Ants in the Sugar - Part Two

Ants in the Sugar – Part Two

(Thursday 11^th – Tuesday 16^th November)

So the agent arrived to drive me to the apartment, sign the contract and move in. All the way here through the city my doubts continued. Admittedly I haven’t done much exploring yet, but (even being only 15-20 minutes in the car) it seemed very far from the city centre surroundings I’ve become familiar with. My moving day loneliness was exacerbated by the huge windstorm that blew up like something out of the Wizard of Oz later that evening. Being on the 12^th floor in a fairly low-rise area, this created a howling noise I haven't heard since Senate House Library.

Then, the apartment block looked just as run down in daylight, and the flat itself tattier, dirtier and less well-equipped. Going through the inventory was even stranger than usual. One glass, no kettle, no cutlery to speak of and a couple of manky pots and pans, plus the dinky little tea set with the thimble-sized cups the landlady had seemed so proud of on Tuesday night. Not to mention the office-style water dispenser with three empty barrels and a telephone number for re-orders that didn’t seem to be working when either Mai, the landlady, or Duy, the agent, tried to call. The TV wasn’t tuned in properly, and the ADSL broadband won’t let me access Facebook Touch let alone the full-blown version. For now I have to wait until I get to work, which I’ve never liked doing. Facebook, to me, is for ‘off-time’ not ‘work-time’.

Facebook is banned in Vietnam. But so far, unlike the other teachers here, I haven’t managed to by-pass the block. When I try to change the network settings in System Preferences I get a pop-up message saying ‘Your network settings have been changed by another application’ which keeps popping back up no matter how many times I click on ‘OK’ and prevents me from doing anything to the point that I can only close System Preferences via ‘Force Quit’. Any ideas?

At some point in the past, someone in the apartment has succumbed to plastic, cutesiness. There’s the 101 Dalmatians tile frieze all the way round the top of the splashback in the kitchen. And there’s the grinning sheep plastic coat hooks (most of them broken) stuck to every imaginable wall surface. Many of the fittings and odds-and-ends of utensils I’ve found lying around the flat seem to be cheap, plastic, Japanese ¥100 shop style stuff which might have seemed great when I first went to Japan but just don't fit with the swanky expensive apartment I have in my head here.

In my more rational moments I can see that the place just needs a damn good clean – a process I started properly yesterday. But it has taken me the best part of a week to reach this point, and I still have wobbles about the place, fearing that I have jumped into it too quickly, and worry about the consequences of breaking the contract, leaving and losing all that deposit money. Still, I am resolved to give it some time to settle in, and won’t be pushed out just yet despite the best efforts of the ant, the resident gecko (who was completely freaked out by my cleaning frenzy yesterday) and a couple of ambitiously high-rise cockroaches. How do cockroaches reach the 12^th floor? Do they do it in stages over several generations?

At least now I’m not so tired, and my teaching seems to be picking up strength again with all three kids’ lessons on Sunday going pretty well. Still haven’t got to grips with the TA thing though.