Ants in the Sugar – Part One

(Tuesday 9^th – Thursday 11^th November)

Well, there had to be a down sooner or later and the sudden acquisition of the apartment was it. Having spent a sizeable chunk of my day off yesterday cleaning the kitchen, I’ve just got up to find ants in the sugar. A further twist in the, so far, rather tortured relationship I have with the apartment.

I was so excited when I found it last Tuesday night. Then overnight the panic set in. For a start, it’s in a different area of the city to where I’d been looking before, and slightly further away from school. Then it’s at the top-end of my budget ($600), which I suspect is possibly a little on the high-side - although yesterday I stumbled across a website offering it for $700! Plus, while the rest of the apartment has been redecorated to suit modern Western tastes, it seems someone forgot the bathroom, which doesn’t look as if anyone has bothered much about it since the place was built. And the building is, to put it kindly, not exactly in the first flush of youth.

It was also the last place the agent showed me on that evening, and after a varied assortment of potential-definite no’s, plus one definite maybe, I was getting tired and depressed. The guesthouse was wearing me down through noise and lack of sleep, and I just wanted out. The thought of having to repeat the process of house-hunting again on my next day off was demoralizing. So agreeing to take this place and paying the landlady a holding fee to stop her showing it to anybody else was followed by a sleepless night worrying that I had rushed into it. I probably should have called the agent and slowed things down.

But by then I was so tired I wasn’t thinking straight. And I had to get the deposit together before signing the contract on Thursday morning. And, of course, I’d be at work for half of Wednesday.

Now, getting your hands on two months’ deposit plus a month’s rent in advance, in cash, in a foreign country can be complicated at the best of times. Add in the landlady’s insistence on payment in dollars – the ATMs, unsurprisingly, spew out dong - and you’ve got the added hassle of calculating exchange rates, commission charges and, indeed, finding an exchange bureau willing to handle those kinds of amounts. (‘Why you want change so much dong?’; ‘We don’t have that much dollar’.) It’s all enough to make an English teacher’s brain curl up and die, whimpering.

Vietnamese ATMs generally only impose a transaction limit and not a daily limit – so with only 36 hours to get the money I hightailed it up to the two convenience stores on Bui Vien when I got back to Backpackerville that night, and duly stood there putting card in, taking money out, putting card back in and taking more money out. Unfortunately, someone forgot to mention this helpful little service to Santander who declined my request when I went back to repeat the operation on Wednesday morning. With only 24 hours and several million dong still to go, and the agent emailing me a copy of the draft contract (no mention of cooling off period) panic was added to doubt and tiredness. By the time I left work on Wednesday night I was tired to the point of tears, although they didn't actually come until Friday night.

Luckily, cash-flow had been restored by the timely appearance of the HR Co-ordinator bearing bank cards stacked with our relocation allowances. And Santander had merely imposed their own daily limit so come Thursday morning I was back in business. So much so that I actually ended up with too many dollars, and at some point I’ll have to go back and change them back into dong.

Flat hunt - Mission Accomplished (fingers crossed)

I've found a flat!!! Hurrah! Not one of the brand spanking new ones like Steve and Louise's - in fact from the outside the building looks a bit tatty. But inside its lovely!! I'm so excited. Move in on Thursday morning. In the meantime, have to race around the ATMs and foreign exchange bureaux getting the dollars together for the deposit. xxx

HCMC - the first ten days

So, after a slighter longer delay than anticipated, here goes - and I apologise if I repeat anything anyone has already read in an email...

Been in HCMC now about ten days, acclimatizing to the weather (hot and humid, interspersed with torrential downpours); the school (awesome - 9 storeys, 64 classrooms, 100+ teachers, 5000+ students - just this school NOT the whole company - and more resources and supplementary materials than most TEFL teachers ever imagined possible in a single location); the hawkers who refuse to take no for an answer no matter how many times you point out you’re already wearing a pair of sunglasses; the traffic (analyse it a little and it’s not quite as insane as it looks) and the dress code for taking xe om (motorbike taxis) to work – short, straight skirts are not a good idea!

The company put us up in a guest house right in central Backpackerland for the first week, which is adequate but not ideal. Its noisy, doesn’t always have hot water or a working internet connection and you run the gamut of the aforementioned hawkers and xe om drivers every time you step out of the front door – even when you’re just crossing the road to get some breakfast from the coffee shop opposite. Most of us have stayed on after the first free week was up merely out of tiredness and unwillingness to move for the sake of moving, preferring to stick it out a bit longer until we can find a permanent place (although the owner, who seems to have taken a shine to me, has just offered me a ‘better’ rate if I stay on next week, which I will…)

I am, however, more or less, actively engaged in the hunt for a place of my own – or rather, so far, I’ve been tagging along with a couple of other new teachers, Steve and Louise, who also happen to be looking for a 2-bedroom apartment at a similar price range, and are rather more proactive about it than I am! Indeed, I spent most of yesterday wandering with a silly grin, giggling to myself after I went with them on their second viewing of their preferred choice. OH. MY. GOD! Brand new, gorgeous, tastefully decorated, flatscreen TV and wifi installed as standard. Put it this way, there was a massive red Ferrari parked out the front of the building. The same apartment in London would be costing them at least triple (?) the $650USD a month they’re paying here. I’ve told the estate agent I don’t want to pay that much, but if he has any one-bedroom places in that block all my wannabe visitors will be consigned to backpacker hell!!

Steve, Louise and I seem to have formed the main flank of the ‘Older/experienced’ guard of this month’s newbie teachers. There are nine of us in all, and we all seem to get on really well (we shall see…) but most of the others are still in their first year of teaching, so we were the ones doing most of the talking during induction. Steve and Louise already have Cambridge examining experience, as well as contacts at the British Council out here, so the three of us are beginning to make enquiries about Cambridge and IELTS examining here – which, apparently would involve travelling as well as getting paid! And examining, obviously, is one form of moonlighting the company don't mind us doing, as it reflects well on them.

Meanwhile, the Delta seems to be bringing me a certain amount of kudos too. The company run it in-house for existing employees but I think it’s quite unusual for someone who already has it to turn up on their doorstep. Maybe it was the jetlag, maybe just my fevered imagination, but were the Academic Managers (DoS’s and ADoS’s) and Academic Co-ordinators (Senior Teachers) coming up to me the first couple of days and saying, ‘Oh, you're Phillipa’ in strangely awed tones? Had word got out around the office to approach with caution?!

But it has provoked a lot of interest (thank god – it is, after all, still too soon after finishing the Delta, for me to have developed a life and the social skills required to talk about anything else). Tagg (yes, that’s her real name), my main AC, is just finishing Module 3, and Sandra, one of the other ACs, is just about to start. Tagg is also about 8 months pregnant. I mention this only as background explanation for her rather sick Halloween costume on Saturday – a blood-stained t-shirt with doll body parts ‘emerging’ from it! I dread to think what the kindergarten kids made of it!

Anyway, I think that’s about all for now. Click the link or the photo on the right here to see the first few photos of HCMC and the Reunification Palace. After a week of increasing hermit-like reclusivity, I finally emerged and managed an hour or so’s touristy stuff yesterday before the heavens opened. Your attention is also directed to my friends’ blogs – particularly ‘On the road with a toad’ in which Matt and Debbie (bless ‘em) recount their adventures as they embark on a pedal-powered pub crawl from Cambridge to Cape Town!

Speak soon xx