Paradise on the beaches of Vietnam

    Feb 27th. The photos are here.

    We received our passports back today with the new visa stamped inside.  They cost us $10 U.S. plus the courier cost and our travel agent's fee came to $30 each, which is 30% cheaper than the closest price we were quoted elsewhere, and our visa has been extended three months instead of one! The agent said, "Lucky. It could have gone either way...sometimes I apply for three month extensions and they come back with only one month. They have stacks and stacks to stamp and date, and make lots of mistakes." We wish we could take advantage of the extra windfall of time. I worried that we'd get bored being so long in one place, but boredom never seems to close in on us here.

    This morning we went with Vicki and her friend Jan to the Fairy Bay breakfast buffet. Jan is a seven foot guy from California who spent decades in Zimbabwe and whose father hobnobbed with Joshua Nkomo and other names that are easily dropped in conversation.  We had a really long chat about how much Nha Trang has changed in the past twelve years, and what other spots along the coast, north and south, are equally beautiful and much less developed. Nha Trang is a victim of success. The Russians, who own 50% of the oil reserves in Vietnam and are building a nuclear plant nearby, get two week vacation visits without the need for visas, and are investing massively in beach front property. They build hotels, and have multiple flights daily into the local airport directly from Moscow, with at least 900 people coming and going each day.

    It's all very new, the opening of Vietnam to foreign investment. It is a top retirement destination, but it might be a narrow window of time that we can enjoy Nha Trang as snowbirds. We're becoming curious about Cam Rang, south of us, and Qui Nhon, north of us.

    We got a taste of what to look forward to yesterday.  We went in a van, eleven of us, to Paradise Resort in Doc Let (pronounced "Yawk Let"), about fifty kilometres north of Nha Trang. For $35, Deb and I rode the van and spent the whole day on a gorgeous beach, with kayaks and snorkel masks, beach chairs and umbrellas, two rooms for changing and resting, and the most delicious lunch that you can imagine.  We ate squash soup, salad with an amazing French mustard dressing, battered fresh fish fry, potatoes, tomatoes and fruit.  Watermelon and bananas are in season, at every meal.  To drink, there's free homemade vodka, as much as you can handle, in clear jugs on the table that you might think are vinegar or water, until you taste them.  And there's beer on the honour system. 

    The owner is an 87 year old Jugoslavian named Chere who fought alongside Tito in the second world war. He's a tough old geezer who lifts everything in sight, does his own repairs, and loves his rotweilers and his guests. He is kindly but opinionated.  His opinion is the only one that matters and he'll happily give it to you. Avoid disagreeing with him, and enjoy the warmth and twinkle in his eyes. His cooks and servers are deaf mutes, very sweet and attentive but uncommunicative.  He has a Vietnamese wife probably 30 years his junior, and two children.

    The beach is sheltered, with lovely clean hard-packed sand under incredibly clear salt water, with no drop off.  It is shallow and evenly graduated for a long way out. Deb and I could stay with Chere in this piece of paradise for $60/day in our own beach front bungalow with three delicious meals per day included, a large bookcase full of books, and all the watersport activities.  One could possibly go fishing with the local fishermen in the bay from time to time. It is warm and sunny in the mornings on this coast, but by afternoon a cooler breeze sweeps in off the ocean which creates relief from the heat, and you can nap in the shade with a cool breeze. It is idyllic.

    All our other activities described in previous posts continue. Dan found a great location in Nha Trang for playing pool, in a little-used restaurant on the top floor of a nearby building, with a lovely balcony view.  There's one table there with a real slate surface. There is no competition for the table, and there are no hostesses. If we bought beer, we could play for free, but instead we just pay $2 an hour for the table.

    It's too bad that we're going home on March 18th. Vicki says that by March 20th or so, the wind swings around and our beach becomes a lee shore, with extremely flat, calm water and crystal clear visibility.  Any garbage that has accumulated (not that there's much now) slowly sails back into the open ocean. Some of yesterday's Doc Let party went snorkeling today, but we decided two "sun days" back to back wasn't advisable. I protected my arms and legs while kayaking, but got a little burn on my face even under my hat, just from the bounce-back from the water surface. We'll take a day to go to Vinpearl now that we have our passports back and can get our over-60 discount; and sometime in the final week we'll watch for the wind and weather window to pick the best snorkeling day we can before we finally leave. If we come back next year, I'll be sure to pack my tennis racquet and sneakers, and personal snorkeling gear.

    Y brought me rice crackers today made by her grandmother - the same enormous rice crackers you see carried by older Vietnamese vendor ladies on the beach. Some are made with chili and pepper. One normally spreads fish sauce and other things on them, but there are many varieties. We've had mango flavoured ones, and Y told us there is a coconut flavoured one in the package. They're a perfect beer snack, but I can't buy them directly from the vendor because they always demand a multiple of what their Vietnamese customers pay. I'm sure they'd sell a lot to westerners if they charged the same rate for everybody.

    Interestingly, and while on the topic of pricing: on the way home from Mac's we stopped for the third time at our banana lady, the one who'd initially charged us 10K, then 15K the second time. Another lady sauntered over and tried to take charge of the negotiations this time. The vendor tried to put a bunch into a bag and hand them to me before she'd tell me her price. Then she tried to get us to pay 30K, then some ridiculous mumbled price for a slightly larger bunch that sounded like 50K. I told her this was ridiculous, that they were only 9 1/2 K per kilogram at the "Maximark" supermarket, where we'd bought our most recent bunch. They were laughing at us and screwing with us, playing games with the prices, so Deborah got mad and pulled me away, and swore we'd never return. They tried to call us back, but Deb wouldn't even turn around. Thus a Vietnamese market vendor who could have had repeat business at least twice a week for many weeks, and more business from the friends we would send to her, will no longer get our business, nor will we send any friends to buy from her. And thus doth many Vietnamese screw themselves with their basic Ferengi-ness.

