good bits of) the British education system. While many of my classes are perfect examples, there are some, like B12, who make me want to kick them out on the street to sell postcards or embroidery, and give that tortoise to a little girl in Sa Pa.

2006-03-26T19:19:00.000-08:00

Sand in the Sandwiches

And in between my toes, and ears, and even in my asthma inhaler (and therefore my lungs). But when you wake up, the only people on a huge white crescent of a beach, that itchy scratchy feeling just fades away.

All day I had been asking myself why we hadn't taken a tour. Was it because I was too snobbish to join with the fat Americans ("I live here you know")? Or was it because I was scared of not being in control of my own time, or not getting the trip I wanted? We had waited for two and a half hours on the dock, haggling for a boat trip through the maze of jagged karsts that is Halong Bay. We had eaten in a little restaurant by the sea, idyllic until the rats came out. But it was when the people on the tour were piled into an overpriced characterless hotel in Cat Ba Town, while we set off over the hills to the beach that I knew we had won.

We were the only ones braving the beach campsite, sleeping in a little tent, raised from the ground to protect us from snakes; and the only ones eating at the beach restaurant, piles of fresh seafood as the sun set.

Ok, it was cold and damp and sandy, but it was ours.

2006-03-22T23:33:00.000-08:00

Nowhere in Hanoi is more symbolic of historical change in Vietnam than the Hoa Lo Prison. Nicknamed the Hanoi Hilton by the POWs kept there during the American War, it was built as a prison for nationalist natives by the French colonisers. Now all that remains is a small museum, overshadowed by Hanoi Towers, where expats can have a serviced appartment, office and a western supermarket under one roof. In short, never be confronted by Vietnam.

Having tea in a cafe by the Cathedral today, I overheard Mr "I used to work for the World Bank", ranting about the need to educate the Vietnamese in jazz. This caught my attention as I, in fact, went to a Jazz bar last night. I had asked a Vietnamese friend to take us to see jazz, and she took us to Minhs - where she was the only Vietnamese person apart from the waiters. We had all wanted to experience Vietnamese jazz, of which there is apparently, a lively scene. But like all the Vietnamese I have met, she thought, thanks to the inhabitants of Hanoi Towers and the like, that foreigners want to stick together.

This makes me appreciate teaching even more. I spend all day every day with Vietnamese people, and I never come home without learning something, however small. This week I have learnt among other things, that there is a Ho Chi Minh youth organisation that all teenagers must join at 14, that they are celebrating there 75th anniversary on Sunday which is why I was subjected to three hours of my students singing and dancing with kids from "the Vietnamese version of the Mickey Mouse club", and most importantly that if the lights don't work in the classroom try the switch next door...

2006-03-09T20:14:00.000-08:00

"Yesterday, all my troubles seemed so far away..." Well, except that that was me crankily crooning after having the mike thrust in my face by class C02. Yes, we were at kareoke, and up to that point I had cunningly managed not to sing. But "Yesterday" is a Vietnamese favourite, and what better than having an English voice to sing it, especially if she is your very embarrased teacher.

So that was how my Women's Day continued. I went back to class, and was then cajoled to kareoke with whatever English they had. In England, they would have used a few beers to prepare me for such an ordeal, in Vietnam I had a fizzy orange. Not really the same I feel...

In fact I was fizzy oranged out by the end of the night as after kareoke I went dancing with Phuong Anh and her colleagues. So I proved that I could neither dance or sing, but I did find out why her colleague's English is so good - they translate HBO and the Disney Channel into Vietnamese.

Apparently sometimes they are not given scripts and they cannot work out what people are saying so "I think maybe you can help...?"

I can just see me trying to explain steamy scenes in Sex in the City and Desperate Housewives...

2006-03-07T17:43:00.000-08:00

The streets are lined with flowers. Big gaudy bouquets wrapped in shiny foil and brightly coloured crepe paper, with the occassional sparkly twig florish. Today is International Women's Day, and while it may only get a mention in a girl's school assembly at home, here it is big business.

I say big business because, perhaps not surprisingly, it is not used for the Vietnamese "communists" to talk about equality of women, but for the Vietnamese capitalists to make money out of selling flowers, cards and even underwear. It is like a second Valentine's day, and mother's day rolled into one, and I am surprised Clinton cards hasn't thought of this in Britain.

