Well, I DID figger it out.....finally.....
OK - as mentioned in the most recent post, there was some rather weird activity on my Blogger account in terms of certain people looking at the page.
As I suspected, I was correct -
It turns out that somebody launched a spam-bot program on mine and several other people's blogs which places spam adverts on the "comments" section of blog posts. Thusly, if you happen to look at blog posts I have posted many months ago, you will find thee best place on the Internet to buy high-quality, yet inexpensive, handbags.
Cute, eh?
Ahhhh....whatever......
In any respect, I'm heading outta Hai Phong shortly.....dates for the E Winter 2009-2010 U.S. Tour are below (pronounced in an obnoxious New Yawk accent):
December 10th - December 15th: Portlandia, Ora-gaaaan
December 16th - December 19th: Las Vegas, Nevaaaada
December 20th - January 1st: Buffalo, New York
January 2nd - January 4th: Lexington, Kentucky
January 6th - January 12th: Portlandia, Ora-gaaaaaan
January 15th - End of tour party: Hai Phong, Vietnam.
More tomorrow from the airport.....
-E-
Monday, December 7, 2009
Saturday, November 28, 2009
SORRY ABOUT THE DELAY........
There appears to be some dodgy shit goin' on wiff my blog. Until I can get more information....I'm gonna refrain from posting forra bit.
(No, it's nothing life-threatening or dangerous!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just did a bit of research regarding this blog, and something weird is going on that may involve hacking and/or spamming......so until I find out WHAT exactly is going on.....please stay tuned)
Which kinda sucks - 'cause I had a fair amount that I wanted to write......but all in good time....
Thanx,
-E-
There appears to be some dodgy shit goin' on wiff my blog. Until I can get more information....I'm gonna refrain from posting forra bit.
(No, it's nothing life-threatening or dangerous!!!!!!!!!!!!!! Just did a bit of research regarding this blog, and something weird is going on that may involve hacking and/or spamming......so until I find out WHAT exactly is going on.....please stay tuned)
Which kinda sucks - 'cause I had a fair amount that I wanted to write......but all in good time....
Thanx,
-E-
Monday, November 2, 2009
Random Blatherings.....again....
Sitting at the the only Wi-Fi Cafe in a town whose name I don't even remember (Cẩm Phả or something like that – about 20 miles East of Bai Chay/Halong City) at what appears to be thee only public Internet spot in this town. The Internet is not working, they tell me......guess I'll write this and cut-and-paste it into blogspot later. Still though, an OK margarita in a glass with salt and a little umbrella for 30,000 Dong (about $1.70USD) makes up for this place's lack of Internet......
It's an interesting-looking cafe....a kind of décor that's a mixture of bright orange and mustard yellow and avacado green vinyl booths (unintentional retro attempt at something that was hip in the mid-90's) and tables that have thee ugliest lavender-and-brown-and-white chairs in recorded history.
Sitting at the the only Wi-Fi Cafe in a town whose name I don't even remember (Cẩm Phả or something like that – about 20 miles East of Bai Chay/Halong City) at what appears to be thee only public Internet spot in this town. The Internet is not working, they tell me......guess I'll write this and cut-and-paste it into blogspot later. Still though, an OK margarita in a glass with salt and a little umbrella for 30,000 Dong (about $1.70USD) makes up for this place's lack of Internet......
It's an interesting-looking cafe....a kind of décor that's a mixture of bright orange and mustard yellow and avacado green vinyl booths (unintentional retro attempt at something that was hip in the mid-90's) and tables that have thee ugliest lavender-and-brown-and-white chairs in recorded history.
Damm me – I sooo wish that I had brought my camera. Instead, I brought my new laptop so I could watch The Bills-Carolina game in my hotel room in Bai Chay (and they won back-to-back road games....Christ, will wonders ever cease??).
But it's got these bizarre, little miniature sharks in an aquarium on the wall....dunno whether these are baby sharks, or if they only grow to a maximum of one foot long.
WAS gonna go to Hanoi (Geographically, thee closest thing to Hai Phong that MIGHT count as a “real” city), but I figgered that I MIGHT have three, four weeks left of decent beach weather this year, so I went to Bai Chay.
Left Bai Chay this afternoon because I was tired of being someplace I'd been four, five, six times before and had I known that Tam was gonna tell me to take Tuesday off from the school, I woulda went to Da Nang this weekend (Vietnam's fourth-largest city and a place that I have never been to and I really want to see – ESPECIALLY with an 800,000VND [$50USD] round-trip airfare from Hanoi airport).
So, when I got the info that I was relieved from work Tuesday, I wasn't sure what to do. Anytime away from Hai Phong is a nice time, but Bai Chay was getting tiresome, and hanging out at the beach alone drinking Tiger beer (buck twenty-five forra sixteen-ounce bottle served to you ice cold at your beach chair) wears thin after awhile, so when I woke up at 2PM (Bills game ended at 6:00AM Vietnam Time), I felt ambitious! What the hell? Me is gonna ride my scooter to the Chinese border.....maybe try to cross...whass the worst that can happen?
Well, THAT was a quick nix when I got about 40 miles east of Bai Chay/Halong City as the road turned into something that a fucking mountain goat couldn't traverse, and I could only safely manage 20 miles an hour on this road that looked like it never quite recovered from The American War (or, The Vietnam War, as we call it), and the sun was gonna set at 5:30pm, and it was 4:30 now.....and this was a rather narrow road with big-ass trucks and busses all over it.....and with 80-plus miles to get to Trung Quoc (or, as we call it, China)....this really wasn't gonna happen!
So, turned around, and went back to thee nearest decent sized town (Cẩm Phả, in this case), grabbed thee nicest-looking hotel that I could see (which wasn't difficult – look for any structure that's over 4 stories and that appears to be fairly clean) and decided to camp out there for the night. Decent small room with TV, fridge and Air-Conditioning for 220,000 Dong ($13USD) for the night.
And here I am.....
Right...so, let's go with the random blatherings......
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Doing a lot of free-lance work. This is where a group of parents will get their children together for a private class and contract with you to teach them. Being the communist that I am, I TRY to make Tieng Anh (“The English Language”) accessable to as many people as I can by making my per-hour teaching fee reasonable.
Yeah, freelancing DOES pay me slightly more than teaching at an established school, but I don't exploit it. For example, if a group of parents got their children together for a private English Language class taught by a native English speaker from one of the Big 7 (England, Ireland, Canada, The USA, New Zealand, Australia or South Africa) and approached one of the larger, established English Language schools to provide the classroom and the foreign teacher, shit – they are looking at ONE MILLION DONG ($60USD) PER HOUR! Thass about one-third the average monthly salary of a typical Hai Phongian (Hai Phonger?)!!
Then the established school turns around and pays the native-speaking English instructor his or her standard rate of 250,000 Dong ($15USD) per hour, and fucking pockets the rest!
There are some folks that actively DO exploit this, charging 575,000 Dong to 650,000 Dong ($35 - $40USD) per hour to freelance a private class. But because I'm one of only about twenty Americans in Hai Phong (and ten of those twenty don't teach – they work for U.S. multi-national corporations) and because I keep my rates reasonable.....well, work's been knocking at my door.
Hey – it keeps me busy......
Naw, I ain't into freelancing 'cause it pays me slightly more than working at an established English Language school.....nope. I do it because I don't hafta put up with bullshit and politics and back-stabbing and having to wear a shirt and tie and all the good stuff that goes with it that one deals with working for an established English Language school! Believe me, English as a Second Language teachers abroad (and ESPECIALLY in Vietnam) can be a really scary lot. I was blessed in the respect that I got along quite well with most of my fellow instructors (and many of those are still friends of mine where we go out and socialise and the like), but if you wanna see an example of the extreme, check this forum and start reading......Jesus.......
The best freelancing gigs are the one's where your client just says: “Just simply have at it!! Do as you will!” and then YOU create the lesson plan. Established schools have you read “Hoa went to the market” and teach that over-and-over (rote-style learning) from the fun, thrill-packed and wildly creative Government-approved textbook. Still, when I HAVE to teach from that.... I ATTEMPT to make it as fun and interesting as possible.
Sometimes you get kids who want to do nothing but learn....and, well, sometimes, you get a group of kids who are Vietnam's next generation of street-sweepers and panhandlers and herion addicts (a pretty big problem here).....but still – can't imagine what else I'd rather be doing! LOT better than all (except for two) jobs that I've held in the past.....
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
No Internet here in Cẩm Phả ......roads that a M-1 Abrams tank couldn't ride over, and cultural misunderstandings. As my friend (and the guy who was kind enough to cover for me at my school when I was Stateside for seven weeks this past summer) Dave explained to me - “T.I.V.”
...or, “This is Vietnam”
Things work a LOT differently here than they do in, say, The States. I could write volumes about this, but I'll tell you a couple quick examples.
On one freelancing gig, the client and I DID agree on the RATE of pay, but I had made certain that he understood that I wanted to be paid AFTER EVERY CLASS (as, I did NOT know this person at the time, and I also wanted some spending money for the week). Tam passed this information on to the client, and they agreed. Or so I though.....
Apparently, they never DID want to pay me after every class! No, they were NOT trying to scam me, but felt it a bit insulting (somehow) to them that they pay me after each and every class!
I say they “somehow” felt this insulting because A HUGE AMOUNT (like, maybe 75+%) of services in Viet Nam (like class fees/tuition, contractor/construction, and MANY other services) ARE DEMADED to be paid for AND ARE paid for UP FRONT BEFORE the service is provided. So, based on this common practice, I could not understand WHY they felt insulted by my stipulation!
I mean, I have one private tutor student that I have had for quite a while now. What I do is I tutor this student for a month's worth of sessions. Then, the first week of the next month, I send a bill home with this student for their parents, and the student comes back with payment at the next class. I know the student, this student's parents have always been cool......so I bill them after-the-fact (which is standard in The States). Never had anything resenbling an issue.
Anyways, WHERE the cultural misunderstanding came in is directly after I performed my first class for this client. After the class (which was at a Public School way out in B.F.E....and the client drove Tam and I out there so I'd know where it is exactly for next time), when the client dropped us off at my house, Tam and I were getting out of his SUV and I said: “Oh, shit...forgot.....uhhhhhhh.....uhhh....the payment?”
“Oh, yeah.....I'll explain that to you when we get inside” Tam stated.
I almost blew a gasket......smelt a scam coming here.......BUT, I got out of the client's SUV and thanked the client, and walked inside my house.
“Errmm.....Tam? Sure hope you did get my money for this class I just did like was agreed upon?”
“Uhhh....no, actually, it's like this......”
I felt the fun feeling of just having worked for free creep up inside of me and I almost lost it.
“WHAT THE FUCK, Tam? This client AGREED to pay me after EACH CLASS!”
“E, do you want your money now?? Fuck it – I'LL pay you now........”
“Wait....so, I DID get scammed....???”
“No, no.....Jesus Christ.....sit down.......”
THIS is basically what went down: Tam explained it to me that Vietnamese people (AND, from what many sources have told me, Asian people in general) have severe difficulty in saying the word “no”! This is thee most bizarre thing that has ever been explained to me, but it is a fact!! So, when this client agreed to pay me after each class, he actually APPEARED to agree.
This is HOW a Vietnamese APPEARS to agree to something – what occurs is that you are in negotiations with a Vietnamese person. You will put in a condition that the Vietnamese person finds objectionable, but since they have tremendous difficulty saying the word “no”, they will say the Vietnamese equilvent of “Yeah....OK....sure.....whatever....” in a deadpan voice (like we do).