    March 1st. We ate at Harry's Canadian Bar and Grill last night...in solidarity. Harry has been evicted, given the boot after only one year on his three year contract. There's no recourse, in Vietnam. The contract isn't worth the paper it was printed on. He has thirty days to remove $6,000 worth of equipment, come up with a new location, and try to attract his customers to it. Some silly reasons were given, but the bottom line is that someone else offered the landlord higher rent, probably part of the same tsunami of Russian investment money that is buying up miles of shoreline here on the coast. The Vietnamese people don't have any idea what is going on, except the top leadership who are enjoying their cut of the action. There is Russian money, Chinese money, and Indian money. They're all jockeying for position, in a great land rush. Rents have tripled in a year. We're probably lucky we came this year; if we return next winter, like migratory birds, we'll likely be looking for a smaller, less developed bit of paradise a little further up the shore.

    March 2nd. Things are changing for us in Nha Trang. Dan left today to return to the frigid wastes of Siberia - at least, that's how I imagine it.  He says there will be snow until mid-April in Tyumen, and a month of mud after that. I've lost my pool partner. He hopes to see us here again next December, as does Vicki, who is on her way home with a one month stopover in the Philippines. 

    My IELTS writing students came to the end of their 8 week session.  I only taught them their last three lessons, and unless enough of them re-register, I won't be teaching them any longer. Which is okay with me; it has been my window into the IELTS program, and it ain't like I was doing it for the cash. The compensation is only about $10 an hour for actual teaching time, and nothing for the lesson prep, correcting and feedback time, which is always triple the amount of in-class time. Most foreign language teachers here, for that rate of pay, must simply think on their feet and do no lesson prep or follow-up work outside of class.

    In some ways it feels like the end of summer vacation, with so many people heading for their homes in the north.  Mac's class is still a delight, so we continue to teach there for free (very little prep involved), and get invited to play badminton, go to beach picnics, and go for coffee dates. And we still hang out with Renée and Shaina who will stay a week longer than we will, and with Esther and Lloyd when they're around. We went on the hash again today and I found myself running a great deal of the distance, which really surprised me. All this hoofing around town and a slight weight loss has made quite a difference to my fitness level.  While hashing, I learned that the young Estonian hasher featured in the last photo album is famous for making pickles and even wholesaling them to local restaurants.  Cucumbers are ubiquitous here, but cucumber pickles are rarely seen.  I also learned that I'd heard his "hash name" incorrectly. I thought it was "Picklebit". It's not. It's "Pickle-dick".

    March 4th. My hip is still recovering from the hash. Apparently breaking into a run didn't only surprise me, it surprised my hip as well. I took a pass on badminton with the kids this morning. However, my jaws still worked well at the Nhi Phi buffet breakfast.

    Crazy Kim's...what to make of that place? Three classes per day, many without teachers, but using the space provided by Crazy Kim who owns a lot of very expensive real estate in the tourist quarter, including a spa, gym and dive training centre, and who never actually meets the teachers who volunteer there.  She just chats with them over the phone and encourages them to take on the classes. There's a prefect assigned to each group. 

    Anh categorically states, "No Vietnamese would do that for free". One former attendee says he had to pay something; another says she never did. Oddly, a couple of days ago I heard from a third person who knows her and says her start-up was funded by a grant from a Canadian foundation, for the purpose of teaching English to street children. I've been there twice: there are no "street children" present, just adult hotel workers and others hoping to improve their promotion prospects in tourism and other jobs. Is there a fee? Do their employers pay something? Does the grant funding continue each year? I suspect the latter, given how easy it is to trick foreign charities.  One could even submit photos from a local orphanage - Renée and Shaina split their time between four of those.  Crazy Kim can collect rent for her space from the foreign grant, pay nothing to any of her teachers and rely on tourist volunteers to meet with the students, whom she also never meets face to face. If my speculation is correct, she is one of probably a great many who have learned to game the charitable urges of the west. Her evening class has no teacher now that Robyn and Aaron have left to return to England. I intend to drop my Vietnamese class and I might use the time to drop in on the evening class to fill the void, and see if I can learn more about how she operates. Not that it will be up to me to do anything about it, but I'm curious. It might make for a good situation in a novel some day.

    Motorbikes: I'm envious of all the Vietnamese - and that means virtually every single one of them - who scoot around town on two wheels. I keep wanting to rent one myself.  They're cheap enough, but Deb won't go along with it. It's not that she doesn't trust my driving skill, although she's dubious that I can negotiate the chaotic traffic in the streets, especially at rush hour; and she will ride on the back of a scooter driven by a Vietnamese. Although the majority of foreign visitors seem to rent them, our guidebook says "Vietnam has recently banned all foreigners from renting motorbikes without a Vietnamese driver's license". Most foreigners have not been made aware of this, and the vendors sure aren't about to tell them.  The police do not enforce the ban. Once never sees a cop enforcing any traffic rules, in spite of the obvious potential for profiting from on-the-spot fines.  Even if they would, they can't speak English so they don't really want to get into trying to discuss traffic laws with a foreign motorcyclist.

    I'm guessing that cops may be terrified of stopping the wrong person, perhaps a person of more status and power, or the child of a government official, and having their jobs put at risk for offending or annoying the wrong person. They don't stop speeders, or people who ride on the sidewalk. And of course, some riding on the sidewalk is inevitable because the sidewalks are not really for pedestrians, as they are in the west.  Vietnamese people don't walk anywhere. Sidewalks are actually parking spaces for motorbikes, and often taxis, private cars, trucks and buses.  This can be incredibly irritating for western pedestrians who constantly have to step nervously out into traffic in order to get around the parked vehicles. Even when you think you are safe walking on the sidewalk, you have to watch out for people leaving their parking spots and buzzing past you on their motorbikes. Mind you, the only time I was ever actually clipped, and from behind, was by a western jerk who would never have ridden on the sidewalk in his own country, but was merrily roaring up a narrow sidewalk to get around a corner without having to get out into traffic. I'm not nervous when I cross the street in front of Vietnamese bikers, who slow and smoothly part like the Red Sea to pass on either side of you.  The western jerks, usually far less experienced, are aggressive, too fast, and unpredictable.  They generally seem to think they've had a free pass without initiation to join the Hell's Angels by spending $5 a day on a motorbike rental.

