Induction

I just got back from my first day of induction (training) at ILA. First impression is that I love, love, love the school! It's huge - located in a 9 story building, there are about 100 teachers for roughly 6000 students. We started with a quick tour of the building (focusing on the cafe on the 9th floor, and the teacher's lounge), then had two one-hour observations. The kids in the classes I observed (one class was 7-8 year olds, the other was 11-13 year olds) were all really, really well-behaved (especially compared to many of my Spanish students...), though nearly impossible to understand, so I've definitely got my work cut out for me. The nice thing is that for each children's class, there's a Vietnamese teaching assistant who's there to keep classroom control (yell at kids in Vietnamese if they're not behaving), help demonstrate things, explain things in Vietnamese if the concept is too difficult for the students, grade homework, and generally help out in the classroom. Should definitely make things easier. One of the more amusing teaching techniques that I saw was from an Irish teacher named Thomas who, whenever he overheard a student speaking in Vietnamese, would draw a mustache on them with a dry erase marker. Seeing little Vietnamese kids with a thin, blue fu manchu or goatee was one of the highlights of my day. After observation and a lunch break, we had the EHR Induction when we signed our contract (I'm officially under contract to work through February 1, 2011 - eek!), and went over tons of paper work for getting a bank account and a tax ID number. Conclusion: Vietnamese bureaucracy is not very fun. Each form had to be filled out exactly correctly (nothing scribbled out, or out of place), two times. Each time had to be an original, so it wasn't possible to fill it out just once and make a photocopy. Such a hassle! - But, it's done now, and I'm on my way to officially being a resident of Vietnam....

The other semi-noteworthy event of today was that I figured out (and solved the problem of) why I couldn't access facebook on my internet. Apparently the Vietnamese government decided to block it...why, I'm not entirely sure (something-or-other to do with Communism...), but I've got it all sorted now and should be good to go.

Yesterday's exciting experiences consisted of two visits to street vendors. At the first, I bought a coconut...they're kept in a cooler, and when you buy one, the vendor cuts the top off, and puts a straw in, and you just drink the coconut milk out of it. It was pretty refreshing, which was nice since it was over 90 degrees out and humid. I got lunch that day from a second street vendor in an alley near my hotel. I got another banh xeo (the pancake thing), which was, if I may say myself, quite adventurous since I had no idea what was inside. Turns out that there was shrimp and an unidentifiable meat (I think pork? - hopefully not dog) inside. I was a bit let down when I opened up a corner of it and saw a shrimp inside, and even more upset/creeped out when I realized that the shrimp wasn't peeled, and still had the tail on it. I peeled the first one and it tasted fine. By the time I got to the second shrimp, I realized that most people just ate the entire thing, so I gave it a go, and it wasn't as bad as I thought (plus peeling the first shrimp was a bit of a hassle), so I just went for it. Surprisingly...not as bad as I thought it'd be. I'd say it was my best meal here so far, and it only cost me 15,000 dong (about 80 cents) - I'm going to have to start going to street vendors more often!

In other news, I'm still very amused by the fact that the currency here is the dong. I asked Lewis how long it was before the novelty of that wore off, and he said that it still hadn't for him (7 months in), and that when it did, it would be time for him to leave Vietnam.

That's pretty much it from here...I'm going to try to squeeze a quick nap in before grabbing dinner with Tara, Lewis, Jane, and the gang (though...come to think of it, that is pretty much the entire gang...)