This is NOT meant at all to be disrespectful (unlike how it is used in English – where it disrespectfully dismisses somebody and their intentions and/or ideas), but rather it is intended to make all things during the negotiations go harmoniously and to keep a happy feeling of cooperation. This is no shit – this is a fact! It creates boatloads of misunderstandings between Tay and Viet.....but it IS thee way things are done here.
And what about the Vietnamese equilivent of “yeah yeah.....sure....whatever”?? What THAT ends up meaning literally is that “We'll hash out the details later – I am happy now that we have reached an agreement-in-principle....please do not disturb my happy feeling with what I feel is nit-picking.”
Anyways, this client paid me after the second class and, since I am now doing two classes per week for him, he has paid me after the second class of every week. A good guy, actually, and we plan to expand our working relationship to do even more classes in the near future!
BUT....BUT.....NOW that this HAS INDEED been explained to me, it does make me realise how, in in my past dealings with Vietnamese here, that I was NOT being scammed, but rather, it is the culturally-accepted norm of executing negotiations over here.......
…..which, sadly, begs the question: Does this mean that when an American person enters into an oral agreement with a Vietnamese person in The States, that the American person can change things that they INITIALLY agreed to, because they did not wish to disrupt the feeling of harmony during the negotiations? Or are we just way too litigious and uptight as a society?
Another T.I.V. Moment came when I had two students of mine at my school come up to Tam and I and explain that they could no longer attend out school. When I asked why, they stated that they have to attend another class at this time.
“WHAT other class? Is it another private English school?? Are you unhappy with the way we've been teaching you?”
“Khong! Khong! ('No! No!'). This is a different subject, in a class held by my Public School teacher”
“??????”
Tam nodded and understood immediately!
Basically, Public Schools, their teachers, and how students achieve a passing grade work a LOT differently here than they do in The States.
These two students were victims of the “Sooooo-HOW-badly-do-you-want-to-pass-this-class?” scam!
Uhhh, E?? What the fuck is the “Sooooo-HOW-badly-do-you-want-to-pass-this-class?” scam??!??
OK...works like this. Teachers in Viet Nam command a great deal of respect. Even non-performing ones. And passing classes at Public School and University is not only important, but it brings MUCH dishonour to a student AND their family to bring home an unacceptable grade. There is a LOT, a LOT more societial pressure for a student here not to fuck up than there is in The States.
So why not take advantage of this intense socital pressure and use it to make a few extra Dong?
Soooooo......what Public School teachers do is they teach their normal class during the day (which is EITHER: 7am to 11:30am OR 1pm to 5pm, depending on the grade. Because of severe school overcrowding, older kids go half the day and younger kids go half the day - six days per week) and, in the late afternoons or during the evenings, the Public School teacher will hold a special sort of “helper-tutoring” class.
Oh....and this class is held at an additional tuition/fee.
And you WILL buy your special texts and materials from the Public School teacher herself!! Not from anywhere else.
Now, even if you are Albert-Fucking-Einstein.....you WILL attend these classes.
What?? You feel that you easily comprehend the material in class and you don't feel that you need to attend this “supplimental education”? Or that you have better things to do with your evenings??
Again: “Sooooo-HOW-badly-do-you-want-to-pass-this-class?”
T.I.V., baby....T.I.V.........
More in a few weeks....
-E-
But it's got these bizarre, little miniature sharks in an aquarium on the wall....dunno whether these are baby sharks, or if they only grow to a maximum of one foot long.
WAS gonna go to Hanoi (Geographically, thee closest thing to Hai Phong that MIGHT count as a “real” city), but I figgered that I MIGHT have three, four weeks left of decent beach weather this year, so I went to Bai Chay.
Left Bai Chay this afternoon because I was tired of being someplace I'd been four, five, six times before and had I known that Tam was gonna tell me to take Tuesday off from the school, I woulda went to Da Nang this weekend (Vietnam's fourth-largest city and a place that I have never been to and I really want to see – ESPECIALLY with an 800,000VND [$50USD] round-trip airfare from Hanoi airport).
So, when I got the info that I was relieved from work Tuesday, I wasn't sure what to do. Anytime away from Hai Phong is a nice time, but Bai Chay was getting tiresome, and hanging out at the beach alone drinking Tiger beer (buck twenty-five forra sixteen-ounce bottle served to you ice cold at your beach chair) wears thin after awhile, so when I woke up at 2PM (Bills game ended at 6:00AM Vietnam Time), I felt ambitious! What the hell? Me is gonna ride my scooter to the Chinese border.....maybe try to cross...whass the worst that can happen?
Well, THAT was a quick nix when I got about 40 miles east of Bai Chay/Halong City as the road turned into something that a fucking mountain goat couldn't traverse, and I could only safely manage 20 miles an hour on this road that looked like it never quite recovered from The American War (or, The Vietnam War, as we call it), and the sun was gonna set at 5:30pm, and it was 4:30 now.....and this was a rather narrow road with big-ass trucks and busses all over it.....and with 80-plus miles to get to Trung Quoc (or, as we call it, China)....this really wasn't gonna happen!
So, turned around, and went back to thee nearest decent sized town (Cẩm Phả, in this case), grabbed thee nicest-looking hotel that I could see (which wasn't difficult – look for any structure that's over 4 stories and that appears to be fairly clean) and decided to camp out there for the night. Decent small room with TV, fridge and Air-Conditioning for 220,000 Dong ($13USD) for the night.
And here I am.....
Right...so, let's go with the random blatherings......
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Doing a lot of free-lance work. This is where a group of parents will get their children together for a private class and contract with you to teach them. Being the communist that I am, I TRY to make Tieng Anh (“The English Language”) accessable to as many people as I can by making my per-hour teaching fee reasonable.
Yeah, freelancing DOES pay me slightly more than teaching at an established school, but I don't exploit it. For example, if a group of parents got their children together for a private English Language class taught by a native English speaker from one of the Big 7 (England, Ireland, Canada, The USA, New Zealand, Australia or South Africa) and approached one of the larger, established English Language schools to provide the classroom and the foreign teacher, shit – they are looking at ONE MILLION DONG ($60USD) PER HOUR! Thass about one-third the average monthly salary of a typical Hai Phongian (Hai Phonger?)!!
Then the established school turns around and pays the native-speaking English instructor his or her standard rate of 250,000 Dong ($15USD) per hour, and fucking pockets the rest!
There are some folks that actively DO exploit this, charging 575,000 Dong to 650,000 Dong ($35 - $40USD) per hour to freelance a private class. But because I'm one of only about twenty Americans in Hai Phong (and ten of those twenty don't teach – they work for U.S. multi-national corporations) and because I keep my rates reasonable.....well, work's been knocking at my door.
Hey – it keeps me busy......
Naw, I ain't into freelancing 'cause it pays me slightly more than working at an established English Language school.....nope. I do it because I don't hafta put up with bullshit and politics and back-stabbing and having to wear a shirt and tie and all the good stuff that goes with it that one deals with working for an established English Language school! Believe me, English as a Second Language teachers abroad (and ESPECIALLY in Vietnam) can be a really scary lot. I was blessed in the respect that I got along quite well with most of my fellow instructors (and many of those are still friends of mine where we go out and socialise and the like), but if you wanna see an example of the extreme, check this forum and start reading......Jesus.......
The best freelancing gigs are the one's where your client just says: “Just simply have at it!! Do as you will!” and then YOU create the lesson plan. Established schools have you read “Hoa went to the market” and teach that over-and-over (rote-style learning) from the fun, thrill-packed and wildly creative Government-approved textbook. Still, when I HAVE to teach from that.... I ATTEMPT to make it as fun and interesting as possible.
Sometimes you get kids who want to do nothing but learn....and, well, sometimes, you get a group of kids who are Vietnam's next generation of street-sweepers and panhandlers and herion addicts (a pretty big problem here).....but still – can't imagine what else I'd rather be doing! LOT better than all (except for two) jobs that I've held in the past.....
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
No Internet here in Cẩm Phả ......roads that a M-1 Abrams tank couldn't ride over, and cultural misunderstandings. As my friend (and the guy who was kind enough to cover for me at my school when I was Stateside for seven weeks this past summer) Dave explained to me - “T.I.V.”
...or, “This is Vietnam”
Things work a LOT differently here than they do in, say, The States. I could write volumes about this, but I'll tell you a couple quick examples.
On one freelancing gig, the client and I DID agree on the RATE of pay, but I had made certain that he understood that I wanted to be paid AFTER EVERY CLASS (as, I did NOT know this person at the time, and I also wanted some spending money for the week). Tam passed this information on to the client, and they agreed. Or so I though.....
Apparently, they never DID want to pay me after every class! No, they were NOT trying to scam me, but felt it a bit insulting (somehow) to them that they pay me after each and every class!
I say they “somehow” felt this insulting because A HUGE AMOUNT (like, maybe 75+%) of services in Viet Nam (like class fees/tuition, contractor/construction, and MANY other services) ARE DEMADED to be paid for AND ARE paid for UP FRONT BEFORE the service is provided. So, based on this common practice, I could not understand WHY they felt insulted by my stipulation!
I mean, I have one private tutor student that I have had for quite a while now. What I do is I tutor this student for a month's worth of sessions. Then, the first week of the next month, I send a bill home with this student for their parents, and the student comes back with payment at the next class. I know the student, this student's parents have always been cool......so I bill them after-the-fact (which is standard in The States). Never had anything resenbling an issue.
Anyways, WHERE the cultural misunderstanding came in is directly after I performed my first class for this client. After the class (which was at a Public School way out in B.F.E....and the client drove Tam and I out there so I'd know where it is exactly for next time), when the client dropped us off at my house, Tam and I were getting out of his SUV and I said: “Oh, shit...forgot.....uhhhhhhh.....uhhh....the payment?”
“Oh, yeah.....I'll explain that to you when we get inside” Tam stated.
I almost blew a gasket......smelt a scam coming here.......BUT, I got out of the client's SUV and thanked the client, and walked inside my house.
“Errmm.....Tam? Sure hope you did get my money for this class I just did like was agreed upon?”
“Uhhh....no, actually, it's like this......”
I felt the fun feeling of just having worked for free creep up inside of me and I almost lost it.
“WHAT THE FUCK, Tam? This client AGREED to pay me after EACH CLASS!”
“E, do you want your money now?? Fuck it – I'LL pay you now........”
“Wait....so, I DID get scammed....???”
“No, no.....Jesus Christ.....sit down.......”
THIS is basically what went down: Tam explained it to me that Vietnamese people (AND, from what many sources have told me, Asian people in general) have severe difficulty in saying the word “no”! This is thee most bizarre thing that has ever been explained to me, but it is a fact!! So, when this client agreed to pay me after each class, he actually APPEARED to agree.
This is HOW a Vietnamese APPEARS to agree to something – what occurs is that you are in negotiations with a Vietnamese person. You will put in a condition that the Vietnamese person finds objectionable, but since they have tremendous difficulty saying the word “no”, they will say the Vietnamese equilvent of “Yeah....OK....sure.....whatever....” in a deadpan voice (like we do).
This is NOT meant at all to be disrespectful (unlike how it is used in English – where it disrespectfully dismisses somebody and their intentions and/or ideas), but rather it is intended to make all things during the negotiations go harmoniously and to keep a happy feeling of cooperation. This is no shit – this is a fact! It creates boatloads of misunderstandings between Tay and Viet.....but it IS thee way things are done here.
And what about the Vietnamese equilivent of “yeah yeah.....sure....whatever”?? What THAT ends up meaning literally is that “We'll hash out the details later – I am happy now that we have reached an agreement-in-principle....please do not disturb my happy feeling with what I feel is nit-picking.”
