fragmented pieces to fill your cravings

A hardy hello to all from Vung Tau. It seems that our blogs have been dissipating, and so the stories keep building. We really could write epic novels about our adventures, but there just isn’t time. So I’ll just write a few thoughts, and answer a few questions that have been asked.

Firstly I’ll (being Brandon) have to thank my parents for the birthday money. We arrived in VT on my birthday, and jumped into the job the next day, so I didn’t really have time to ‘enjoy’ my birthday. Although I suppose that moving to an Oceanside town to live for a year isn’t a bad birthday at all. However, the money that I was given was well spent when our weekend came. Our weekends are Mondays. We signed contracts that leave us open to teach six days a week, so Monday is our holiday. (more on the contract later). Sunday night was a big party for Stuart’s child. The child is one month old, which is a big date for the Vietnamese. Stuart is a co-worker of mine who married a Vietnamese lady, hence celebrating Vietnamese traditions. We mixed and mingled for a few hours and had a wonderful spread. We then went out with a bunch of the teachers and enjoyed the social scene. After playing pool for a while, we decided to leave. Now the wonderful thing about spontaneity is that it’s spontaneous. Where the idea came from, I don’t recall, but it was decided that we would drive north along the coast to Long Hai, and spend the night and Monday there at the beaches. (The beaches in VT do look nice, but aren’t really anything special to swim in because of the oil rigs). As we sat on the side of the road reading the Lonely Planet trying to figure out how to get to LH, a Vietnamese guy offered to lead us up there. (I definitely forgot to mention that we each have our own motobikes. We got them the day we arrived in VT. They are our lifelines. We can do anything now. We have done several tears up the coast, but none as epic as this. They cost about 60 USD to rent for a month). So we hop on our bikes and rip off to LH. It took about half an hour, and it was about 3 am when we arrived. Luckily hotel owners sleep in their lobbies so that we can snag rooms off them at such horrible hours. And to our enjoyment, our guide settled all of it for us. AT 11 am we awoke, and decided to get massages for 60,000 dong (or 6.5 dollars)! And after a nice 45 min. massage, we headed down to the beach for food and swim. Our first swim in the South China Sea was decent. It was a cloudy day, with not much wave action, but still spectacular. The water was incredibly warm. Almost too warm. I’d say 82 to 84 degrees. And the beach was great. The beaches here are really wide. As in, the don’t dive steep into the water. They gradually get deeper. So you can walk out a long way. And there are full shells everywhere. It was super nice. stop.

Now for our jobs and contracts and all that great stuff. We work in a fairly small school. There are 10 or 11 teachers. Dave, Rick, John, Anne, Antony, Craig, Stuart, Rudi (who is also our boss right now), and then the two of us. (Quite different than Saigon where there were 50 teachers). It is pretty tight knit, and we hang out a lot. Tonight we are going bowling. We both teach classes aged 5 to 16 or 17. Right now I only have 3 classes, totally about 16 hours. By the sounds of it I will get many more hours. Our contracts actually start on October 1st, and run until September 30, 2007 (when we get a $1000 bonus for finishing the contract). Our pay is $1066 per month, based on 82 hours a month. Roughly 20 hours per week. Overtime is fairly frequent, so here is an explanation of that. Whatever hours we work overtime, they enter an OT bank. This bank accumulates to 50 hours. The hours up to 50 are unpaid. When it goes over 50, we get paid our hourly rate (14) plus 1 dollar, so 15, on that months pay check. The bank works so that we can take vacation, but still get our monthly salary. So if I take two weeks off, I just deduct 40 hours from my bank, and still get my whole salary. Pretty cool idea. Whatever hours are left at the end, I then get paid those hours.

One last piece of information. We are getting a house. We are signing the contract tomorrow. It is a big blue house, with 3 stories, the third being a porch, on section which is a glassed in room with crazy wood carved furniture. We have a small pool above our garage, about 10 ft by 8 ft, and 6 ft deep. It has three bedrooms, and 2 bathrooms. It is the greatest house I will probably ever live in (mainly because of the view) and it only costs us $450 a month. We have to include electricity and water on top of that, but that will be nominal because everything is pretty cheap here. We will get pictures of the house up soon, but not yet.

More….. the cheapness. It is really quite cheap to live here. I’d say you can cut the cost of everything down to one third. Some things are equally priced, but expect to pay about a third of what you would in Canada. Labour is even cheaper. People here work like dogs. They seem to love it, and charge very little for their time.
Nap time is from 12 -2. The city slows to a crawl during these hours. Everyone turns off their lights, and just hangs out in their shops or restaurants or wherever. Few people do anything. I feel weird when I’m out at this time. The people are generally very nice, and very interested in why we are here and where we’re from. Sometimes the language barrier is overwhelming, but a surprising amount of them can speak enough English to get by. However, that allows us to be lazy and not learn Vietnamese. I really have to get on top of that.
So things are really coming together. I realize this was frantic and disjointed, but hopefully it is informative. I just finished teaching and am ready for food and bowling.

Goodbye for now.
The adventures continue.
Brandon and Adam.