    Local insight from the expat community is unanimous: if you are involved in an accident, as a foreigner you will automatically be the one responsible for payment of damages, regardless of fault. Even your travel insurance might not cover you in an accident, especially since you are specifically banned from driving on just an International License or a valid license from your home country. This, fundamentally, is why we walk everywhere in town.  We occasionally bum a ride from one of Mac's students if we're going out for coffee or badminton as a group, or we try to find a bus going in our direction. A German tourist explained that he got his Vietnamese license by producing his International license with a motorcycle qualification.  He carries a blue card that shows the bike he bought is actually registered to someone else, a Vietnamese person, because foreigners can't own property.   The Vietnamese person holds the insurance on the motorbike even though the foreigner has unofficially purchased it. It all sounds very dubious, and one still isn't covered if one causes personal injury or loss of income in an accident; nor is there any protection from being automatically considered "at fault" in any accident merely by virtue of being a richer foreign driver.

    March 6th. All the above notwithstanding, my friend Lloyd is hunting for his own motorbike. He and Esther are renting one from his landlord, which he claims is insured by the landlord. Certainly the other expats, in spite of what they say, do ride their bikes everywhere. I'd say they keep their fingers crossed that they won't be involved in an accident where anyone gets injured, but I learned earlier that to cross your fingers is a rude sign - and yet I've also learned more recently that maybe it isn't, but that there is a very similar sign that is that involves a slight separation of the crossed fingers, a trick I can't perform.

    I've also learned that the story told by the American teacher in Da Lat at our Christmas Eve party may be grossly exaggerated - the one about preparing for an English pronunciation class for university professors that none of them were willing to attend. Yesterday in my reading group at Mac's I sat with a lady who had surprisingly good English, and she turned out to be a supervisor of students at Nha Trang University. She assured me that at both universities - and she'd gotten her degree at Da Lat - the English professors had to have Master's degrees, at a minimum, from an Australian university. It may have been professors in other departments who didn't show up for their first class; and they may have simply decided there was no particular reason why they had to attend because they didn't need to speak English and they had tenure so it wasn't like they could lose their jobs for refusing to play ball with the administration. This is all just speculation, of course, in an attempt to reconcile the two stories I've heard about Vietnamese university professors.

    Today I'm helping a grade 11 student with an essay she's writing in English. She's preparing to go to the U.S. for grade 12 to be hosted by a family while she experiences a year of school there. I've encountered people who say they can't travel and can't get visas, and others - large numbers of them - who do study abroad and then come back. It appears that getting student visas to study abroad isn't very difficult, if you've got the money to travel. To emigrate searching for a job in a new country is a different story, and it would be hard to call yourself a refugee if you come from Vietnam, which is considered quite a stable country at the moment. I have another friend who aims to travel to foreign countries on Vietnamese ships, as a marine surveyor who is responsible for continuous assessment of the ship's condition. He hasn't said that he intends to jump ship in a foreign port, and I don't believe he wants to. However, the resistance to emigration doesn't appear to come from the Vietnamese gov't, but from the immigration departments of the western nations that some Vietnamese would like to travel to. They want to avoid asylum seekers and visitors overstaying their visas, becoming an economic and social problem in the new host country, and an influx of young people claiming refugee status for ideological and economic reasons rather than any genuine danger to themselves and their families.

    Vietnam appears to be enjoying a major economic boom, with the help of investment money from Russia, China and India. The country is primed for growth demographically, unlike most western nations where the populations are aging, retiring, and increasingly in need of elder-care. The construction boom in Nha Trang alone is astonishing and constant - it will look quite different in only a few more years. Sadly, high rises are going up in streets just back of the waterfront, and they will blot out the sun on those streets, and in neighbouring hotels. 

    Some tourists will begin looking for another "unspoiled" location, in particular perhaps the Australians and the European backpacker crowd.  The Russian "packagers", as Dan calls them, will still come for their quick visa-free vacations on direct flights from Moscow and several other cities. The Vietnamese tourist industry in Nha Trang appears to be hitching its wagon to that particular star, which makes sense. 

    There are many who are shut out of profiting from the economic miracle, but others participate through tourism and other industries. The appetite to learn English is fueled by tourism, but also by students seeking higher education in foreign universities and intending to return to Vietnam afterward, and company executives wishing to trade overseas, sell their services overseas, or acquire new technologies. Those companies reward workers who work toward demonstrating proficiency in English.

    March 7th. Last thoughts about corruption in Vietnam before moving on to a new topics:  the guy Owee must be willfully blind about corruption if he's lived here for 12 years and hasn't seen any. Trinh didn't get to travel with Vicki to the Philippines for a month. Married to Ramon and living in Milan for the past two years, she was supposed to get a letter from local authorities proving no criminal background, which was part of her Italian citizenship process. She filled in lots of forms, waited patiently for appointments with people who stalled her, had to miss her flight and change it, and was finally made to understand that she would get her simple letter document, having paid all the official fees, for an additional million dong, $50. And it took ten extra days, even after that.

    We were pleased that her sister Hieu was able to begin attending Mac's English conversation classes; and even more pleased that she got hired here at the Ha Tram hotel as a receptionist. Trinh is training here, since Trinh is at loose ends while waiting, and it was here in the hotel that Trinh worked when she met Ramon.