Anyways, this client paid me after the second class and, since I am now doing two classes per week for him, he has paid me after the second class of every week. A good guy, actually, and we plan to expand our working relationship to do even more classes in the near future!
BUT....BUT.....NOW that this HAS INDEED been explained to me, it does make me realise how, in in my past dealings with Vietnamese here, that I was NOT being scammed, but rather, it is the culturally-accepted norm of executing negotiations over here.......
…..which, sadly, begs the question: Does this mean that when an American person enters into an oral agreement with a Vietnamese person in The States, that the American person can change things that they INITIALLY agreed to, because they did not wish to disrupt the feeling of harmony during the negotiations? Or are we just way too litigious and uptight as a society?
Another T.I.V. Moment came when I had two students of mine at my school come up to Tam and I and explain that they could no longer attend out school. When I asked why, they stated that they have to attend another class at this time.
“WHAT other class? Is it another private English school?? Are you unhappy with the way we've been teaching you?”
“Khong! Khong! ('No! No!'). This is a different subject, in a class held by my Public School teacher”
“??????”
Tam nodded and understood immediately!
Basically, Public Schools, their teachers, and how students achieve a passing grade work a LOT differently here than they do in The States.
These two students were victims of the “Sooooo-HOW-badly-do-you-want-to-pass-this-class?” scam!
Uhhh, E?? What the fuck is the “Sooooo-HOW-badly-do-you-want-to-pass-this-class?” scam??!??
OK...works like this. Teachers in Viet Nam command a great deal of respect. Even non-performing ones. And passing classes at Public School and University is not only important, but it brings MUCH dishonour to a student AND their family to bring home an unacceptable grade. There is a LOT, a LOT more societial pressure for a student here not to fuck up than there is in The States.
So why not take advantage of this intense socital pressure and use it to make a few extra Dong?
Soooooo......what Public School teachers do is they teach their normal class during the day (which is EITHER: 7am to 11:30am OR 1pm to 5pm, depending on the grade. Because of severe school overcrowding, older kids go half the day and younger kids go half the day - six days per week) and, in the late afternoons or during the evenings, the Public School teacher will hold a special sort of “helper-tutoring” class.
Oh....and this class is held at an additional tuition/fee.
And you WILL buy your special texts and materials from the Public School teacher herself!! Not from anywhere else.
Now, even if you are Albert-Fucking-Einstein.....you WILL attend these classes.
What?? You feel that you easily comprehend the material in class and you don't feel that you need to attend this “supplimental education”? Or that you have better things to do with your evenings??
Again: “Sooooo-HOW-badly-do-you-want-to-pass-this-class?”
T.I.V., baby....T.I.V.........
More in a few weeks....
-E-
Tuesday, October 27, 2009
SORRY.....SORRY......SORRY.....
Naw, I'm still here....
Been rather busy with routine, uninteresting stuff.....a few new developments...but nothing that is really worth writing about. Hai Phong is a really dull place....and I haf been too busy with woirk to really travel the past two months or so.....
So, I've decided to update and write on this board once every month. Look for a post next week (November 2nd-ish)......
-E-
Naw, I'm still here....
Been rather busy with routine, uninteresting stuff.....a few new developments...but nothing that is really worth writing about. Hai Phong is a really dull place....and I haf been too busy with woirk to really travel the past two months or so.....
So, I've decided to update and write on this board once every month. Look for a post next week (November 2nd-ish)......
-E-
Sunday, September 6, 2009
Random blatherings...........
.....mellowing as I type this at a really nice cafe I first visited in April 2008 on the edge of Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, smoking a 555 and drinking a Singapore Sling.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Ya gotta love a shampoo, conditioner, scalp massage, facial scrub and a haircut, all in air-conditioned bliss......all for 50,000 Dong.....
....or, $2.84 USD.
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Was beginning to write this post at home in Hai Phong a week or so ago when, in mid-sentence, I heard the bell clang repeatedly......
......'member the first time that I had heard this bell - it was my second day in Hai Phong. I was living in a classroom at the school that I used to work for.
"Oh...right fucking on!" I exclaimed. I ran and got my Dong and ran outside. "Cool! Man, I could use some Ice Cream right about now...."
Errmmm........no.
It actually was the street-sweeper.
Street-sweepers here are NOT semi-automatic revolving shotguns, nor these tall, squat white slow-moving vehicles with these big-ass brushes on the bottoms of them. Rather they are just what the name implies: They're these women dressed in lime-green industrial coveralls with a hand towel wrapped around their faces who push a cart around and carry a primitive-looking broom who walk around and sweep the streets for part of the day (hence, WHY the Vietnamese litter EVERYWHERE at EVERY AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITY), and, for the other part of the day, they roam the alleys in front of residences ringing a bell to advise people to hand them their trash. There is no set day or set time - they come by my house, like, three times a day or so.....
......for this privilege, I pay the staggering sum of 7,000 Dong per month.
Thass 40 cents to you and I......
.......I still cannot bring myself to litter - to this day, I'll carry something with me when I'm out until I happen across a street sweeper (usually in less than two blocks or three minutes).
This is an incredibly thankless job, and, from what I'm told, The Government pays 'em absolute shit. So, whenever they ring the bell in my alley, if I've got trash, I'll hand it to them and toss in whatever pop and beer bottles and cans that I've got (usually several) 'cause they can cash 'em in. For Tet, I'm gonna toss 'em a tenner inside the customary red Tet gift envelope (A TEN DOLLAR BILL - NOT a 10,000 Dong note).....
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Vietnamese bill payment is yet another bizarre concept that I've encountered. But, much like the street sweepers and the refusal to go to automation, everybody here has to have a job. So, for your Internet, electricity, water, and garbage collection - you don't get a bill in the mail.
Nope not here.
They come by your fucking house in person and collect it! (Well, no - not THEM personally....but their representative....but still.....).
I had first encountered this shortly after I had moved into my new house back in April. I was walking down my alley towards home when I was approached by this old lady walking a bicycle. She handed me something printed offa an antique dot-matrix printer that I couldn't quite understand.....
....Tam was with me, and she snatched the form out of my hands and stated - "Oh. This is your water bill."
I just kinda stood there for, like, three minutes with a Jerry Brown-look on my face.
Finally, I snapped out of it.
"Uhhh....doesn't that come in the mail? I mean.......like, who is this lady? She doesn't even have a water company uniform on, and...."
"What do you mean, 'come in the mail?' I don't understand....."
"Uhhh....well, like, your utility company sends you the bill in the mail, and you either write out a cheque and mail it back to them, or you pay it on their Internet site, OR, if you are feeling particularly ambitious, you go to their office and pay it in person."
"Really?" came the stunned response.
"Really."
"Oh...well...there aren't many people who actually HAVE chequing accounts in Vietnam....and the same with credit cards. And (as I noticed from the number of people who ALWAYS cut in front of me in the checkout line at Metro and think absolutely nothing of it at all) we don't really like queuing at the water company's office, so this way is more convenient for us."
"Errmmm....yeah....I guess that makes sense....just weird, though....."
This works out to be a bit iffy with me, though, 'cause I don't wake up until, like, 10AM at THEE earliest, and then I'm often off traveling somewhere or at school teaching a class or whatever......by contrast, somebody is inside a Vietnamese household about 99.7 percent of the time.
For smaller bills (like 100,000 Dong and below), the bill-collecting bicycle lady will pawn your bill off on a neighbour, who will pay it, then the neighbour will give you the receipt when you get home, and you pay them back.
The first time I had encountered THIS, I was like - "WTF? WHY is the next-door neighbour handing me this dodgy-looking piece of paper and asking me for money???" But, again - it's just how things are done here.
Larger bills (Internet, electrique, etc.), the neighbour is NOT gonna fork over two-or-three hundred thousand Dong and hope to catch up with you shortly in hopes of recovering it. Naw, you is on your own for that one. I found THAT out the hard way when, after allegedly trying to catch me at home for two weeks after my broadband bill was due, they shut off my Internet ONE DAY after FINALLY leaving a note telling me to pay the monthly tab of 388,000 Dong at FPT's central office.
HOWEVER, the next day after FPT shut off my Internet, they came by AGAIN and finally caught up with me. I forked over the buxx and within, like, four hours, my Internet was up and flying again - no re-connect fee or late fees or ANY of that bullshit.....kinda really liked THAT......
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And, on the topic of collecting money, I was on Minh Khai and I had bumped into a Vietnamese friend of mine that I hadn't seen in a couple of weeks. He runs a bit wild and fast, if you know what I mean, and generally is not the sort I'd want to hang out with on a daily basis.
We had sat down at a coffee shop and, over a few Singapore Slings, we were catching up with each other. I had been deathly sick for a few days last week and had been very busy with the school. He was telling me how he was either at MDM or The Sound Club every other night this past week (which are two of the six Hai Phong nightclubs that blare irritating-ass techno-disco bullshit from every corner of the building). This is a lot less impressive than it seems on the surface, since every business in Hai Phong is required by law to shut down by midnight.
We went on, and I was telling him about how I had to turn down an offer to teach a small class at a prominent local school because they really wanted Tam and I to teach two classes a month (on fucking SUNDAY, can you believe it - leaving me essentially TWO days off per month) at 500,000VND for both of us per 90 minute class - three hundred thousand Dong less per class than they were paying now at another English language center (and we are better quality instructors than what they're getting now). Tam was willing to do it simply for the exposure for our school......but I had told Tam to politely explain to them that, on Sunday, we don't even wake up for less than 800,000 Dong.......
My friend also told me his tales of the week, about how a mutual acquaintance of ours was deathly hungover all day today from too much ecstasy and booze from the night before....and he showed me pictures of his daughter on his iPhone, when I had asked him:
"So ______, what is it that you do for a living again?" (because I never really asked him before).
"Oh, I loan money to people" came the reply.
"Oh! So you work for a bank?"
"No....I just personally loan money to people" he explained "and they pay me back with much more money."
"Oooooh.....OK.....gotcha - you're what we in The West call a loan shark."
So I asked him - "So, doesn't that get the police on you? I mean, isn't that not legal here in Viet Nam?"
He mis-understood the question - "Không. WHY would it get the police involved? I mean, they are borrowing money from me, not from the bank...so if they don't pay it back, I will take care of them, not the police......."
"Whaaaa....? I'm sorry, _____: I don't follow......"
"No, I mean, that I and my friends will take care of things if the person I loan money to does not pay me back.....not the police."
"Right right right.....you'll kneecapp 'em....got THAT part....but what is this about the police and banks?"
"I do not understand. Sorry?? 'kneecapp?' What does this mean?"
I then explained to him the time-honoured American tradition of private money lenders taking a 18-inch metal pipe (or other suitable instrument) swiftly and quickly to the knees of the delinquent lendee.
"Vâng! Vâng!" he stated with a very faint smile.....
"Right. And in most Tay nations, what you do for a living is not legal" I explained. "What I am asking you is if what you do is allowed in Viet Nam?"
"I do not understand - the police do not care about me and who I lend to because I am not a bank."
"Right. But what are you talking about?? I mean, do the police care who the banks lend to? Now I don't understand......"
"What?? Of course the police care about who the banks lend money to."
"Huh? Why??"
"Because if the person who get money from bank does not pay bank back, the police have to know where that person is to find them."
My drink almost fell out of my hand.
"GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!! Are you serious??"
"Of course. So they do not care at all about me.....so, I give person money, they don't pay me back, me and friends find them, not the police. So bank give someone 50 million Dong, that person pay bank 60 million Dong. I give someone 50 million Dong, that person pay me 85 million Dong."
"No shit? Wow.....you see, in America - you borrow money from the bank, and do not pay it back, then the bank says bad things about you to others on your TRW. Then, the next time you need money, and you go to borrow from another bank, the other bank will not give you any money because you did not pay the first bank back."
