This is going up on my other site, Drinking & Drawing, in the near future so I figured I should post it here too:

It’s my Bonushog shirt/poster sketch! Those of you who watched Season 1 in Vietnam should recognize the old rascal even in my lopsided freehand.  I want a Bonushog shirt!

It’s time to make our accounting apparent. After all, one crucial thesis of this experiment is that these adventures are possible on a bare-bones budget. Frankly, It’s been a constant battle. As we’ve explained, a hefty savings would have been much more comfortable than a summer of grueling jobs and mimunum-wage living. The first weeks in Vietnam have been so hectic because Saigon made us sweat moisture and money at equal rates. Finances are another burden, another challenge, another one of those recurring crises people encounter in travel.
We’re trying to forge a path that others can easily follow, and money is the launch pad. So we’re weaving our fickle finances into our developing story – in essence, we need to prove the $0.00 in Jet Set Zero.

We left Seattle and landed in Saigon with $3859. Three months of labor had seen that money steadily accumulate, but our first month saw it rapidly melt.

Here’s our financial footprint so far:

$630 – Housing and accommodations for 3 weeks

$260 – Expensive trip to Nha Trang

$125 – Bonus Hog, but she’s a recent addition to our team…and yes, we bough, and are currently driving, a motorbike for $125

$672 – Food – 3 months of our summer nutrition-less food budget inspired a little financial recklessness our food spending, and we averaged about $8.50/person/day, including daily trips to wifi cafes. We love our hotel, but trying to do Jet Set work in those dark stuffy rooms just makes us yearn for cool temperatures, fresh air, and peaceful quiet, all of which are so abundant in Saigon… so we’re driven to local wifi cafes, which always involves opening and emptying our wallets.

$200 – Drinks – we haven’t yet figured out the cheaper watering holes, and we’ve had a couple epic party nights, though to be fair, a “bad night” drinking can set us back a whopping $30…

$45 – Transit – daily Xe Om (motorbike taxis) rides to/from work and big taxi rides (from drivers who liked taking long expensive excursions before dumping us off at our destination) are adding up pretty quick

$175 – miscellaneous get-yourself-set-up costs, including annoying banking withdrawal fees

So, we’ve spent $2107 so far, leaving us with $1752.

Seems ok, right? Unfortunately, we don’t get paid for another week and our teaching schedules are far from mature, so we don’t expect to pull in much money. At this point, we need to move to cheaper housing and find a way to stop leaking money at local cafes…
At the end of each week, we’ll post a financial report which follows the episode, telling you the poor, the bad, and the poverty of our travels.

There is no contest in what I consider to be the greatest accomplishment of my time here in Saigon.  Driving a motorbike, day after day in the traffic here.

I've never seen traffic jams like this

When we arrived here we were totally amazed by the chaos embodied by the traffic.  Motorbikes, cars, and buses swirled around each other and over every part of the city that was remotely level.  To live here is to constant keep your vision moving, looking for the next screaming motorbike, bus or wall of traffic and figuring out if it is going to require swift reactive action on your part.  The flow never stops, so even crossing the street is an exercise in slowly putting one foot in front of the other and trying to make eye contact with whatever insane driver is on a trajectory mostly likely to intersect with your own.  This absolute madness was something we boldly boasted about walking through, but never imagined we would take part in.

We seem to do a good job of challenging ourselves, and as such it wasn’t long before we found ourselves learning how to ride a bike out in the industrial district under the brave guidance of one of our Vietnamese friends.  After that we promptly rented bikes and built up a tolerance for traffic levels.

As much as the traffic here is pure anarchy and lacks compete regard for laws or common sense, there is a sort of system.  A system I think of as blockers and flows.  Flows move in a single direction, along streets, down sidewalks, and are more or less as safe as it gets.  You bounce along through them and try and keep a bubble from the other crazy drivers.  The challenge comes when you need to switch to a flow moving a different direction or when two flows intersect.  At this point its just a big fucked up game of chicken with no right of way between one and a few hundred drivers competing for the same slice of road you need.  This is where the blockers come in.  No matter how many lanes of fast moving traffic there are, there is always someone with less to lose than the rest that inches out.  As they block the oncoming flow everyone else falls into the traffic shadow they create until the balance tips and your flow takes the road. Simple right?

Needless to say no matter what happens to me, for the rest of my life I will never forget the experience of driving in Saigon.  Never has been getting to where you’re going been so insane or exciting.

Crossing the flow

So I’ll admit, my first day of teaching was as horrible as the short clip suggests, and while I wasn’t curled on the floor crying, as Brian suggested, my compatriots did find me lying upside-down with a tie around my forehead.

