here, there, everywhere

Spotted on the road to Gia Long's mausoleum: apparently this is one of three elephants that live in Hue.

Sunset at Gia Long's mausoleum, outside of Hue.

Back from Hue, which was one of the most beautiful cities I've seen in Vietnam - I wish we could have spent more time there but as it was, I had a great time and hope to go back someday. After three nights of night trains and night buses, I don't feel quite ready to head back to work (or didn't, rather, as I blearily taught my two Sunday classes early this morning and, as always, couldn't tell you a thing about them except that I drank coffee beforehand and it was awesome).

After the week of torrential rain at the end of November, Hanoi has been absolutely, unseasonably beautiful - cold and sunny and windy - and I'm starting to see why my students all rave about autumn here. My favorite description is by Mien, one of my former Elementary Three adults: "I like autumn in Hanoi because I don't forget the milk flower. I like to smell it at night on the absent road." I think this may be the most (accidentally) beautiful writing I've stumbled across while teaching.

Iain cycles through a flooded pathway in Lenin Park (the area in the foreground is usually a lawn).

One more from the beginning of September; I love how muggy and misty it gets at night here now that the weather is finally cooling, although my students are fond of warning me that it will become ungodly cold soon.

Little girls dressed up as fairies during the midsummer festival, in the park across the street from the citadel. There were lots of fairy wings, masks and funny wigs for reasons I didn't quite catch, and also about a million kids pedalling determindly around on various tiny bikes, vespas, cyclos (!) and cars, alongside skateboarding and rollerblading teenagers wearing rabbit ears and pink spiky wigs.
Some teenagers were better at rollerblading than others.

Step one: set fire to your lantern.

Each class I teach ends with an excursion (my school gives me about $1 a student to treat them to tea or ice cream); my Elementary Three class, which ended last Wednesday, marks the end of the first round of classes I've taught from the start (the first classes I taught were started by another teacher). I'm always sad on the last day, but I was especially sad to have this class end, as they are an incredibly sweet group and they worked incredibly hard. Most of the Elementary classes I've taught don't bother to speak a lot of English during our class party, but these guys kept it up the whole time. I was really lucky to have such a fun class, and I know I'll miss them a lot.

With this class over, my teaching schedule is finally going a bit easy on my brain - I teach three Intermediate One adult classes, and one Intermediate One teen class during the week, so more mental whiplash as I run from advanced to elementary classes back to back, at least till Sunday rolls around (during which I teach very, very low levels). So that's here - outside it is raining torrentially and I am being lazy after my very early morning of teaching, sitting around Iain's room waiting for him to get home from work and watching youtubed Top Model episodes. I'm finally moving to my own place this week, so more on that later, hopefully.

From the short drive over the Red River towards Bat Trang, two Saturdays ago.



Not pictured: a group of giggling Vietnamese women who had also stopped to take some photos, and who kept taking pictures of Iain.

Bac Trang is a village about 20 minutes drive out of Hanoi that's famous for pottery, though none of these pictures are particularly pottery related. We tried to drive out twice in the last two Saturdays (the only day Iain and I have off all week long), but were rained out midway there on the first attempt by a torrential tropical storm (see: earlier photos of motorbike drivers huddled under the overpass.) At any rate, we made it back next week and wandered around aimless a bit, though we didn't do anything particularly pottery-centric; it was incredibly nice to get out of the city if even for just a few hours - these six day work weeks are definitely kicking my butt more than I'd like, though hopefully I'll be getting some more travelling in during November (after election day, which I fully intend to spend sitting in front of the godawful CNN channel we get out here).

The awesome students of my (all-women!) Pre-Intermediate III class, which ended two weeks ago. On their first day, I was midway through my standard 1st day of class intro spiel + getting-to-know-you activities when one of them (I forget who) interrupted to ask who I was, and I had to explain that I was actually the teacher, and not just a particularly motivated fellow student.)

I am sorry, as ever, for the radio silence this last month; the excuse this time is that I'm well into my second month of homelessness, thanks to some plans falling through. My battery is dying on my laptop (typing, fast, in Iain's kitchen, where I've been living these last couple of weeks. The whole house, not the kitchen) so in lieu of my own apologetic incoherence, you can read about me on my friend Ben's blog, which you should look at anyway since he actually writes about living in Hanoi and all that, instead of just sporadically resurfacing to apologize for not resurfacing sooner. If you skim around enough, there's a photo of my many exhuast pipe burns as well (I'm on my 4th!)

A few photos from the Marble Mountains, which I wrote more extensively about back in March); the mountain was one of my favorite places in all of Vietnam, so I was really happy we got the chance to go back there. It was sunny this time, so there were crazy beams of light in the caves, and I got to climb through the slippery rockface hole of certain death again, only this time in flipflops.