    I met a young Vietnamese fellow who has been hitch-hiking through Vietnam, from Hanoi to here so far, Couchsurfing all the way.  He will continue south and visit Cambodia, Thailand, and other Asian countries he can visit without a visa. I quizzed him about how it was that he could afford to travel when so many other young Vietnamese could not. His parents are not wealthy.  His father is a retired guard and his mother owns a small store, but his sister works at one of the twenty banks in Vietnam. He graduated from university with a degree that should prepare him for a job in a bank, but he didn't try for the job. He worked as a tour guide (his English is excellent, with a clear mid-western accent), a receptionist at "the Skybar", and at a third job, and saved his money.

"Why didn't you go into banking?", I asked.
"In a word...corruption," he answered. "I didn't want my parents to have to pay."
"Pay? But you've already completed your education, right?"
"Right...but they would still have to buy me the job."
"That sounds crazy. How much would they have to pay?"
"About 300 to 400 million dong," he replied. "and that's just for a job at one of the smaller banks. I know that because my sister works at a bank, and they had to buy her job."

    So, that's fifteen to twenty thousand dollars that his parents had to pay for his sister to get a job at a bank, and would have had to pay for him to follow in her footsteps - to the bigwigs at the bank. His father's total salary as a guard might only have been about $4,000/year.

    Our young friend Y, who will interview shortly for a student visa to the U.S., hopes to take a teaching degree there and learn our classroom practices and methods. She says, "The teaching methods here are not good; teachers pay to get their jobs."

    Lastly, before ending this diary entry and beginning the final one: I didn't bother volunteering at Crazy Kim's. "Crazy like a fox", she is. Before Hieu came to Mac's, she tried to go to Crazy Kim's, where as I've earlier described, they run three classes a day on the second floor of a local dive shop. Trinh used to go there a few years ago. They got Hieu to register and fill out forms, and then told her there were no spots available for her. "I don't know why they made me register if there were no spots," she said, plaintively. Ah, but to a retired school administrator the madness is quite clear. Her neatly printed registration will now be used as evidence of student attendance, to be stacked with all the others to justify continuation of the grant from the Canadian foundation that, we've been told, pays the rent for her space so that "street kids" can attend free conversation classes. Not that there are any qualified or paid instructors there - just occasional passionate volunteers. Canadian charities are such myopic soft touches.  Myopic = "inability to see things that are far away".

Next: final diary entry from Vietnam

School Daze and Business Malpractices

    Here are the photos for this entry. There are sixty-one, which is enough to view at one time. There's a separate album of photos of the sculptures in the beach park across the street from our hotel.

    Feb 10th. Today began with a bus ride to the Fairy Bay Hotel to breakfast with Anh, who'd never been there before. Then we joined an English conversation "class" in progress above a dive shop a block from our hotel. We had some fun listening to the students describe how they celebrated their Tet holiday - the Vietnamese version of "What I Did On My Summer Vacation".  We joined Aaron and Robyn, a couple of young volunteers from England, and Renée and Shaina from Cortez Island. Shaina is in grade nine at home but gets to take the whole middle term off in order to come here with her mother. She was adopted from an orphanage in Hai Phong at the age of four months, and Renée has brought her back to Vietnam at age 7 and again now at age 15. She's quite self-conscious, at times. She complains, "I look exactly like them so they all speak to me in Vietnamese, and then they look at me as if I'm stupid because I don't understand!"

    None of the volunteers had received any direction from the owner, who did not show up even though there were students to be taught. The students were great, but none of them or the six volunteers had any idea what sort of program ought to be followed, or who was nominally in charge of the class.  Anh says that's par for the course for a Vietnamese-run language school. 

    The six of us worked well together and bonded after class as well, exchanging emails and phone numbers, and news of restaurants, sports complexes and other language class opportunities, including an orphanage which has teenagers nearby who need a curriculum. It's Anh's guess that this owner, known as "Crazy Kim", who has several different businesses on the block: a spa, a gym, a coffeeshop/bar, a dive school and dive centre, as well as the conversation classes, is charging the students and staffing her classes with volunteer expat teachers. If that's the case I'll probably stay away, which is sad because it is close to where we are staying, but I won't be "used" by anyone.  Mac doesn't charge his students anything so I don't mind spending time helping him for free, but if someone is making money off my time and expertise I want to be paid as well, even if it is at local Vietnamese teaching rates, and even if it is only "beer money".  

    After this morning's experience, some of the others are considered donating their time to the orphanage instead, but they also dropped in to meet Mac in the afternoon. Before the week is out I'll probably hear from Michael.  I wouldn't mind doing in depth language instruction with more advanced students.  Well-heeled businessmen or government officials will pay something for my time, and the instruction level is more intellectually enjoyable.  There are many who are extremely well off in this society, surprisingly (or not surprisingly, when all I've heard is taken into account).  I'm hoping to study a bit of Vietnamese at Michael's school as well. I'm beginning to research the IELTS program, and I will see if I can help his students to prepare for that testing system, which is a prerequisite for scholarships to western universities, some jobs with foreign based corporations, and some citizenship requirements, including Canada's, I believe.

    Anh talked about the Vietnamese language this morning, not for the first time: "You can master Vietnamese in about 500 hours", he said. "It's not a deep or complex language. Words are used differently by different people, and sometimes the differences are regional, but not always. There is no etymological dictionary of definitions, because the leadership of the country would have to admit how many of our words derive from Chinese origin, and we are constantly in a state of conflict with China. Since we never explore the roots of our words, we can't use complex language to express our emotions and feelings, our opinions, even scientific and technical language. 