As backstory, on Friday September 12, I was offered some teaching hours with Cleverlearn; on Monday, I was informed that I’d be teaching; on Tuesday, I stepped into the classroom.

I was to teach 7th grade at a local public school. The only things I’d heard so far about teaching at public schools were that I would have TA’s to “keep the children in line” and that Cleverlearn tried to keep public school teaching hours low because teachers get overwhelmed, exhausted, and/or burnt out. I kept conjuring the nightmare stories from Teach for America or remembering the public school teacher blogs I had read for my education research. Rolling eyes, screaming children, paper projectiles—in a word, pandemonium. So, I spent as long as I could carefully preparing some activities and devising interesting ways to review material in the book.

I introduced myself, speaking slowly and in simple English, in accordance with the lesson they were studying. As I continued speaking, they all started exchanging confused glances and staring at me with blank faces. I was informed by the TA – who, it turns out, is actually their regular teacher, highly qualified, trained, patient, but unfortunately not a native-english speaker – that I was talking too quickly, that they don’t understand the English I was using, that, in not so many words, all the things I was doing were over their heads. All my lesson preparations and activities just went out the window, and I was staring at 75 more minutes with this class and 90 minutes with another. Oh, and also, they’ve actually already done all the lessons in the textbook, so it won’t really work to fall back on just ‘going by the book.’
How I got through that, I still don’t know. Those first 15 minutes were utter chaos, as I slowed my speaking, raised my voice, simplified my vocabulary until I was bellowing monosyllabic commands at a classroom clearly out of control. There was a break about 45 minutes through, which really became the official time period to act the way they had already been acting. This is what they usually do during break…

Once they start swinging the pole at each other, I exit as quickly as possible – I didn’t see it, I’m not responsible, I can’t even communicate with them, and I’m totally not dealing with it.
The classes were a nightmare of embarrassment – having 30 students just ignore you – and shame – completely on the fly, I came up with the stupidest and most inane activities…I still shake my head at how much I wasted their time. The first day of teaching at public schools was unfortunately awful, and it made me so gun-shy for my later classes…

There aren’t many jobs for an American in Vietnam.  And the ones there are might not be what you thought they were going to be…

This past week of teaching was one of the most successful I’ve had yet. Teaching English (and I imagine teaching in general) can be a fickle trade, and I’ve observed two general ways to immerse oneself in it.

Some teachers simply check out mentally and emotionally, content to mime the teaching motions with a thick layer of apathy. I actually can’t do that…teaching for me is emotionally submitting myself to whatever storms break in the classroom.

On days when teaching is stale – in fact, so slow that I can feel the classroom time itself slowly going stale – or when yelling at my rowdy 7th graders wears thin my voice and patience or when my banking students stare at me with blank frustrated faces – when those days hit, I’m a wreck. I feel awful, and it can ruin my evening. I feel as though I’ve wasted their time and I’ve wasted mine.

However, on days when teaching has gone well, my spirits soar. This past Friday was one such day. With my morning students, we discussed the future of Vietnam as I guided them through Superstruct, a massive Alternate Reality Game about life in 2019. My hope is that it at least immerses them in issues of far more importance than when to use “might” v. when to us “could.” I played music with my 9th graders, which had the obvious boon of exciting everyone. But I had them complete lyric sheets, which was actually extremely difficult for many of them, but it was a challenge that deeply engaged them. After playing it a couple times, I went through the song phrase by phrase, telling them what words they should be listening to. I could see the excitement in their eyes when the jumble of sounds they once heard suddenly coalesced into something coherent. The only downside was that I had to listen to 3 hours of angsty teen music – and why the hell are 9th graders listening to these true love and break up songs?!? And am I really old enough to be complaining about those angsty teenagers?!?

Anyway, with my banking students, I facilitated an lively conversation about the merits of marriage, a conversation which had many winding tangents. I think the most interesting was discussing the differences between sex and gender…

All in all, I ended my longest day teaching elated. I still feel like a farce of a teacher, but on Friday, I felt that I had accomplished something useful. And everyone had fun, which is always a plus.

Episode 2 shows and suggests how challenging it was to find jobs after we landed.  I wanted to clarify one of the crucial reasons why the process was so difficult and why it pummeled our morale.

Usually, getting jobs is supposed to be fairly simple – show up to a school, make a year-long commitment, and bam! you’re in the classroom dishing out some English and raking in some money.  Most ESL markets are afflicted with some teacher-school antagonism.  Schools change schedules, pay late (or not at all), and can just generally puppet teachers around.  Teachers have an unfortunate habit of disappearing before their contract is up, often without warning, and mysteriously just after payday.  Needless to say, it’s a bit of an unstable environment, and generally, it’s the students who lose.