"What is the 'TRW'?"
"It's kinda like our version of your National Identity Card......."
(ed. note - from what I understand, the police take a sweet kickback for providing this "service" to the banks)
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
I was walking down my alley last week when I had caught, out of the corner of my eye, a rather weird looking fellow. Not weird-looking at all to me, but he looked like he didn't quite fit in with the surroundings and people in my alley....exception being that he wore the older Vietnamese male costume of a white wife-beater tank top and a pair of light blue boxer shorts.......but, wait - something was weird.....did a double-take and finally figgered it out......
....riiiiiiggggght! Right. He didn't LOOK Vietnamese.
I clenched my fists and locked my teeth and spat! What the fuck was THIS??!?
Basically, I do NOT live on Minh Khai (thee place where Hai Phong's twenty or so Westerners live and hang out at), and my alley (pictured below) is a bit hidden and about as non-Tay as they get....and, Goddammit, i LIKE it that way! These are MY Vietnamese.....and I AIN'T gonna share them wiff another Cracker!
My alley - facing East - my house is the pink one next to the bookstore and across the alley from the tarp-shelter covering the pain-in-the-ass tea shop where the unemployed guys sit and hang out and bullshit all day literally four feet from my front door...
Same alley - facing West.....
I mean, I'm sorry, but I am a strict adherent to number 71 on the list! I mean, Christ - WHY do you think I always eat at Chinatown restaurant on Murray and Walker in Cedar Mill (besides the simple fact that the food KICKS ASS)??
Found out later that this guy's name is Eric and was a buddy of my friend Finchy. Met Finchy out for pints one day, and Eric was there. Really nice guy, actually.....but he said that he'd be heading back to New Zealand soon forra while, possibly for good.......
....fine by me - now, can I please have MY alley back???
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Hadta (once again) escape the skull-crushing boredom that is Hai Phong , so I woke up one morning a couple weekends ago and decided to piss off somewhere.....but where?
Hanoi? Naw...been there too many times....no it too well....
Cat Ba Island? Naw....got this fear of accidentally jumping on the slow boat again.
Bai Chay? Nope - was just there with Tam recently.....
Ho Chi Minh City? And what? Hop on a plane for a trip lasting a day-and-a-half? Don't think so....and besides - too many Crackas there.
Well, shit: Where, then?
Time to grab the Vietnam road atlas.
All right - so, I look down the coast for some place that has a little beach-umbrella-and-sunbather icon on it (indicating a beach of some sort....though the quality of these beaches varies greatly). Figuring that wherever I pick cannot be more than 160 kilometres from Hai Phong (again, got, like, a day and a half to spend away from Hai Phong - so, realistically, it'd be maybe a three-hour ride at most), I notice this one site on the map in small print called Thinh Long.
"Damm, that looks kinda out there" I figured to myself. But I figured, since I'd been to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City enough times, and I reside in Hai Phong, that it would be a good time to finally see The Provinces.
The Provinces are basically considered to be ANY AREA outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Hai Phong, Da Nang or Cần Thơ. In America, The Provinces would be called "The Sticks", "B.F.E." or "Wyoming."
So, analyzed the atlas, figured that I'm not looking at more than three hours each way riding hopped on the scooter and took off South.
No worries! Hey....should be 5/8th of the way there when I hit the City of Nam Dinh....cool.
Well, thass when the worries began.
For starters, the road atlases of Vietnam don't have blown-up pictures in the corners of the pages showing a city IN GREATER DETAIL (like Western atlases do). Add to this the fact that in Nam Dinh, a city of about 200,000 inhabitants, there are DEAD-FUCKING-ZERO signs indicating what street you're on OR the direction to other nearby towns and cities. Well, that's OK....the locals know where they're going....no need for signs of any sort!
Moreover, this city has a drainage system that removed water from the streets of the city after a 60-minute downpour about as well as the Yugo provided reliable, safe transportation. So this resulted in several detours.
90 minutes later, I gave up, pulled my GPS out of my backpack, turned on the compass feature, and, ten minutes after that, I was headed out of the city going southbound.
OK....so, I hop on to the road going towards Thinh Long. The atlas showed the road from Nam Dinh to Thinh Long as a secondary road. Now, what the atlas shows as primary roads are the ones that I take from Hai Phong to Bai Chay, Hanoi, etc. and have no worries on.
Cool....so, based on that hypothesis, the secondary roads would maybe be equilivent to Route 5 from Clarence to Batavia, or Highway 6 from Banks to Tillamook. Cool.....
As Bender said in The Breakfast Club - "Not even close, Bud!"
Only half of the distance to Thinh Long was paved (and I use the term "paved" veeerrrry loosely, as there were potholes that would swallow a car in places on this thing). The width of this road was such that two cars going in opposite directions would take about 35 seconds to pass each other. When a bus was coming at you, you basically pulled your bike off the road into the rice paddy so that the bus could pass.
I was warned in Nam Dinh NOT to take the road to Thinh Long....as there could be Viet Cong guerrillas behind any bush lying in wait to ambush me.
The remaining 50% percent of the road to Thinh Long was basically ungraded dirt and some gravel.....ALWAYS a treat to ride on.
Two bicyclists on the road towards Thinh Long.....
It was 110 kilometres from Hai Phong to Nam Dinh, and fifty kilometres from Nam Dinh to Thinh Long.....NOT counting time spent getting lost in Nam Dinh, it took two hours to get from Hai Phong to Nam Dinh.......and two hours getting from Nam Dinh to Thinh Long.
Made it to Thinh Long......
The skooter on the outskirts of town as I approach Tinh Long........
.....didn't know WHAT to expect. Figuring that it was the only beach for miles, there would prolly be a fair amount of activity around this town.
Ahhhh.......no.
It was bizarre - a lot of these folks had never seen a Tay (foreigner) before, and as I rode my skooter down the beachfront promenade (where there is a string of, like, forty hotels and restaurants), people sitting out front were literally almost attacking me - "Khong, Khong! ở lại đây....tốt hotel, tốt hotel" ("No, no!! Stay HERE....nice hotel, nice hotel").
Judging by the severe lack of people about, and the desperation of innkeepers for me to lodge at their establishments, it looked like I was not only the first Tay that they had seen in a long time....but also the first tourist!
Beach was decent....not Oregon standard by any stretch......but I'd say equivalent to Bai Chay and a LOT cleaner than Doson. Still, like any place in Vietnam (or Southeast Asia, for that matter) that attracts tourists (or, in this case, that THINKS that it will attract tourists), there were hookers. BUT they weren't out and openly about like in Doson.
I had discovered just WHERE the hookers were by quite an embarrassing misunderstanding. I had just gotten back to my hotel around 9:30pm from walking the promenade and sitting on the beach after a late dinner. I had noticed that my skooter wasn't out front where I had parked it. I had used the grunt-and-point to the hotel manager/check-in guy/whatever person to ask him what's up with my skooter. He then replied something back to me and showed two fingers and I THOUGHT (with my absolutely piss-poor understanding of the Vietnamese language) I understood him to say something like "We got you're skooter inside and it's twenty thousand Dong for parking it inside" (which is standard in Vietnam). To this, I stupidly nodded my head and gave the thumbs-up sign.
Well, ten minutes later.....imagine my surprise when a scantily clad girl knocks at my door and walks in and starts rubbing my Dong.
Oooooh........Oooooooh.....OK - NOW I get it - he was telling me that, for two hundred thousand Dong, I could have a girl sent up to my room......ahhh.....right.......
So, thee only way to get rid of this girl was to shrug my shoulders and pull out my pockets and try to explain in my horseshit grasp of the Vietnamese language that I haf no money.....
....this worked, but not before she used her version of the grunt-and-point and pointed to her cell fone and wrote down her number on a piece of paper, and pointed at me and made a fone-call gesture with her hand and her ear.
I told her - "Sure thing, Babe....give ya a shout next time I'm in town."
What was creepy though was that, the next morning, for some bizarre reason, I had actually gotten up rather early and had walked down to the first floor lobby. Walking out of a first-floor hotel room right by the lobby, stretching her arms and yawning, was that same girl. Putting one-and-one together and knowing that it wasn't a guest's room because I was thee only guest in that hotel [and prolly in the entire town] that night, I had figured that when she gets a John, the hotel takes a big fat chunk out of that 200,000 Dong and leaves her a little bit and gives her food and lodging. And someone else probably owns the restaurant in the hotel, and for every 100,000 Dong meal, the restaurant operator probably give the hotel owner a nice piece of that for having a place to do business and for providing a kitchen and dining area.
Wow....talk about providing in-house services......
Thinh Long was a fascinating place. It's like a ghost town just waiting for the tourists to show up! I mean, the Karaoke bar-cafe-restaurant-hotel room to residents ratio is like 2:1! And this was early September!! Prime season, so it wasn't like I showed up in February and wondered where all the tourists went.
The empty street right near the beach promenade....cafes, Karaoke places and broken dreams in early September.....
One of the main streets of Thinh Long.....
Rush hour on the high street of Thinh Long......
What appeared to be a wonderful restaurant serving such delicacies such as gà, mèo, thỏ, and that ever-popular favourite, chó (I'll let you figger out just what the hell those are).....but, sadly, I just wasn't that hungry.....
But, shit - some decent advertising and infrastructure improvements (like that Goddamm road from Nam Dinh) and who knows?
Actually....naw.....leave it the way it is.....I kinda like it this way......
-E-
.....mellowing as I type this at a really nice cafe I first visited in April 2008 on the edge of Hoan Kiem Lake in Hanoi, smoking a 555 and drinking a Singapore Sling.
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Ya gotta love a shampoo, conditioner, scalp massage, facial scrub and a haircut, all in air-conditioned bliss......all for 50,000 Dong.....
....or, $2.84 USD.
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Was beginning to write this post at home in Hai Phong a week or so ago when, in mid-sentence, I heard the bell clang repeatedly......
......'member the first time that I had heard this bell - it was my second day in Hai Phong. I was living in a classroom at the school that I used to work for.
"Oh...right fucking on!" I exclaimed. I ran and got my Dong and ran outside. "Cool! Man, I could use some Ice Cream right about now...."
Errmmm........no.
It actually was the street-sweeper.
Street-sweepers here are NOT semi-automatic revolving shotguns, nor these tall, squat white slow-moving vehicles with these big-ass brushes on the bottoms of them. Rather they are just what the name implies: They're these women dressed in lime-green industrial coveralls with a hand towel wrapped around their faces who push a cart around and carry a primitive-looking broom who walk around and sweep the streets for part of the day (hence, WHY the Vietnamese litter EVERYWHERE at EVERY AVAILABLE OPPORTUNITY), and, for the other part of the day, they roam the alleys in front of residences ringing a bell to advise people to hand them their trash. There is no set day or set time - they come by my house, like, three times a day or so.....
......for this privilege, I pay the staggering sum of 7,000 Dong per month.
Thass 40 cents to you and I......
.......I still cannot bring myself to litter - to this day, I'll carry something with me when I'm out until I happen across a street sweeper (usually in less than two blocks or three minutes).
This is an incredibly thankless job, and, from what I'm told, The Government pays 'em absolute shit. So, whenever they ring the bell in my alley, if I've got trash, I'll hand it to them and toss in whatever pop and beer bottles and cans that I've got (usually several) 'cause they can cash 'em in. For Tet, I'm gonna toss 'em a tenner inside the customary red Tet gift envelope (A TEN DOLLAR BILL - NOT a 10,000 Dong note).....