    "That is why I am generally uncomfortable speaking with Vietnamese people. They speak a simple language that only transmits instructions or acts as a social lubricant" (I'm paraphrasing him here) "and if I want to discuss anything of any intellectual depth with my friends we find ourselves using English at least fifty percent of the time because there are no ways to express our meanings in Vietnamese. Not only because the language is superficial; because of the mindset of the leadership, students are not taught to think deeply and express themselves intellectually in Vietnamese, so they have no experience in intellectual thought and discussion. Even when they learn basic English, lacking that training in intellectual thought and discussion in their own language, they are unable to express concepts and opinions that they've never had a chance to consider and develop."

    Not that Vietnamese are simple minded. As Anh pointed out, when they live in other countries and speak other languages they do very well in science and in business, and as writers, as I know. Anh's description of the Vietnamese language reminded me of "pidjin English", that simple but widespread version of English which is little more than a trading language. Even the young poets in Jamieson's book express personal feelings in metaphors and allusions, until they become communists and their writing becomes flat and simplistic, even while expressing exuberance and enthusiasm for the cause. 

    I thought about that today as I sat in Mac's class trying to find things to talk about with a young man. Mac claims, and I believe it, that all of his students can read and write English quite well, but only need practice to speak it and hear it spoken. However, as this young man struggled to come up with questions of any interest and depth to ask us, questions that demonstrate originality of thought and are not simply the same oft-repeated formulaic questions of his classmates and his previous meetings with foreigners, Anh's words came back to me. That's something I'll be watching for as I engage one on one with more students over the coming weeks: not only what can they say, but what sort of vocabulary do they employ to demonstrate what they think about, puzzle about, and form opinions about?

    Feb 12th. I've been studying the IELTS exam, getting a handle on how I would coach a student who wanted to pass it.  It's used now by many university admission departments, by countries for immigration purposes, and by corporations. I can't escape the impression that it's an expensive, over-hyped, high risk test with no appeals process that's been very well marketed but isn't always helpful. I know two individuals who deserved a higher score than they got from the very subjective examiners - including one who got her Masters at a U.K. university and who speaks fluently and well, but didn't score well on the IELTS afterward. 

    Some of the questions seem to require prior knowledge of a milieu that some students wouldn't have; and in part, it also appears to be an intelligence test, in so far as one can tease out intelligence from linguistic ability. It's also clear that they mark spelling, which is anathema to modern pedagogy - native English speakers don't place undue emphasis on spelling when teaching native English students, because research makes it clear that spelling ability is no predictor of intelligence or other linguistic skills. 

Students who write English accurately but can't express themselves verbally are a case in point. 

    Modern language teachers also don't place much credence in timed tests.  Deeper and more intelligent answers take longer than glib and error-ridden ones. Some people just take longer than most to conduct their thought processing, and they often come up with a superior solution. Test anxiety is often a factor, especially for shy students from Asian cultures, so it's quite unfair not to give them the time they really need to feel at ease and display their best abilities.

    Unfortunately, the timed, high-stakes IELTS is a very high bar that third world non-English speakers have to leap over to emigrate, or to get scholarships, and jobs. Vietnamese students, after having some of the most misguided English instruction in the world, often have to sit their employment interviews in English, especially for foreign corporations operating in Vietnam, or for companies engaged in tourism, and increasingly for Vietnamese companies, who will often hire and/or offer salary increases to those who demonstrate English skills through a test result. Vietnam Airways is one example that fits into the tourism category.  We know a young lady who wants to get hired by them, but she has a long way to go to be able to handle the interview, I'm afraid.

    However, today we put school work out of our minds and went to a lovely restaurant in "Old Nha Trang" that you'll see in the photos, and then to a fishing pond. "We" means Deb and me, Vicki, Trinh and her Italian husband Ramon, Trinh's sister Hieu and a childhood friend whose name I've forgotten.  A Spanish guy named Tony was there. Ramon and Tony are both flight attendants with EasyJet, and several of their colleagues have visited them here over the past couple of weeks. 

    We were about to have to take an expensive taxi ride to the restaurant, which was quite far out on the edges of town, because no-one else was able to come along with us to share the cost.  Everyone in our group has their own scooter.  Suddenly a scooter miraculously appeared right here in front of our hotel. Apparently they've been for rent here all along, and I didn't know. There aren't any signs or brochures that list services that the hotel can provide for its guests, which is a weird omission for a business that wants to sell services and make money. We paid under $3 to rent an automatic scooter for a half day. I would like to rent them more often, but Deb is still reluctant to ride, especially through rush hour. But maybe we'll rent one to visit Vicki, who is a little out of town.

    Today's feat of magic: We were trying to organize several people to share the cost of a taxi to the restaurant out of town. "We'll text before we leave", I say. Then Deborah drops the phone on the tile floor. It's broken. It'll only say "invalid battery" and "unable to charge". We take out the battery and put it back in. Several times. We plug it into AC, with battery in, and without. Nothing makes any difference. Our mood sinks.

    Finally I tell Deb, "Drop it again. From exactly the same height, in exactly the same place." She looks at me as if I'm crazy, and I argue that there's no harm trying, because it's already broken.  I downplay the fact that we might only have to replace the battery, because it makes no sense to me that a battery would be damaged by shock.  She tries, but can't let go.  Her face screws up and she says "I can't do it!" about three times. On the fourth try she finally lets go. She picks it up, turns it on, and looks at me like I'm a magician. Voilà, one working phone, as good as before.

    Feb 13th. We had a pleasant day walking to Michael's language school, and signed up to teach two IELTS classes, one on Fridays and the other on Tuesdays, both at suppertime. Then we walked to Mac's for an afternoon of heavy conversation class. These days Mac is getting almost as many volunteer teachers as students, so the students are getting volunteers paired off with one, two or at the most three students. 

