First week of Orientation is done and I've just started week two... Haven't written on here because the internet tends to go out at night and it wasn't working all weekend and those are my down times. We haven't had any problems with losing electricity but we've lost running water twice in the past week, just for a short time though. No warm or hot water in the showers and the realization that I'm not going to have a warm shower for a whole year is kind of sad! I'm settled into my room and have gone to Big C (Asia's version of Wal-mart) twice to get stuff for my room and bathroom and also to get comfort food. I'm not really into eating pork noodle soup for breakfast every morning so I had to get some too expensive cereal, soy milk, crackers and peanut butter and jelly to keep me happy. But good news is, yogurt is cheap cheap! Only ten cents a yogurt....
Nothing crazy to report, just lots of class sessions about teaching styles, lesson planning, classroom management, grammer review and things like that as well as an hour and a half of Vietnamese lessons every day. We definitely need these lessons because no one speaks English where we live and in the surrounding neighborhoods. It's amazing though because we are only 2 km from the center of Hanoi's Old Quarter where most everyone speaks a bit of English but the second you cross the bridge over the river, nothing. No Westerners, no English, and when we take walks, locals stare with mouths wide open probably thinking, why are there white people wandering the streets around here?? They'll get used to us.
A few of us took a sunrise walk the other morning to explore the area to the left of our compound and found a lake, some French inspired housing architecture and a large morning market complete with fresh fruits and veggies, fish, skinned ducks, chickens being gutted right there and lots of other random food items. We didn't try to buy anything though because zero English on their part and zero Vietnamese on our part just wouldn't have worked out. We are really trying hard to learn our numbers and survival phrases but the tone of the language is so hard! For example, dưa means melon, dừa means coconut and dứa means pineapple. It's all about the tonality of the way you say it and westerners just don't have the ear for it for the Vietnamese do.
I've been taking cabs everywhere because they are so cheap but I am hoping to get a motorbike this week. Then I'll be able to get out out of the compound whenever I want and do my own things like join a gym, go shopping and explore myself instead of relying on other people or going through the effort of trying to sign language to a taxi driver and hoping he understands. Overall, it's been a good week and it feels like I've already been here a while. We've been working hard and WorldTeach has given us a weekend trip away to Halong Bay this coming weekend, so everyone is excited about that. Hopefully the rain holds off!
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