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.

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.

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?

"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.

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?

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.

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?

"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.