The job search could have been much easier if we had just folded ourselves into this vicious cycle, taught for 3 months, and split for the next country.  However, I think that would have been disrespectful and dishonest, and this isn’t the message we want to give about traveling.  So it was agonizing to explain that we are only here for 3 months – in almost every interview, that prompted an “Ok, great, well we might have some classes opening soon, and if we do, I’ll give you a call…”

The job search was frustrating for many reasons, but this was one of the biggest.  It’s a principle we chose to stick to, and it didn’t come without cost.  At the end of the day, however, it’s more accurate to the story we’re trying to create and the message we’re trying to tell.

After my corporate English class last night, I invited the students to get coffee– a thank you for such a great class. Of course, this being Saigon and them being investment bankers, each student took their own shiny, functional motorcycle to the coffee shop, and I took Bonushog. Travelling as a pack (there were about 12 of us), was interesting and I found myself ducking in and out of a few dicey situations to keep with the group. Apparently, even Vietnamese drivers think it’s crazy to cut off a bus. I can’t imagine why.

Well, when we arrive I got a somewhat stern lecture from one of my students. “Mr. Rob, I think the way you drive, you can compete with many young men in the city.” (Just like back home, the worst drivers here are teenage men with a short attention span and something to prove.) Well, after that we launched into a terrible round of horror stories about accidents. One of my students told me she had broken her leg twice, and spent 3 months in the hospital both times because of it. She said she was lucky she didn’t have a limp, because often a broken leg here will leave you with one.

After coffee, with all of my students around me, I found my bike, pulled out the kick-start and gave it a strong shove. Nothing. I gave it another. A little sputtering, then silence. I continued to do this in the Saigon heat for 30 minutes, gradually sweating more and more, while my students looked on masking their amusement with concern. They told me to go to the mechanic, which meant pushing this 300-lb. monster 2 blocks with a small contingent of my class trailing close behind.

The hour passes by very slowly while the mechanic works. My students can’t leave me now because he doesn’t speak English, even though it’s almost 10:30. If I had a tape recorder on me, I might’ve been able to learn every swear word in Vietnamese– the mechanic circled the bike shouting, occasionally pointing at some random piece of hardware and saying “everything is broken”. Great. Here I am at 10:30 at night, far from home, sitting on a tiny plastic stool, drenched in sweat, while half of my corporate students watch a mechanic swear at my motorcycle.

When the bike finally started (170.000 VND and an hour’s humiliation later), my students were reluctant to leave. I don’t think they expected me to get home actually. I took off for home scolded about my driving, terrified of long-term injuries, and humiliated by my own motorcycle. How could it be worse? Never ask.

Just before I turned into our neighborhood, as I focused on crossing the intersection, I hear a woman scream just over my left shoulder, a crash and silence. Glancing back, I see the two motorcycles locked like a knot of twisted metal, smoke, and a single person walking amidst the wreckage. I remember the scrambling police bikes shooting through the alley as I passed.

The message, as I see it: Drive more carefully, you may get seriously hurt. You can’t rely on your motorcycle to function, and even when you can, you can’t rely on anyone else on the road.

Today, in my public school class, I came to the sad and terrible realization that my students and I have the exact same goal: waste class time. We would love it if the clock hand swept by just a little quicker; if the next group exercise took just a little longer; if the noisy chaos at the begining of class lingered just a few more minutes. My experience last week confirms this– as I rounded out my time in class, I thought it would be a good idea to continue until the next period’s teacher arrived. The minutes ticked by, one after another, and I continued shouting instructions and correcting grammar as the students worked through the exercises. Before long I noticed that I had taught a full 20 minutes over and decided to wrap up and leave. By the time we’d completed the end-of-class ritual “Goooodddbbyyyyee teeaaacchhhheeer” “Goodbye class, thank you.” I walked into the hallway, and found the science teacher sinfully enjoying her reprieve.

I will need to struggle now to resist the urge to enable this joint desire. That’s why we play games, I realize. We don’t teach anyone English, we just help them pass the time just a little faster. So much for any illusion I had about being a legitimate teacher.

In case I haven’t yet mentioned this, a lot of respect out here is based on your age. My class full of investment bankers were shocked to learn that I was only 24, and every time I tell a younger audience, I start to lose control. So, in my effort to look older, I have decided to bring back the beard I wore for over two years. Right now, it’s just a little scraggly, but hopefully, it will grow in full but well-tamed.