Crazy spotlights in the cave illuminating the shrines; Josh does... something.

Because I am fancy, I finally figured out how to schedule posts on this thing, which means that as you read this, I am being run over by motorbikes in Saigon, or, at the very least, am sleeping (but in Saigon! Not Hanoi!).

SIDECAR!

Last week I was lucky enough to have my friend Josh from Oberlin visit me on his way back home from Japan; we spent a few days in Hanoi before making a whirlwind trip down to Hoi An, I had a great time and it was awesome getting to see someone from home, though today I am weirdly homesick and missing the Bay Area in particular, which may explain the sudden rush of blog posts (that and I'm not working this week, which means I'm approaching a state of being well-rested for the first time in months). At any rate, I love getting the chance to show someone around Hanoi and drive them around on my motorbike, even if we didn't really manage to do anything particularly touristy while in town.

We did, however, manage to get Josh set up with a lifetime supply of stickers.

At any rate, Josh is gone and everyone else is working, so I am weirdly aimless today; I learned how to fumblingly talk about the weather in Vietnamese today (hot; rainy; spring-rainy; really rainy), and also that apparently me and my teacher's definitions of "mind-crushingly hot" apparently do not coincide. My Vietnamese, by the way, barely deserves to be called that - I'm not good at languages on a good day (see: posts way back in November about my wasted four years of Spanish) and Vietnamese, with its various and sundry new vowel sounds and six tones, is entirely different from anything else I've ever tried to wrap my brain around. I'm trying to practice more these days, though mostly on little kids (if they laugh at me, at least I'm still bigger than them); the best response so far was telling a little girl in Hoi An that her shoes were beautiful (dep qua!) and randomly receiving a giant hug, though whether this was in response to my crazy impressive Vietnamese skills or because she felt that bad for me that I could be so old and still barely able to speak still isn't entirely clear.

Left to right: Thao, who was the most prone to excessive compliments ("I love these new crayons! You are very nice today! This game is awesome!"); Yen Nhi, who was a bit shy at first but who would wait outside the staff room for me to walk to class; and Lan, who had somewhere picked up the phrase "oh noooo" and used it to call attention to pretty much anything that happened ever (a broken crayon: "Oh noooo, Mikka!"; a randomly open window: "oh nooooo!")

Back in June, I got assigned a kids class - Starters Two, which means very, very, very beginner - which was terrifying, given that a month of intensive CELTA training left me overwhelmed at teaching adults with a functional grasp of English already. I had absolutely no idea what I was doing when I walked into the room on the first day with a box of crayons and a lesson plan that pretty much consisted of:

1) Say "Hello!!! How are you?"

2) Get them to say "Hello!!! How are you?" back.

3) Sing the "Hello!!! How are you?" song at least three times.

4) Pass out crayons.

Left to right: Lan Anh, who was the best artist in the class; Giang and Huy, who blazed through every worksheet I gave them to the point where I had to print out special word-searches for them to do while everyone else finished.

I was in no way prepared for how insanely good natured my students would be about the fact that I clearly had no idea what I was doing (or the fact that they already knew the phrase "Hello, how are you?" - I didn't find out till much later that the first three weeks of our class was meant to be review), but amazingly they were all cool with the fact that we spent the first few weeks doing way too much coloring and BINGO (they rocked BINGO), and after a few weeks, a handful of them took to waiting in the hallway for me to come out of the teachers room, and would bob around me as we walked up the hallway (Them: Hellomikkahowareyou?? Me: I'm fine, thank you, and you? Them: I'mfinethanksandyou?? all the way up the hall) and then whenever I walked into the room they'd all chorus HELLO MIKKA! at the top of their lungs like I was actually a decent teacher who did more than just make them play Simon Says too much. It wasn't till late July that I was finally starting to feel a bit more adventerous, teaching-wise - one day we sang Hello, Goodbye by the Beatles, and seriously if you haven't seen a roomfull of ridiculously tiny Vietnamese children earnestly singing the Beatles, you're missing out.

So I was completely smitten with my kids class by mid-August, which is why I was devastated to walk in one afternoon and find out that I'd been moved to Sundays, which meant my kids were going to be given a new teacher, and even more gutted when I found out the shift was happening that weekend and that I would never get to teach them again. I fell all over myself describing them to their new teacher ("They love coloring and BINGO and Simon Says and this game where you paste pictures to their backs and make them guess, oh, and wordsearches, don't forget those, Giang and Huy will finish everything really fast and Linh and Nghia need extra time, and Thuong will ask you to look at everything she does, and if you give Thao the new crayon box she will love you forever and, we started making zoo collages last week, don't forget their zoo collages, and and and" ) and I still miss them, like a lot, so much that I'm writing ridiculously long posts about them instead of my recent trip to Hoi An or pretty much anything else about living in Hanoi, but there you go. I miss you guys.