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Vietnamese bill payment is yet another bizarre concept that I've encountered. But, much like the street sweepers and the refusal to go to automation, everybody here has to have a job. So, for your Internet, electricity, water, and garbage collection - you don't get a bill in the mail.
Nope not here.
They come by your fucking house in person and collect it! (Well, no - not THEM personally....but their representative....but still.....).
I had first encountered this shortly after I had moved into my new house back in April. I was walking down my alley towards home when I was approached by this old lady walking a bicycle. She handed me something printed offa an antique dot-matrix printer that I couldn't quite understand.....
....Tam was with me, and she snatched the form out of my hands and stated - "Oh. This is your water bill."
I just kinda stood there for, like, three minutes with a Jerry Brown-look on my face.
Finally, I snapped out of it.
"Uhhh....doesn't that come in the mail? I mean.......like, who is this lady? She doesn't even have a water company uniform on, and...."
"What do you mean, 'come in the mail?' I don't understand....."
"Uhhh....well, like, your utility company sends you the bill in the mail, and you either write out a cheque and mail it back to them, or you pay it on their Internet site, OR, if you are feeling particularly ambitious, you go to their office and pay it in person."
"Really?" came the stunned response.
"Really."
"Oh...well...there aren't many people who actually HAVE chequing accounts in Vietnam....and the same with credit cards. And (as I noticed from the number of people who ALWAYS cut in front of me in the checkout line at Metro and think absolutely nothing of it at all) we don't really like queuing at the water company's office, so this way is more convenient for us."
"Errmmm....yeah....I guess that makes sense....just weird, though....."
This works out to be a bit iffy with me, though, 'cause I don't wake up until, like, 10AM at THEE earliest, and then I'm often off traveling somewhere or at school teaching a class or whatever......by contrast, somebody is inside a Vietnamese household about 99.7 percent of the time.
For smaller bills (like 100,000 Dong and below), the bill-collecting bicycle lady will pawn your bill off on a neighbour, who will pay it, then the neighbour will give you the receipt when you get home, and you pay them back.
The first time I had encountered THIS, I was like - "WTF? WHY is the next-door neighbour handing me this dodgy-looking piece of paper and asking me for money???" But, again - it's just how things are done here.
Larger bills (Internet, electrique, etc.), the neighbour is NOT gonna fork over two-or-three hundred thousand Dong and hope to catch up with you shortly in hopes of recovering it. Naw, you is on your own for that one. I found THAT out the hard way when, after allegedly trying to catch me at home for two weeks after my broadband bill was due, they shut off my Internet ONE DAY after FINALLY leaving a note telling me to pay the monthly tab of 388,000 Dong at FPT's central office.
HOWEVER, the next day after FPT shut off my Internet, they came by AGAIN and finally caught up with me. I forked over the buxx and within, like, four hours, my Internet was up and flying again - no re-connect fee or late fees or ANY of that bullshit.....kinda really liked THAT......
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And, on the topic of collecting money, I was on Minh Khai and I had bumped into a Vietnamese friend of mine that I hadn't seen in a couple of weeks. He runs a bit wild and fast, if you know what I mean, and generally is not the sort I'd want to hang out with on a daily basis.
We had sat down at a coffee shop and, over a few Singapore Slings, we were catching up with each other. I had been deathly sick for a few days last week and had been very busy with the school. He was telling me how he was either at MDM or The Sound Club every other night this past week (which are two of the six Hai Phong nightclubs that blare irritating-ass techno-disco bullshit from every corner of the building). This is a lot less impressive than it seems on the surface, since every business in Hai Phong is required by law to shut down by midnight.
We went on, and I was telling him about how I had to turn down an offer to teach a small class at a prominent local school because they really wanted Tam and I to teach two classes a month (on fucking SUNDAY, can you believe it - leaving me essentially TWO days off per month) at 500,000VND for both of us per 90 minute class - three hundred thousand Dong less per class than they were paying now at another English language center (and we are better quality instructors than what they're getting now). Tam was willing to do it simply for the exposure for our school......but I had told Tam to politely explain to them that, on Sunday, we don't even wake up for less than 800,000 Dong.......
My friend also told me his tales of the week, about how a mutual acquaintance of ours was deathly hungover all day today from too much ecstasy and booze from the night before....and he showed me pictures of his daughter on his iPhone, when I had asked him:
"So ______, what is it that you do for a living again?" (because I never really asked him before).
"Oh, I loan money to people" came the reply.
"Oh! So you work for a bank?"
"No....I just personally loan money to people" he explained "and they pay me back with much more money."
"Oooooh.....OK.....gotcha - you're what we in The West call a loan shark."
So I asked him - "So, doesn't that get the police on you? I mean, isn't that not legal here in Viet Nam?"
He mis-understood the question - "Không. WHY would it get the police involved? I mean, they are borrowing money from me, not from the bank...so if they don't pay it back, I will take care of them, not the police......."
"Whaaaa....? I'm sorry, _____: I don't follow......"
"No, I mean, that I and my friends will take care of things if the person I loan money to does not pay me back.....not the police."
"Right right right.....you'll kneecapp 'em....got THAT part....but what is this about the police and banks?"
"I do not understand. Sorry?? 'kneecapp?' What does this mean?"
I then explained to him the time-honoured American tradition of private money lenders taking a 18-inch metal pipe (or other suitable instrument) swiftly and quickly to the knees of the delinquent lendee.
"Vâng! Vâng!" he stated with a very faint smile.....
"Right. And in most Tay nations, what you do for a living is not legal" I explained. "What I am asking you is if what you do is allowed in Viet Nam?"
"I do not understand - the police do not care about me and who I lend to because I am not a bank."
"Right. But what are you talking about?? I mean, do the police care who the banks lend to? Now I don't understand......"
"What?? Of course the police care about who the banks lend money to."
"Huh? Why??"
"Because if the person who get money from bank does not pay bank back, the police have to know where that person is to find them."
My drink almost fell out of my hand.
"GET THE FUCK OUT OF HERE!! Are you serious??"
"Of course. So they do not care at all about me.....so, I give person money, they don't pay me back, me and friends find them, not the police. So bank give someone 50 million Dong, that person pay bank 60 million Dong. I give someone 50 million Dong, that person pay me 85 million Dong."
"No shit? Wow.....you see, in America - you borrow money from the bank, and do not pay it back, then the bank says bad things about you to others on your TRW. Then, the next time you need money, and you go to borrow from another bank, the other bank will not give you any money because you did not pay the first bank back."
"What is the 'TRW'?"
"It's kinda like our version of your National Identity Card......."
(ed. note - from what I understand, the police take a sweet kickback for providing this "service" to the banks)
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I was walking down my alley last week when I had caught, out of the corner of my eye, a rather weird looking fellow. Not weird-looking at all to me, but he looked like he didn't quite fit in with the surroundings and people in my alley....exception being that he wore the older Vietnamese male costume of a white wife-beater tank top and a pair of light blue boxer shorts.......but, wait - something was weird.....did a double-take and finally figgered it out......
....riiiiiiggggght! Right. He didn't LOOK Vietnamese.
I clenched my fists and locked my teeth and spat! What the fuck was THIS??!?
Basically, I do NOT live on Minh Khai (thee place where Hai Phong's twenty or so Westerners live and hang out at), and my alley (pictured below) is a bit hidden and about as non-Tay as they get....and, Goddammit, i LIKE it that way! These are MY Vietnamese.....and I AIN'T gonna share them wiff another Cracker!
My alley - facing East - my house is the pink one next to the bookstore and across the alley from the tarp-shelter covering the pain-in-the-ass tea shop where the unemployed guys sit and hang out and bullshit all day literally four feet from my front door...
Same alley - facing West.....
I mean, I'm sorry, but I am a strict adherent to number 71 on the list! I mean, Christ - WHY do you think I always eat at Chinatown restaurant on Murray and Walker in Cedar Mill (besides the simple fact that the food KICKS ASS)??
Found out later that this guy's name is Eric and was a buddy of my friend Finchy. Met Finchy out for pints one day, and Eric was there. Really nice guy, actually.....but he said that he'd be heading back to New Zealand soon forra while, possibly for good.......
....fine by me - now, can I please have MY alley back???
- - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - - -
Hadta (once again) escape the skull-crushing boredom that is Hai Phong , so I woke up one morning a couple weekends ago and decided to piss off somewhere.....but where?
Hanoi? Naw...been there too many times....no it too well....
Cat Ba Island? Naw....got this fear of accidentally jumping on the slow boat again.
Bai Chay? Nope - was just there with Tam recently.....
Ho Chi Minh City? And what? Hop on a plane for a trip lasting a day-and-a-half? Don't think so....and besides - too many Crackas there.
Well, shit: Where, then?
Time to grab the Vietnam road atlas.
All right - so, I look down the coast for some place that has a little beach-umbrella-and-sunbather icon on it (indicating a beach of some sort....though the quality of these beaches varies greatly). Figuring that wherever I pick cannot be more than 160 kilometres from Hai Phong (again, got, like, a day and a half to spend away from Hai Phong - so, realistically, it'd be maybe a three-hour ride at most), I notice this one site on the map in small print called Thinh Long.
"Damm, that looks kinda out there" I figured to myself. But I figured, since I'd been to Hanoi and Ho Chi Minh City enough times, and I reside in Hai Phong, that it would be a good time to finally see The Provinces.
The Provinces are basically considered to be ANY AREA outside of Ho Chi Minh City, Hanoi, Hai Phong, Da Nang or Cần Thơ. In America, The Provinces would be called "The Sticks", "B.F.E." or "Wyoming."
So, analyzed the atlas, figured that I'm not looking at more than three hours each way riding hopped on the scooter and took off South.
No worries! Hey....should be 5/8th of the way there when I hit the City of Nam Dinh....cool.
Well, thass when the worries began.
For starters, the road atlases of Vietnam don't have blown-up pictures in the corners of the pages showing a city IN GREATER DETAIL (like Western atlases do). Add to this the fact that in Nam Dinh, a city of about 200,000 inhabitants, there are DEAD-FUCKING-ZERO signs indicating what street you're on OR the direction to other nearby towns and cities. Well, that's OK....the locals know where they're going....no need for signs of any sort!
Moreover, this city has a drainage system that removed water from the streets of the city after a 60-minute downpour about as well as the Yugo provided reliable, safe transportation. So this resulted in several detours.
90 minutes later, I gave up, pulled my GPS out of my backpack, turned on the compass feature, and, ten minutes after that, I was headed out of the city going southbound.
OK....so, I hop on to the road going towards Thinh Long. The atlas showed the road from Nam Dinh to Thinh Long as a secondary road. Now, what the atlas shows as primary roads are the ones that I take from Hai Phong to Bai Chay, Hanoi, etc. and have no worries on.
Cool....so, based on that hypothesis, the secondary roads would maybe be equilivent to Route 5 from Clarence to Batavia, or Highway 6 from Banks to Tillamook. Cool.....
As Bender said in The Breakfast Club - "Not even close, Bud!"
Only half of the distance to Thinh Long was paved (and I use the term "paved" veeerrrry loosely, as there were potholes that would swallow a car in places on this thing). The width of this road was such that two cars going in opposite directions would take about 35 seconds to pass each other. When a bus was coming at you, you basically pulled your bike off the road into the rice paddy so that the bus could pass.
I was warned in Nam Dinh NOT to take the road to Thinh Long....as there could be Viet Cong guerrillas behind any bush lying in wait to ambush me.
The remaining 50% percent of the road to Thinh Long was basically ungraded dirt and some gravel.....ALWAYS a treat to ride on.
Two bicyclists on the road towards Thinh Long.....