However I am doing quite well out of it. I have had flowers from my classes, big lilies and pink roses, vibrant gerberas and purple carnations, heather and dainty daisies. I have also had a present from the university - a small bag in a (ahem) "Gucci" box.

Across the hallway from where I sit in the university, the office staff have downed work and are putting make up on each other for Women's Day. Its like those twelve year olds' sleepovers all over again.

The Women's Day party that I have just got back from (where I was the special guest of class B02) was not unlike a children's party either. Except the only thing that looked like jelly was the bowls, and the food was a decidedly grown up hot pot of beef and tofu, vegetables, and for some unknown reason liquorice. Mm. We all sat on the floor of my student Hien's living room, looked down upon by a Buddha wrapped in cellophane to stop it getting dirty, and listening to dodgy English pop music. And, somehow, I couldn't stop smiling.

2006-03-05T19:49:00.000-08:00

"Vietnam..Ho Chi Minh.. Mu Nam Mu Nam."
(Vietnam..Ho Chi Minh..Viva, Viva)

There had to come a day when we would pay homage to "Uncle Ho" who peers down from above our blackboard, paying more attention than most of our students.

So we rose early, as Ho, being Vietnamese, keeps early hours. In fact, last entry to the mausoleum is at an ungodly 10.15 am. We cycled like mad to the other side of the city, and so concerned were we about being too late for Ho, we stumbled across the path in front of the mausoleum. Two steps later the whistle was blown and we were confronted with one of the stormtrooper like guards that protect their father Ho.

Luckily once we had been shunted round the corner, and had all our bags, mobiles, cameras and other new fangled things that Ho might not have approved of removed we were allowed into the line. Most of the people who go are Vietnamese, and it is a very somber occassion as you march up into the marble hallway, reminiscent of many a five star hotel, hands out of pockets, eerily silent and feeling you have stumbled upon a cult.

Ho had been well and truly tangoed. The Russians, whom he goes to for repairs three months of the year, had not done a very good job. He did not look human, and while perhaps that was the aim, as he now has a God like status, I am pretty sure they didn't want him to turn into the God of orange fizzy drinks.

2006-03-05T19:35:00.000-08:00

Five go to Ninh Binh.

The students had exams and for once that didn't mean us. So we packed up and left Hanoi for Ninh Binh, two hours south. Three weeks ago I hadn't ridden a bike since I was a child, but soon, like a scene from Enid Blyton in the rice paddies; only without the ginger beer, we were cycling 46 km a day.

We went to Kenh Ga Floating village, where children as young as three seem to row their own boats, with their feet, of course, like everyone in Kenh Ga. We went to the Tam Coc caves (yes we basically choose these places for their funny names) and the Cuc Phuong National Park, where we trekked through the forest, our guide's Westlife songs blaring from his mobile phone, disturbing the monkeys for miles around. Call the R.S.P.C.A, I say.

2006-02-23T20:34:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-02-16T19:16:00.000-08:00

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.

2006-02-08T02:20:00.000-08:00

"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.

2006-01-24T11:15:00.000-08:00

She's shaking the books. I am sitting on the bookshop floor staring up at Leonie. Lonely Planet and Rough Guide seem to be in a shaking competition. "Why are you shaking the books?" I venture. The answer is, of course, to see how heavy they are. Silly me. After months of planning and dreaming over the adventures these books contain, practicality has kicked in and it has now become an issue of weight.

Stanfords, the travel bookshop in London, is as far as we're going together. I am, as my doctor scarily put it "a teacher", that is, I'm going to teach English in Vietnam. Only just out of school myself, and with a week's TEFL, the hat doesn't fit just yet. But I've bought my stickers, little prizes and english books and I'm going to land "like mary poppins in a jungle" (thanks, Jack) and impart my language.

Except I'm not going to the jungle, but the urban jungle that is Hanoi. A place where you get woken up by government loudspeakers rather than monkeys, drink bia hoi rather than rainwater, and eat, well, snake and dog. I'll keep you posted on that.

Leonie is going to "do" south east asia - Japan, Malaysia, Thailand, Cambodia, Laos and then when she's absolutely shattered come and travel with me in Vietnam.

This all began about a year and a half ago, when buried under A level work, we signed up to the gap year phenomenon to dream of a different life. But now, instead of coursework, exams and homework, we have jabs, visas and travellers' cheques to organise. It's three weeks until I go and the enormity of moving 8000 miles away for six months is only just sinking in.

So I'm off to weigh my guidebooks...