Graham on the road: Studying

Well, I’ve finally got around to writing another blog. My main excuse is that I’ve started studying – it’s a part-time online TEFL course that will keep me very busy for the next ten months. The induction course was conducted over twelve days at the British Council school in Kuala Lumpur. The school is spitting distance from the Petronas Towers (it would have to be a long spit but, well, you know what I mean). The towers look absolutely amazing – especially at night.

They kept us fairly busy on the course but I survived. All went well apart from one little glitch on my written assignment. The tutor meant to write ‘You have looked at pron (short for pronunciation) …’ but she misspelled it and actually wrote ‘You have look at porn …’ I rather wish she’d been a little more careful - that sort of thing can get you in trouble y’know.

Now I’m back in Hanoi and studying as hard as I can manage. I have to pop in to work most days of course but I get to the climbing wall a bit and I’m still playing badminton on the street (we’ve found a better place now).

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Around Hanoi

There are a fair number of mausoleums in the world with the remains of past leaders in them. There’s Mao in Beijing and Lenin in Moscow for example and in Hanoi there’s Ho Chi Minh. HCM is highly revered in Vietnam – more so than any other political leader I can think of. His mausoleum seems to be something of a shrine for the Vietnamese to visit - there were far more Vietnamese in the queue than tourists as far as I could see.

The queue was quite long – about 1km - but moved at walking pace so we got in fairly soon. The actual chamber though is just a walkway around the glass cabinet guarded by four soldiers in white uniforms, rifles and bayonets. You’re not allowed to even smile and I suspect they’d use those bayonets if anyone did something silly. So, I walked past in sombre fashion and stayed in one piece. HCM looks like a waxwork but is in fact embalmed. He goes to Russia for a month or so each year to be restored I’m told.

Cameras are forbidden so the best I could do was take a pic from the outside. The square outside is a really popular spot in the evenings when people walk vigorously up and down (and even backwards) for fitness. Keeping fit is a public thing in Hanoi. From about 6am there are folk out exercising in groups, but you’ll see it at all times of day. Elderly folk are often the keenest and can be seen walking vigorously and swinging their arms, doing Tai Chi or playing badminton.

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Everywhere you go you will find people lighting fires in the streets. Often up against walls or trees. It looks a little dodgy to me. At first I thought it was just a rather handy way to get rid of your rubbish, but I have been informed that it is in fact, offerings. Burning ‘lucky money’ is thought to provide money for dead ancestors eg. to buy them a house, car, food. About 20,000 dong (1 dollar) will buy 1 million lucky dollars so they do OK up there. It is only necessary on the 1^st and 15^th of the lunar month however.

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I can now say ‘Toi khong thich an thit cho’ rather well. (I don’t like to eat dog.) I like to get this point firmly established with any Vietnamese who want to take me out for a ‘traditional’ meal – just in case. I went for a meal with my neighbours, Hanh and Khoi, recently. On the way Khoi asked me ‘Have you ever eaten leeches?’ Have you ever been asked that? It was a first for me. I quickly pointed out that this was not something that I would consider eating – too much blood. I prefer my meat well-done. As it turned out we had a variety of rather tasty dishes including mince in glutinous rice with sausage meat on the side, samosas and shredded shrimp pasted onto a sugar cane (and then cut off).

I bought my first dragon fruit the other day. They’re quite nice.

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Giving flowers is a bit of a minefield I discovered. A few months ago I had my cooker rings cleaned by our in-house cleaner. She doesn’t usually clean my flat so I thought I’d buy her some flowers to say thank you. It all seemed perfectly reasonable. So, when she had finished, I gave the flowers and off she went. She came back 10 minutes later with the landlord and the flowers in a vase. He said they would look nice on my table and gave them to me. I sensed something was wrong so I just took them and said thank you. I closed the door and wondered what had gone wrong…

I have since found out that flowers can mean a few things … marking the anniversary of the death of a family member or a suggestion that you might like to marry. In this case though, she probably just thought that I wanted a vase. I hope so. I have been told that a nice envelope with about 20,000 dong is the usual way to say thank you in these parts. Must remember that …

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I’ll leave you with a little Health & Safety – Vietnamese style. I watched this chap from my living room window the other day – he’s about 6 storeys up and hanging from a rope ladder. He swung across to the air-conditioning unit and climbed on top of it. The other chap hanging out of the window pulled the ladder away and then threw it back when all was done. Those units have been there a while and I imagine the brackets are getting a bit rusty but he looked as cool as a cucumber.