It was 110 kilometres from Hai Phong to Nam Dinh, and fifty kilometres from Nam Dinh to Thinh Long.....NOT counting time spent getting lost in Nam Dinh, it took two hours to get from Hai Phong to Nam Dinh.......and two hours getting from Nam Dinh to Thinh Long.
Made it to Thinh Long......
The skooter on the outskirts of town as I approach Tinh Long........
.....didn't know WHAT to expect. Figuring that it was the only beach for miles, there would prolly be a fair amount of activity around this town.
Ahhhh.......no.
It was bizarre - a lot of these folks had never seen a Tay (foreigner) before, and as I rode my skooter down the beachfront promenade (where there is a string of, like, forty hotels and restaurants), people sitting out front were literally almost attacking me - "Khong, Khong! ở lại đây....tốt hotel, tốt hotel" ("No, no!! Stay HERE....nice hotel, nice hotel").
Judging by the severe lack of people about, and the desperation of innkeepers for me to lodge at their establishments, it looked like I was not only the first Tay that they had seen in a long time....but also the first tourist!
Beach was decent....not Oregon standard by any stretch......but I'd say equivalent to Bai Chay and a LOT cleaner than Doson. Still, like any place in Vietnam (or Southeast Asia, for that matter) that attracts tourists (or, in this case, that THINKS that it will attract tourists), there were hookers. BUT they weren't out and openly about like in Doson.
I had discovered just WHERE the hookers were by quite an embarrassing misunderstanding. I had just gotten back to my hotel around 9:30pm from walking the promenade and sitting on the beach after a late dinner. I had noticed that my skooter wasn't out front where I had parked it. I had used the grunt-and-point to the hotel manager/check-in guy/whatever person to ask him what's up with my skooter. He then replied something back to me and showed two fingers and I THOUGHT (with my absolutely piss-poor understanding of the Vietnamese language) I understood him to say something like "We got you're skooter inside and it's twenty thousand Dong for parking it inside" (which is standard in Vietnam). To this, I stupidly nodded my head and gave the thumbs-up sign.
Well, ten minutes later.....imagine my surprise when a scantily clad girl knocks at my door and walks in and starts rubbing my Dong.
Oooooh........Oooooooh.....OK - NOW I get it - he was telling me that, for two hundred thousand Dong, I could have a girl sent up to my room......ahhh.....right.......
So, thee only way to get rid of this girl was to shrug my shoulders and pull out my pockets and try to explain in my horseshit grasp of the Vietnamese language that I haf no money.....
....this worked, but not before she used her version of the grunt-and-point and pointed to her cell fone and wrote down her number on a piece of paper, and pointed at me and made a fone-call gesture with her hand and her ear.
I told her - "Sure thing, Babe....give ya a shout next time I'm in town."
What was creepy though was that, the next morning, for some bizarre reason, I had actually gotten up rather early and had walked down to the first floor lobby. Walking out of a first-floor hotel room right by the lobby, stretching her arms and yawning, was that same girl. Putting one-and-one together and knowing that it wasn't a guest's room because I was thee only guest in that hotel [and prolly in the entire town] that night, I had figured that when she gets a John, the hotel takes a big fat chunk out of that 200,000 Dong and leaves her a little bit and gives her food and lodging. And someone else probably owns the restaurant in the hotel, and for every 100,000 Dong meal, the restaurant operator probably give the hotel owner a nice piece of that for having a place to do business and for providing a kitchen and dining area.
Wow....talk about providing in-house services......
Thinh Long was a fascinating place. It's like a ghost town just waiting for the tourists to show up! I mean, the Karaoke bar-cafe-restaurant-hotel room to residents ratio is like 2:1! And this was early September!! Prime season, so it wasn't like I showed up in February and wondered where all the tourists went.
The empty street right near the beach promenade....cafes, Karaoke places and broken dreams in early September.....
One of the main streets of Thinh Long.....
Rush hour on the high street of Thinh Long......
What appeared to be a wonderful restaurant serving such delicacies such as gà, mèo, thỏ, and that ever-popular favourite, chó (I'll let you figger out just what the hell those are).....but, sadly, I just wasn't that hungry.....
But, shit - some decent advertising and infrastructure improvements (like that Goddamm road from Nam Dinh) and who knows?
Actually....naw.....leave it the way it is.....I kinda like it this way......
-E-
Tuesday, September 1, 2009
Right - so where was me again.....?
Right.....made it back to The States.
So, I had determined that, given the wonderful economic climate not only at my home base in Ora-gaaan, but also EVERYWHERE , it'd be best to hang in Hai Phong forra while and see where this opportunity takes me.
So, went back to America for seven weeks during June and July. Literally busted my ass trying to coax somebody to come over here to cover for me at my school as a E.S.L. instructor from a native English-speaking country, but no dice.
I had offered that they teach for nine hours a week at my school free of charge to me. In return, they'd get my entire house rent-free, use of my Broadband Internet at no charge, use of MY SKOOTER free of charge, and they just hadta pay the electric, water and garbage bills (at a whopping $15USD a month)! Plus they would word an additional three hours a week where they worked in private tutoring and earned 250,000 Dong ($15USD) per hour for that! A fair chunk of change here.....
Was a bit bummed - because of the economic depression, I thought that SOMEBODY.....ANYBODY.....would grab this chance.
Nada nada enchilada!
I mean, I COULD obviously understand people with kids and shit like that....or those lucky enuff to have an actual JOB, and possibly understand those who own a house AND a mortgage on it.....but that weeded out everybody except for about a dozen, non-spawning, non-house-owning, non-employed people.......
......I guess that they felt safer and more financially and emotionally secure in an economic depression home in The States then they did running 12 time zones away for a summer in Vietnam teaching English.
Aw well....
Kinda sucked because, at the 11th hour, my buddy Finchy (that's not his real name, but he kinda looks and slightly acts like Chris Finch from The Office television programme back in 2004, sooo.....) hooked me up wiff an American E.S.L. teacher named Dave from the desert SouthWest who did an amazing job in my absence! Many thanx and kudos to Dave....thanx for having my back!
Sad part was, that after I had committed to Dave (like, LITERALLY two days before my flight left for The States), a few people E-Mailed and Facebooked me: "Hey....uhhh....E?? IS that offer to teach for the summer at your school for nine hours a week and live in your house for free still open??"
Christ, talk about lousy timing!!!
So, ran back to The States, got lucky and caught up with pretty much 90% of my closest friends (some of whom made journeys of several hundred miles to meet all together in Buffalo), and hung out and enjoyed the hospitality and company of some friends I had not seen in a long-ass time (Go-Go = since 1993......Dino = since 1990....Big Mo = since 1988....Rico = a dog's age), hadta forfeit all of my shit in a storage unit (TRIED to sell it ALL TOTALLY on the condition that, for $85, you clear it ALL outta the unit - people came back and stated - "uhhh......I'll pick this and that piece and...." but nobody took it all, so I left it be to the storage guys to dispose of), and had some great times with my family (both, nuclear and extended)!
DID a lot of events that were critical to me - The Chugwater Chili Cook-off, a trip to Rockaway Beach, Oregon.....sadly missed a couple of others - GayDay in Buffalo and watching the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field.
Loaded up on essentials that I badly needed (hippie soap from Portland, Oregon......a GALLON of Frank's Red Hot [Tam is now LITERALLY addicted to Frank's], cumin powder, chili powder from the American Southwest, Gilette Fusion razors, Arm and Hammer toofpaste, and a buncha other stuff). I DID buy two cartons of Export A Greens from Duty Free going into Canada.....but I smoked 'em all in the seven weeks that I was in The States...............really shoulda planned THAT better.....
So....here I am....back in Hai Phong.......co-owning a tiny English Language school and just hangin'.....livin' the dream......
Assorted ramblings coming up next week.
-E-
Oh, and P.S. - I probably WILL need someone to cover for me at our school NEXT summer......same offer will probably apply.....keep it in mind if the economic depression is still lingering about during that time.....
Oh, and P.P.S. - I was elated to hear that BOTH, Trent and T.O. said that they have NO WORRIES about The Bills offence this season! Good.....
.....that'll break the string of three consecutive seasons of a 7-9 record......
....because THIS season??
The Bills are going 5-11.....
....mark my words on that.
Right.....made it back to The States.
So, I had determined that, given the wonderful economic climate not only at my home base in Ora-gaaan, but also EVERYWHERE , it'd be best to hang in Hai Phong forra while and see where this opportunity takes me.
So, went back to America for seven weeks during June and July. Literally busted my ass trying to coax somebody to come over here to cover for me at my school as a E.S.L. instructor from a native English-speaking country, but no dice.
I had offered that they teach for nine hours a week at my school free of charge to me. In return, they'd get my entire house rent-free, use of my Broadband Internet at no charge, use of MY SKOOTER free of charge, and they just hadta pay the electric, water and garbage bills (at a whopping $15USD a month)! Plus they would word an additional three hours a week where they worked in private tutoring and earned 250,000 Dong ($15USD) per hour for that! A fair chunk of change here.....
Was a bit bummed - because of the economic depression, I thought that SOMEBODY.....ANYBODY.....would grab this chance.
Nada nada enchilada!
I mean, I COULD obviously understand people with kids and shit like that....or those lucky enuff to have an actual JOB, and possibly understand those who own a house AND a mortgage on it.....but that weeded out everybody except for about a dozen, non-spawning, non-house-owning, non-employed people.......
......I guess that they felt safer and more financially and emotionally secure in an economic depression home in The States then they did running 12 time zones away for a summer in Vietnam teaching English.
Aw well....
Kinda sucked because, at the 11th hour, my buddy Finchy (that's not his real name, but he kinda looks and slightly acts like Chris Finch from The Office television programme back in 2004, sooo.....) hooked me up wiff an American E.S.L. teacher named Dave from the desert SouthWest who did an amazing job in my absence! Many thanx and kudos to Dave....thanx for having my back!
Sad part was, that after I had committed to Dave (like, LITERALLY two days before my flight left for The States), a few people E-Mailed and Facebooked me: "Hey....uhhh....E?? IS that offer to teach for the summer at your school for nine hours a week and live in your house for free still open??"
Christ, talk about lousy timing!!!
So, ran back to The States, got lucky and caught up with pretty much 90% of my closest friends (some of whom made journeys of several hundred miles to meet all together in Buffalo), and hung out and enjoyed the hospitality and company of some friends I had not seen in a long-ass time (Go-Go = since 1993......Dino = since 1990....Big Mo = since 1988....Rico = a dog's age), hadta forfeit all of my shit in a storage unit (TRIED to sell it ALL TOTALLY on the condition that, for $85, you clear it ALL outta the unit - people came back and stated - "uhhh......I'll pick this and that piece and...." but nobody took it all, so I left it be to the storage guys to dispose of), and had some great times with my family (both, nuclear and extended)!
DID a lot of events that were critical to me - The Chugwater Chili Cook-off, a trip to Rockaway Beach, Oregon.....sadly missed a couple of others - GayDay in Buffalo and watching the Colorado Rockies at Coors Field.
Loaded up on essentials that I badly needed (hippie soap from Portland, Oregon......a GALLON of Frank's Red Hot [Tam is now LITERALLY addicted to Frank's], cumin powder, chili powder from the American Southwest, Gilette Fusion razors, Arm and Hammer toofpaste, and a buncha other stuff). I DID buy two cartons of Export A Greens from Duty Free going into Canada.....but I smoked 'em all in the seven weeks that I was in The States...............really shoulda planned THAT better.....
So....here I am....back in Hai Phong.......co-owning a tiny English Language school and just hangin'.....livin' the dream......
Assorted ramblings coming up next week.
-E-
Oh, and P.S. - I probably WILL need someone to cover for me at our school NEXT summer......same offer will probably apply.....keep it in mind if the economic depression is still lingering about during that time.....