    This morning Trinh told me that she used to go to Crazy Kim's for conversational English, and that she never had to pay, so I felt better about giving them some of my time for free as well. Deb and I will team teach for Michael and his wife Lan, who won't consider paying two teachers for a class she would normally staff with one teacher, but at least we will get some taxi and coffee money.  It's a pretty stiff walk from our hotel. They haven't told us how much yet, but Michael brought it up at the end of our meeting today and stated that there would be "compensation" of some sort.  Since the students are paying him for lessons, that feels appropriate to me. I told him that the normal level of volunteer teacher here is, to use an analogy, like a little league coach compared to the professional coaching experience that Deb and I would be bringing to the job. I told him I was simply "thirty years beyond" what the casual backpacker volunteers were able to bring to the job in terms of focus, intensity, experience and analytical pedagogical skills.  The traveling hippy teachers, many of whom get paid by the language schools here, are what I was in Japan over thirty years ago.

    On the way home we passed tons of vendors with new product: roses and chocolates. Valentine's Day is tomorrow. When we arrived home I turned on my computer to find Lloyd and Esther have written a nice new blog entry about food in Vietnam. We agree with them that Vietnamese food is delicious, except for one shortcoming: we've had two days of what we suspect might be MSG overdose. I'm told they pour it in by the cupful. Sometimes food seems more delicious than it honestly ought to be. One night we both had a headache in the evening at precisely the same strength, time and duration; another time a slightly upset stomach, a bit of a "buzz" and sleeplessness. I've wondered whether the sodium in MSG can impact blood pressure the way salt can, especially if you get it in large doses.

    Feb 15th. Last night we taught our first IELTS exam class, introducing a practice test in the writing portion. It's work disguised as teaching, which is normally fun disguised as work. I'm only doing the IELTS because I want to learn how to help students who must jump through that nasty hoop in order to get a job, emigrate, or qualify to study at a western University. By contrast, this afternoon we did Mac's class and taught the students three songs, which they seemed to thoroughly enjoy. We did Teddy Bears' Picnic to focus on the "z" sounds at the end of so many of those words (Vietnamese, like Japanese, don't have consonant endings to their phonemes, although an "ng" is often ended with a closed mouth like an M, and a C ending results in closed lips like a P). We did Red River Valley because they wanted to learn a cowboy song, and it's just after Valentine's Day, and they also have a Red River in Hanoi; and we did Big Yellow Taxi so that we could discuss the environmental message and also highlight a Canadian singer/songwriter and a song with a good driving rhythm. We were ready to quit after the first song, but they loved it and asked us to continue. We spent two hours learning and discussing the three songs. This was so much more fun than the IELTS...

    Last night our hotel room was pounded right into the wee hours by driving bass speakers from the Sailing Club resort, hundreds of metres away. It was like the pounding of a constant, concentrated artillery barrage. I don't know how they get away with it - thousands of people in surrounding hotels had to endure it. It was an auspicious festival occasion, I was told: the first full moon after the Lunar New Year. However, the volume seemed far beyond necessary, and when I woke up for about the seventeenth time just before dawn there were still drums and amplified singing. One could argue that we ought to accept that it is Vietnamese tradition, but I'm pretty sure there was no bone-quivering amplification in the traditional origin of this festival. I thought it would only last for that one special night, but tonight the music is still pounding from a nearby bar, perhaps not quite as loud, but enough to disturb the sleep of corpulent tourists exhausted by their day on the beach loungers, not to mention two Canadians who've spent their afternoon teaching much sweeter songs.  Later I was told that it'll happen every Friday and Saturday night, which are party nights at the Sailing Club.  The management of this high end Sandals resort can afford to pay off the cops and city officials to ignore them, instead of making them show some consideration for nearby residents, hotel guests, and of course the threat to the business of nearby hotel owners.

    Feb 16th: The Hash! Here's a History of The Hash. A large group of us, expats and Vietnamese, were taken out of town on buses and dumped at the edge of town to follow the ambiguous arrows and shredded paper "scat" of two hares, who led us through the rural outskirts of Nha Trang. We ran along the other side of the river, past fish farms, fields and and pig pens, and finally returned to the bus to drink beer and eat potato salad. It was a good bit of exercise which mirrored the traditions of the Hash, and it was the 54th Hash run for the Nha Trang chapter. The photos will give you an idea of the mood of the event.

    Feb 17th. We had a large turnout at Mac's. There were about a dozen Vietnamese students, two Russians (Dan and Taras), and eight native English speakers from the U.K. and Canada, so over twenty, in a big circle.  Taras is impressive: he learned French as his second language in school, but after only two months of learning English he is explaining himself quite well and catches, he thinks, about 60% of the conversation. I've become a little bit interested in Russian, now. There are so many Russians here that the local tourist trade includes a lot of Russian signage, and the menu at some restaurants isn't even offered in an English translation - only in Vietnamese and Russian.  Mind you, that's also just very poor marketing, because there are lots of English and international visitors who would also use the restaurant if the menu were also in English.  

    The Russian alphabet is strange, in that there are 33 letters (or maybe 31 plus two signs that mean "hard" and "soft"), but even though at least half look like Roman letters, they don't always have the same sound. A P is actually an R, for example, a B is a V, and an H is actually an N. There's a letter for the "ch" sound that we use in Scottish for the word "loch", or German for "Bach", the name of the composer. When I remember, I will ask Dan to tell me how it developed that the alphabet has the same symbols with different sounds. I suspect, and Taras agrees, that there may be words that will be familiar to me because of roots in Greek and Latin, German and other languages, once I decipher the alphabet. The word "restaurant" is now instantly recognizable, because it is everywhere in our tourist district: ресторан. And the word "tour" is тур. So far, there doesn't appear to be a distinction between upper and lower case letters. The word "crocodile" appears everywhere: крокодил - it appears that Russian tourists are tempted to eat crocodile in Nha Trang, and go home with small stuffed crocodiles as souvenirs.