Oh, and P.P.S. - I was elated to hear that BOTH, Trent and T.O. said that they have NO WORRIES about The Bills offence this season! Good.....
.....that'll break the string of three consecutive seasons of a 7-9 record......
....because THIS season??
The Bills are going 5-11.....
....mark my words on that.
Monday, August 17, 2009
Terrell Owens once said.......
.......about himself that, when he goes out on the football field, you should “Get yer popcorn ready, ‘cause I’m gonna put on a show!!”
Well, when I go out wiff my camera, I’m saying get your scrapbooks ready, ’cause you don’t know WHAT the fuck I’m gonna shoot……
……and, now, this week – I hadta get some sort of security clearance criminal background check for my job to prove that I’m not a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Vietnam-ness…..
….Tam suggested that, in order to help facilitate this, we pay a visit to an old drinking buddy of mine -
Yep - That'd be The Captain and myself.....
Waaaaaai......waaaaaay a sec: "Background check for your job??" I thought you already HAD a job?? Huh....?
OK.....OK....less back up a bit here.
Right, so, shortly before I had moved into my new house, circa mid-April, I had been working for the past three months at the Dang Tuan Language Center. It was fun, enjoyable, and I really enjoyed teaching my students Tieng Anh (English)!
After a while, though, there became more and more disagreements about things and issues that were previously agreed upon, and much tension was in the air. Around the middle of April, it became intolerable, and I had felt that it would be best for ALL parties that I no longer continue my employment there, so I handed in my resignation letter, giving a full month's notice before my last teaching date.
I was summoned in to a meeting the next day with Mr. Tuan. There, he and the former school coordinator, had told me that they felt that it was in the school's best interest that I be terminated immediately. I was slightly surprised, but not deeply saddened. I enjoyed my job, it was just that we didn't see eye-to-eye on several issues. I was immediately paid my correct final salary and I was about to leave, when Mr. Tuan and the former coordinator went to shake my hand! I shook hands and smiled. Then, we had a foto shoot, where there were smiles all around. It was certainly thee strangest firing I had attended, but we gave final firm handshakes, and I left. We had went separate ways on very good terms.......
......or so I thought!
Anyways, Tam had handed in HER resignation notice two months earlier and she had been canned the next day (but I don't think that she got the happy ending at HER firing ceremony that I got). So she was in the process of opening her own English Language school, and had asked me if I would come and work there!
Now, I had NO plans after the canning, and I HAD thought about hopping off to Ha Noi, Da Nang, or another town in Viet Nam and going on my merry way there. But I decided to stick around Hai Phong, having just signed a lease on a house and also having accumulated much rubbish (read: Material possessions) and I really didn't feel like hauling them all over Viet Nam nor trying to sell them after just buying them.....so I took the job.
Since my B-3 Business Visa was gonna expire in July, and with the end of the U.S. economic depression NOWHERE in sight for the foreseeable future, I had decided to spend seven weeks back in The States to finalise my affairs and say my goodbyes as I planned on being in Viet Nam for at least 18 months at the minimum.....probably two years, and maybe longer!
It was sometime in the middle of my stay in America (maybe early-mid July) when The Calls came......
.......
.....Tam was calling, explaining to me that some police guy was calling her, and strong-arming her for money, because it had been reported by Tuan to the Authorities that our school had lacked the proper paperwork to operate as a school.
"Errrmmm......Tam?? What THE FUCK is this all about????"
Apparently, to make a long story short - somebody had posted an article, written a blog, or something like that, about Tuan's school. This piece had been taken down before I got a chance to read it, but the gist that I was told about it was that it encouraged foreogn teachers to stay away from there because he rips them off.
So, because Tuan thought that I wrote this piece, and that, because Tam was close to me - he would start sending the Authorities after her school.
Needless to say - this pissed me off to NO end, and I was gonna jump thee next plane to Hai Phong and contact certain well-placed Government friends of mine and have HIS school investigated for several operating violations - but a few friends of mine pleaded with me and talked me out of it.......
WHY he picked ME as writing this thing, I'll never know - apparently, he doesn't realise that he has more than a few disgruntled former employees.....I wouldn't even say that I was a disgruntled employee - Tuan and I just didn't agree on certain things and that was it!!
....still, though, we paid off the bribes, and did all of the paperwork, and now we're legit. And apparently Tuan heard that I was back in town and that I was VERY angry and suddenly, the uninvited visits from the police and the Hai Phong Department of Education and training stopped.
Fine by me - if he stops bothering my school....I won't bother his....and we'll all be happy......
....still, though, I can't help but to feel a bit betrayed! I mean, I was under the impression that we had parted ways on good terms...and THEN he goes and accuses me of THIS? Whatever.....
BUT, whilst I was in The States, Tam did a great job with her school, QUADRUPLED enrollment from 25 to 100-plus in eight weeks, and basically busted her ass making things work - mega kudos to her for that!
www.ETEnglishcenter.com
But things almost got out of hand with the fast growth - we've had to hire staff, take in greater revenue, pay out greater expenses......just been keeping me reeeeaaallllly busy even since I got off of the plane here in Hai Phong a few weeks ago.......so, yeah, it's a bit crazy! I'm very busy.....I have no time to play games with a little man like Tuan.....
.....still, though - I wish I had seen that web page before it got taken down....probably woulda been good forra chuckle!
-E-
.......about himself that, when he goes out on the football field, you should “Get yer popcorn ready, ‘cause I’m gonna put on a show!!”
Well, when I go out wiff my camera, I’m saying get your scrapbooks ready, ’cause you don’t know WHAT the fuck I’m gonna shoot……
……and, now, this week – I hadta get some sort of security clearance criminal background check for my job to prove that I’m not a threat to life, liberty, and the pursuit of Vietnam-ness…..
….Tam suggested that, in order to help facilitate this, we pay a visit to an old drinking buddy of mine -
Yep - That'd be The Captain and myself.....
Waaaaaai......waaaaaay a sec: "Background check for your job??" I thought you already HAD a job?? Huh....?
OK.....OK....less back up a bit here.
Right, so, shortly before I had moved into my new house, circa mid-April, I had been working for the past three months at the Dang Tuan Language Center. It was fun, enjoyable, and I really enjoyed teaching my students Tieng Anh (English)!
After a while, though, there became more and more disagreements about things and issues that were previously agreed upon, and much tension was in the air. Around the middle of April, it became intolerable, and I had felt that it would be best for ALL parties that I no longer continue my employment there, so I handed in my resignation letter, giving a full month's notice before my last teaching date.
I was summoned in to a meeting the next day with Mr. Tuan. There, he and the former school coordinator, had told me that they felt that it was in the school's best interest that I be terminated immediately. I was slightly surprised, but not deeply saddened. I enjoyed my job, it was just that we didn't see eye-to-eye on several issues. I was immediately paid my correct final salary and I was about to leave, when Mr. Tuan and the former coordinator went to shake my hand! I shook hands and smiled. Then, we had a foto shoot, where there were smiles all around. It was certainly thee strangest firing I had attended, but we gave final firm handshakes, and I left. We had went separate ways on very good terms.......
......or so I thought!
Anyways, Tam had handed in HER resignation notice two months earlier and she had been canned the next day (but I don't think that she got the happy ending at HER firing ceremony that I got). So she was in the process of opening her own English Language school, and had asked me if I would come and work there!
Now, I had NO plans after the canning, and I HAD thought about hopping off to Ha Noi, Da Nang, or another town in Viet Nam and going on my merry way there. But I decided to stick around Hai Phong, having just signed a lease on a house and also having accumulated much rubbish (read: Material possessions) and I really didn't feel like hauling them all over Viet Nam nor trying to sell them after just buying them.....so I took the job.
Since my B-3 Business Visa was gonna expire in July, and with the end of the U.S. economic depression NOWHERE in sight for the foreseeable future, I had decided to spend seven weeks back in The States to finalise my affairs and say my goodbyes as I planned on being in Viet Nam for at least 18 months at the minimum.....probably two years, and maybe longer!
It was sometime in the middle of my stay in America (maybe early-mid July) when The Calls came......
.......
.....Tam was calling, explaining to me that some police guy was calling her, and strong-arming her for money, because it had been reported by Tuan to the Authorities that our school had lacked the proper paperwork to operate as a school.
"Errrmmm......Tam?? What THE FUCK is this all about????"
Apparently, to make a long story short - somebody had posted an article, written a blog, or something like that, about Tuan's school. This piece had been taken down before I got a chance to read it, but the gist that I was told about it was that it encouraged foreogn teachers to stay away from there because he rips them off.
So, because Tuan thought that I wrote this piece, and that, because Tam was close to me - he would start sending the Authorities after her school.
Needless to say - this pissed me off to NO end, and I was gonna jump thee next plane to Hai Phong and contact certain well-placed Government friends of mine and have HIS school investigated for several operating violations - but a few friends of mine pleaded with me and talked me out of it.......
WHY he picked ME as writing this thing, I'll never know - apparently, he doesn't realise that he has more than a few disgruntled former employees.....I wouldn't even say that I was a disgruntled employee - Tuan and I just didn't agree on certain things and that was it!!
....still, though, we paid off the bribes, and did all of the paperwork, and now we're legit. And apparently Tuan heard that I was back in town and that I was VERY angry and suddenly, the uninvited visits from the police and the Hai Phong Department of Education and training stopped.
Fine by me - if he stops bothering my school....I won't bother his....and we'll all be happy......
....still, though, I can't help but to feel a bit betrayed! I mean, I was under the impression that we had parted ways on good terms...and THEN he goes and accuses me of THIS? Whatever.....
BUT, whilst I was in The States, Tam did a great job with her school, QUADRUPLED enrollment from 25 to 100-plus in eight weeks, and basically busted her ass making things work - mega kudos to her for that!
www.ETEnglishcenter.com
But things almost got out of hand with the fast growth - we've had to hire staff, take in greater revenue, pay out greater expenses......just been keeping me reeeeaaallllly busy even since I got off of the plane here in Hai Phong a few weeks ago.......so, yeah, it's a bit crazy! I'm very busy.....I have no time to play games with a little man like Tuan.....
.....still, though - I wish I had seen that web page before it got taken down....probably woulda been good forra chuckle!
-E-
Saturday, August 8, 2009
WHERE was me, again....?
Right - took a long-ass break to head back to The States......and, before that, I was talking about....
....CAPTAIN BRIBE!
Right, so, let's go back in time and finish up what had happened before I left for North America.....
....today, we are gonna talk about the delicacies available in Vietnam.
Now, I am NOT what one would call an "adventurous eater" (though, I HAVE dined at Mighty Taco a few times in the past), and, actually, I am very picky about what I like to eat. Needless to say, in terms of food, I shoulda went to another country.
No, I AM NOT criticizing Vietnamese food....but....honestly.....errrmmm....it's just not for me! I mean, yeah, I can eat rice and noodles and the WONDERFUL bread that they bake here (a sort of left-over cultural effect from the French colonial days), and, of course, the Phố Bà, but everything else....errrmmmm....doesn't really appeal to me - again: I'M A PICKY EATER!!! I'm not even huge on AMERICANISED Vietnamese food, like in restaurants in Portland......
So, I had discovered a Western restaurant on Minh Khai called "Texas Bar-B-Que". It does ribs OK (NOT great, but edible), good garlic bread, decent spaghetti, GREAT apple crumble, and horrible pizza and chili. But I had seen on their menu one of my all-time favourites: cánh gà or, "Wing of Chicken".......
....allright - THIS should be good forra laff, I thought to myself.