    My Tuesday IELTS class has an uncertain future.  Only two students have signed up, not quite enough to afford to run the class. I suspect it is a marketing issue, although I provided my credentials, which should have helped to sell the class. Considering the constant daily turnout at Mac's, we know there's an interest; however, Mac's class is free. I don't know what Michael and Lan are charging. 

    I thought I'd finally learned that Crazy Kim's was free as well, but another student who's been going to Mac's for a year claims he did have to pay something when he went to Crazy Kim's, and I'd heard elsewhere that it was an issue in the past. There was some suggestion - to be further explored - that they'd had to charge something because the cops had demanded a cut of a non-existent fee and because it encouraged open discussion with foreigners.  This, according to everything I've learned about Vietnamese social economy so far, is an entirely credible possibility. The shakedown seems to be an ever-present fact of life for Anh and for other Vietnamese, including hotel owners. 

    I've heard disturbing stories of illegal overpayments demanded by ticket agents on the monopoly railroad, and by land transfer agents. A Vietnamese friend had to pay 60% over the printed amount on the bill, and had no recourse; a foreigner ahead of him in the same line had to pay 125% extra, and possibly had no idea he was being overcharged. Teachers have their own ways of squeezing extra cash from the students to make up for very low salaries. A visa extension for us is $10 U.S. according to the stamp in Mac's passport, but Deb and I have been quoted everywhere from $30 to $45 by visa agents to incorporate their mark-up, while our hotel staff want $70 - everybody has to get a piece of the pie, you see. The visa rules make no obvious sense and change frequently - as one person described, "What happens from month to month depends on the direction of the wind, the price of fish in China, and whether the Director's wife wants a new pair of diamond earrings." Even doing simple and obvious business transactions is difficult, as this link from Owee, a.k.a. Anh Phuc, will describe.

    Mind you, I read in one of Owee's responses that he hasn't seen any "corruption" here, and he's been here twelve years. Something's odd about Owee's assertion. We've only been here three months and have a dozen or more examples, a few personal ones and the rest to close friends. Even Renée has experienced it - her landlord almost had to kick her out of their apartment just before Tet because the cops said they didn't have the right to rent the apartment to people with a C1 tourist visa.  It would have cost them a lot for a hotel room right at that time, of course - if they were able to find one.  There was a period of uncertainty during which the landlord was trying to find the right person of influence to bribe so that they got to stay and the bribe money didn't just disappear into the pocket of the wrong person. 

    I know a man who sold a house.  After official fees and transfer taxes, he was asked to pay 10 million dong - $500. That's two months salary for the average Vietnamese, and this payoff was unofficial - it went into the pocket of the gov't official in charge of the department, who initially asked for more. Because he got less than he'd asked for, the process would have taken two years; but the official died and was replaced by another official, who - you guessed it - demanded another 10 million for himself to complete the transfer. Which took another two years, so it actually took four years and four months' salary in bribes to sell the house. 

    The final chapters of Neil Jamieson's "Understanding Vietnam" describes exactly how this sort of omnipresent behaviour has always been a part of the culture and became even more deeply entrenched during the period of terrible inflation and hardship of the "American War", as it is remembered here. It has been difficult for regular Vietnamese when foreigners, soldiers or tourists, come here and throw their money around, driving up prices for local people. The U.S. military brought vast sums into the country in the form of aid - too much of which was quickly diverted into the local economy in ways that would have made American taxpayers and politicians choke. Wages for military personnel flowed into the economy.  

    Tourists always spend a great deal more in two weeks on a holiday than they would spend in two weeks at home, which confuses Vietnamese consumers who imagine that they have that same spending power all the time. However, it is not only those extremely difficult but short term events in history, or the chronic one caused by tourism, that have caused this problem. Those who think of themselves as middle and hopefully upwardly mobile Vietnamese, who land gov't jobs through a combination of family connections and payments to the right superiors, do whatever they can to recover their expenses and extract whatever they can from anyone who subsequently comes within their sphere of influence, in order to afford a lifestyle that matches their expectations. It appears to be how the society has always functioned.  It is a deeply ingrained cultural reality.

    Getting things done at a bureaucratic level is therefore a very mysterious maelstrom of nebulous rules and improvisational acquisitive behaviour, and those who cut through the arcane sets of roadblocks do so with extra cash, from the stories I've read and heard. Our visa extension is a case in point, as are some of the bribery cases I've mentioned. When shopping, it is difficult for a westerner to pay "normal" or "advertised" or "Vietnamese" prices without cagey bargaining or the help of a Vietnamese friend.  Even the Vietnamese will be charged whatever the vendor thinks they can get out of him, which is why western friends hide around the corner when the Vietnamese buddy goes shopping for them. Even the lowliest market vendor learns quickly.  We bought bananas one evening from an outside vendor who didn't have enough status to occupy a stall in the outdoor market; when we returned three evenings later to the same location, she wanted 50% more money from us for the same sized bunch of bananas. We held out a bill in the denomination of our earlier purchase and were handed a smaller bunch. It's already a disturbing trend; our only option for our third bunch of bananas is to make an obvious show of walking away into the market with our money looking for a better deal, at which point the odds are fairly high that she'll call us back and offer us what she was happy to sell us the first time, especially if it is late in the evening, which is when we usually buy them. She doesn't really want to have to pack them up again overnight and have them get too ripe to sell the next day.  No matter what price she charges us, it will be more than she'll get from a Vietnamese buyer. There are, however, many fixed price items in restaurants and on the street that aren't too outrageously priced, maybe just at the lower end of the "tourist" range of pricing.  When we see Vietnamese people lining up to buy at a fixed price vendor, we shop there with confidence.