Well, it wasn't a laffing matter - the wings had not been left to deep fry in the oil long enuff, and the sauce was basically Tabasco sauce.
It brought me much dishonour, being from Western New York an' all.....
PLUS, they hit you fiddy-thousand Dong for FOUR WINGS!!! That's, like, seventy-five cents per wing! In Hai Phong, that is VEERRRRY much on the pricey side.....
....so whass an estranged Buffaloian to do?
Do what all estranged Buffaloians shoulda done before they left: Take matters into my own hands!
So, I went to one of the two hypermarkets in town (Metro - Big C is the other), and found cánh gà in the meats section (but they were still together - like they serve 'em in the Southern U.S. - ya gotta cut them through the bones into wing SECTIONS to make them authentic), found cooking oil, and actually found (I couldn't believe this) a deep-fat fryer!
Well, I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT going to tarnish my wings with Tabasco sauce.....and there ain't no Frank's here, so I figgered, for the sauce, that I hadta improvise.
There's a little shack (literally, it IS very small and shack-like) just offa Broadway on W. 1st Avenue in Denver called "Hot Wings To Go". Now, this place is very unassuming, and does NOT go out and advertise and scream "WE MAKE THEE BEST BUFFALO WINGS ANYWHERE!!!" or any rubbish like that.
But they DO make good wings....
......so, amongst their four or five varieties of wing sauce flavours, there is a flavour called "Singapore Hot"....which is this weird, spicy, hot, tangy, sour, salty kind of sauce that I had tried and absolutely fell in love with!
Over the years whilst residing in Denver, I was actually able to replicate this sauce, and make it a teeny bit tastier than the original. So, since I'm a lot closer to Singapore right now than Hot Wings To Go is, I figured that I could scrounge up the needed ingredients here at Metro hypermarket and a few beakers and test tubes, and away I went!!!
I needed guinea pigs, though. I mean, this was the first time I had attempted to make wings on foreign soil, using ONLY locally available ingredients....so I hadta try 'em out on somebody.
So I called the family I used to live with and asked 'em if I could make them lunch. They were willing participants, and away I went over to my old house, with my deep-fat-fryer, and all the sauce ingredients in tow on my skooter.....
(no, the over-sized Vietnamese grapefruit was NOT part of the ingredients, but they are reeeaaallly good, and they may yet become part of the ingredients of this sauce in the future)
Hang cutting the wings.......
Soooo.....I fried 'em up, blended the sauce. I was scared - I mean, these folks had never had chicken wings the way that we are used to 'em......so I didn't know WHAT to expect! But they got a nice reception! Cuong (the father of the family I had resided with) brought in some beer, and I proclaimed "THIS is the food of my people....."
Apparently, they got SUCH a nice reception from my Vietnamese family, that I had been asked to come back as soon as possible and make them AGAIN! Was a bit busy, but I promised them that I'd be back in a coupla weeks to make my cánh gà again for them. I was very honoured by the compliments that I had received from Ngoc, Hang and Cuong about my wings....
....So, my buddy Suzanne was having a house party the next week, and it was a sort of potluck dinner. So, I had decided to try my wings out on Hai Phong's miniscule Foreigner population.....THIS should be an interesting response, I figgered.....
.....well.....didn't hafta figger TOO long.....
.....thirty wings got inhaled by six Tay in LITERALLY a matter of three minutes.
Emmmmm-Kay.....
DID make it back a few weeks later to my old house, and served Cuong, Hang and Ngoc another batch of my wings.....
...apparently, expressing their delight with these wings wasn't good enough for them.....
....they got placed at the Altar of the Ancestors.....
Literally, I nearly shit myself! I mean, I know my wings are GOOD, but, Christ, to be placed at a family's altar?? I was speechless and dumbfounded......I mean, I didn't know what to say......
...probably the most important honour I have received in my entire life.....especially considering that Hang's a DEVOUT Buddist (chants every other morning and such), and that things don't just get dropped at the family altar willy-nilly.....
Brought back over a gallon of actual Frank's Red Hot with me from Buffalo.......
....the ancestors must be licking their chops now.
Few more stories.....this time, about a trip to a private island, and a change in employment (which, pretty much everyone already knows about by now) coming up within the next week.....
...really....within one week...this time I mean it!!!
-E-
Right - took a long-ass break to head back to The States......and, before that, I was talking about....
....CAPTAIN BRIBE!
Right, so, let's go back in time and finish up what had happened before I left for North America.....
....today, we are gonna talk about the delicacies available in Vietnam.
Now, I am NOT what one would call an "adventurous eater" (though, I HAVE dined at Mighty Taco a few times in the past), and, actually, I am very picky about what I like to eat. Needless to say, in terms of food, I shoulda went to another country.
No, I AM NOT criticizing Vietnamese food....but....honestly.....errrmmm....it's just not for me! I mean, yeah, I can eat rice and noodles and the WONDERFUL bread that they bake here (a sort of left-over cultural effect from the French colonial days), and, of course, the Phố Bà, but everything else....errrmmmm....doesn't really appeal to me - again: I'M A PICKY EATER!!! I'm not even huge on AMERICANISED Vietnamese food, like in restaurants in Portland......
So, I had discovered a Western restaurant on Minh Khai called "Texas Bar-B-Que". It does ribs OK (NOT great, but edible), good garlic bread, decent spaghetti, GREAT apple crumble, and horrible pizza and chili. But I had seen on their menu one of my all-time favourites: cánh gà or, "Wing of Chicken".......
....allright - THIS should be good forra laff, I thought to myself.
Well, it wasn't a laffing matter - the wings had not been left to deep fry in the oil long enuff, and the sauce was basically Tabasco sauce.
It brought me much dishonour, being from Western New York an' all.....
PLUS, they hit you fiddy-thousand Dong for FOUR WINGS!!! That's, like, seventy-five cents per wing! In Hai Phong, that is VEERRRRY much on the pricey side.....
....so whass an estranged Buffaloian to do?
Do what all estranged Buffaloians shoulda done before they left: Take matters into my own hands!
So, I went to one of the two hypermarkets in town (Metro - Big C is the other), and found cánh gà in the meats section (but they were still together - like they serve 'em in the Southern U.S. - ya gotta cut them through the bones into wing SECTIONS to make them authentic), found cooking oil, and actually found (I couldn't believe this) a deep-fat fryer!
Well, I AM ABSOLUTELY NOT going to tarnish my wings with Tabasco sauce.....and there ain't no Frank's here, so I figgered, for the sauce, that I hadta improvise.
There's a little shack (literally, it IS very small and shack-like) just offa Broadway on W. 1st Avenue in Denver called "Hot Wings To Go". Now, this place is very unassuming, and does NOT go out and advertise and scream "WE MAKE THEE BEST BUFFALO WINGS ANYWHERE!!!" or any rubbish like that.
But they DO make good wings....
......so, amongst their four or five varieties of wing sauce flavours, there is a flavour called "Singapore Hot"....which is this weird, spicy, hot, tangy, sour, salty kind of sauce that I had tried and absolutely fell in love with!
Over the years whilst residing in Denver, I was actually able to replicate this sauce, and make it a teeny bit tastier than the original. So, since I'm a lot closer to Singapore right now than Hot Wings To Go is, I figured that I could scrounge up the needed ingredients here at Metro hypermarket and a few beakers and test tubes, and away I went!!!
I needed guinea pigs, though. I mean, this was the first time I had attempted to make wings on foreign soil, using ONLY locally available ingredients....so I hadta try 'em out on somebody.
So I called the family I used to live with and asked 'em if I could make them lunch. They were willing participants, and away I went over to my old house, with my deep-fat-fryer, and all the sauce ingredients in tow on my skooter.....
(no, the over-sized Vietnamese grapefruit was NOT part of the ingredients, but they are reeeaaallly good, and they may yet become part of the ingredients of this sauce in the future)
Hang cutting the wings.......
Soooo.....I fried 'em up, blended the sauce. I was scared - I mean, these folks had never had chicken wings the way that we are used to 'em......so I didn't know WHAT to expect! But they got a nice reception! Cuong (the father of the family I had resided with) brought in some beer, and I proclaimed "THIS is the food of my people....."
Apparently, they got SUCH a nice reception from my Vietnamese family, that I had been asked to come back as soon as possible and make them AGAIN! Was a bit busy, but I promised them that I'd be back in a coupla weeks to make my cánh gà again for them. I was very honoured by the compliments that I had received from Ngoc, Hang and Cuong about my wings....
....So, my buddy Suzanne was having a house party the next week, and it was a sort of potluck dinner. So, I had decided to try my wings out on Hai Phong's miniscule Foreigner population.....THIS should be an interesting response, I figgered.....
.....well.....didn't hafta figger TOO long.....
.....thirty wings got inhaled by six Tay in LITERALLY a matter of three minutes.
Emmmmm-Kay.....
DID make it back a few weeks later to my old house, and served Cuong, Hang and Ngoc another batch of my wings.....
...apparently, expressing their delight with these wings wasn't good enough for them.....
....they got placed at the Altar of the Ancestors.....
Literally, I nearly shit myself! I mean, I know my wings are GOOD, but, Christ, to be placed at a family's altar?? I was speechless and dumbfounded......I mean, I didn't know what to say......
...probably the most important honour I have received in my entire life.....especially considering that Hang's a DEVOUT Buddist (chants every other morning and such), and that things don't just get dropped at the family altar willy-nilly.....
Brought back over a gallon of actual Frank's Red Hot with me from Buffalo.......
....the ancestors must be licking their chops now.
Few more stories.....this time, about a trip to a private island, and a change in employment (which, pretty much everyone already knows about by now) coming up within the next week.....
...really....within one week...this time I mean it!!!
-E-
Wednesday, July 29, 2009
Monday, June 8, 2009
We'll continue.....
....with some new twists and turns in my Hai Phong experience in a bit.
Right now, I'm sitting down at a sidewalk bar in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), sipping several pina coladas.....and I should actually be sleeping now as I have a 6AM flight to Buffalo to catch, but still....
Yep!
Yeah.....I is here for the longer haul. Coming back to The States to finalise my affairs and tie up loose ends.
Dates of the E Farewell Tour -
June 10th - June 16th: Buffalo, New York
June 16th - June 23rd: Denver, Colorado and Rapid City, South Dakota (with stops in Chugwater and Cheyenne, Wyoming)
June 23rd - July 2nd: Portland, Oregon
July 2nd - July 5th, New York City, New York
July 5th - July 19th: Buffalo, New York
July 19th - July 22nd: Memphis, Tennessee and Tunica, Mississippi
July 25th: End of tour party - Hai Phong, Vietnam
REALLY hope to see ya......it'll be the last time I'll be StateSide for at least the next year....maybe longer!!
-E-
....with some new twists and turns in my Hai Phong experience in a bit.
Right now, I'm sitting down at a sidewalk bar in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), sipping several pina coladas.....and I should actually be sleeping now as I have a 6AM flight to Buffalo to catch, but still....
Yep!
Yeah.....I is here for the longer haul. Coming back to The States to finalise my affairs and tie up loose ends.
Dates of the E Farewell Tour -
June 10th - June 16th: Buffalo, New York
June 16th - June 23rd: Denver, Colorado and Rapid City, South Dakota (with stops in Chugwater and Cheyenne, Wyoming)
June 23rd - July 2nd: Portland, Oregon
July 2nd - July 5th, New York City, New York
July 5th - July 19th: Buffalo, New York
July 19th - July 22nd: Memphis, Tennessee and Tunica, Mississippi
July 25th: End of tour party - Hai Phong, Vietnam
REALLY hope to see ya......it'll be the last time I'll be StateSide for at least the next year....maybe longer!!
-E-
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