    We had a simple shirt repair - added a toggle button - for $1, in Hoi An. I bought another shirt which needed the same toggle, but a similar lady with a sewing machine in Nha Trang at Cho Dam market, used to gouging Russian tourists, wanted $6 to add the toggle button (to an $8 shirt), some of which was apparently a commission that was going to go to the fellow who led us around the market to find her, after he'd decided that he couldn't do the job himself. By contrast, when I needed an extra hole in my belt, I found a cobbler on the street, asked him how much, and he waved off the charge. He voluntarily added three extra holes for me, and handed it back...and only reluctantly accepted the folded up bill that Deborah passed to him, with a look of embarrassment, because he'd offered to do it for free. It can be a bit of an Alice in Wonderland world.

    Feb 19th. We had our first class in Vietnamese with Lan last night, after spending the afternoon with Renée and Shaina, teaching them to blog and to create a profile on couchsurfing.org. The class was only an hour long, and was helpful.  Lan forced us to focus on the pronunciation of vowels in the Vietnamese language.  There are eleven, and we had to sound out the tonal variations, with steady tones, rising and falling tones, broken tones, etc. Coupled with the signage, menus, and basic interaction vocabulary we've picked up since we arrived, we will have scratched the surface of the language by the time we go home. My Tuesday class remains cancelled for lack of students, but I'm beginning to receive assignments from my Friday class, which continues.

    Shaina sent me a rant, actually two of them, written by our friends Robyn and Aaron in their blog when they were in Malaysia.  They were amusing, and parallel things we've observed about toilets in Vietnam, except that Vietnam has no Muslims, or at least any that would admit to being Muslim. Vietnamese speak of Muslims as dangerous extremists and terrorists.

    We delivered our passports for renewal/extension last night. We don't know why there are two names and parallel processes, and we don't know what we're going to get, actually; initially we got a "business" visa, which was claimed to be the only way we could get a three month visa as opposed to a one month visa, but we know others who have a three month "tourist" visa, and who applied for it, and who arrived in Vietnam at the same time as we did. It's very mysterious. We only know that we should get a stamp that allows us to stay for an extra month, long enough to achieve our exit date of March 18th. Today my plan is to stroll up the beach taking photos of the sculptures, ending up at Mac's for his afternoon class, and then spend my evening analyzing the writing of my Friday students. Tomorrow, if the lovely weather holds, we'll be on and in the water, on a boat ride and snorkeling trip to some of the nearby islands.

    Feb 20th. Of the six IELTS writing students who attended last week's class (one was absent), all of whom received a deadline of midnight last night to submit Parts 1 and 2 of the writing practice test we explored together, one student managed to send me Part 1. The rest did not; and that one student promised me Part 2 the following morning but did not complete it. Interesting. I think the next step will be to insist that they complete Practice Test 2 in class, only in the test time permitted, and turn their work in to me at the end of class. I'm no great fan of the IELTS, but I may be beginning to understand why it takes Vietnamese students so long to learn English well enough to pass it. Michael, however, tells us how hard the students work, going from one class to another back to back all day long, so we have to cut them some slack.

    Walking to breakfast most mornings, we pass a construction hoarding of galvanized metal at the top of the first block. We cross over to the other side of the street before we get there, because it is used as an outdoor urinal by Vietnamese men. Surprisingly, the odour is not offensive, at least from the distance we skirt it. I sometimes wonder that they don't seek more privacy by going behind the fencing, or lobby the city for a wall and a trough, at least.  I reflect that the only other place I've seen this in "civilized" surroundings is in southern France, driving down to the beach: drivers stuck in slow traffic would leap from their cars and release a stream against trees lining the roadway. Maybe the French custom was adopted here. Finally, I am amused by the building directly across the road, from which the guests look down from their windows onto this scene: the Asia Paradise Hotel, one of our frequent breakfast buffet choices.

    This morning, however, we amble to the Nhi Phi hotel where we stuff ourselves with delicious Vietnamese and Western food, all-you-can-eat for $6 apiece, with dishes that sometimes change from one visit to the next, to relieve the boredom.  We rotate between three different buffets and on alternate days we eat various Vietnamese noodle soup breakfasts out on the street. On the days when we do the buffet, we don't eat again for eight hours or more, and then we just have a light plate for supper, maybe some chao (congee) or some sticky rice with chicken, or a variety of spring rolls, both fresh and fried. And a daily beer for me, usually with handful of freshly roasted and salted peanuts.  When we bought two packages yesterday they were still warm from the roaster. For dessert we have bananas and cookies back at the room. During the day we might stop somewhere for a fruit smoothie, (Deb's favourite is passion fruit and mango, mixed together), or strong, dark, sweet Vietnamese coffee.

    Today we're going to meet Dan, Taras, Renée and Shaina at Crazy Kim's, where we'll make conversation with the students and then plan a day's outing on a boat to do some snorkeling. Dan and Taras will leave on March 1st to go home to Siberia, so we have to do it before then. Dan described visiting the Nha Trang University yesterday, so I plan to do that before ending up at Mac's for the afternoon, where we've gotten to know many of his students quite well, and feel very much at home.

    Feb 24th.  Our various language groups and classes continue, the weather remains perfect, and our days pass as idyllically as lotus eaters should expect. The food remains good and we enjoy our cut-rate breakfast buffets and our walks through the town to work off the calories. I've begun teaching Dan to play pool, which is fun.  Tables rent here for $2 to $4 an hour, and they come with "hostesses": young twentyish ladies in heels, black blouses and red miniskirts whose job it is to rack your balls, encourage you to buy beer, and sit idly by looking bored while you take far too long to clear the table. I can only assume they are an anachronism from the American war, and perhaps the French before that, when servicemen would enjoy a beer and a game of pool, and perhaps some female companionship, in their off-duty time or their R&R breaks. They're certainly not needed for two gentlemen to enjoy a game of pool, and the wages they'd have to be paid seems like an extravagant waste of the owner's profit, yet there they are.  How very un-revolutionary in a 40 year old communist nation, like an evolutionary throwback to a bygone era.

Next entry: Paradise on the beaches