As September was closing, we had $1752 to our names. Unfortunately, the sources of our slow financial death continued unchecked, and money disappeared to fund coffee, food, drinks, transit, and accommodation.

It turns out that we get paid on the 4th of the month, which fell on a Saturday in the first week of October. So, we still had to wait until Monday to collect our meager paychecks.

We were prepared to open our wallets wide for this trip to Buon Ma Thuot, but as we mentioned, we didn’t spend a single Vietnam dong. This act of hospitality effectively saved us whatever money a normal weekend would have cost, plus $30 by consolidating all our gear into 1 room (with Dan) for 2 nights.

Accommodations were only $180 this week, while food was around $200. The small financial crisis of the week was renewing our VISA’s, which were set to expire on the 5th of October. We doubted Vietnam had the infrastructure to track us down, but we figured being illegal aliens in our first country would be a bad idea. So we dropped $240 to avoid deportation. With all of us having jobs, transit rose to $35. Finally, Rob, Brian, and I needed some new clothes for teaching, so 2 tailored shirts and 1 tailored pair of pants cost us $61.
All in all, the past week cost us $716.
We now have $1036, barely holding onto 4 figures.

Here’s how it broke down per person, for the week of September 29th to October 5th.

• $50 for food, about $10/day, which includes an ok breakfast ($1), coffees at a wifi cafe (3 * $1 = $3), lunch ($2), dinner ($2.50), and maybe 2 drinks after a day of stressful teaching ($1.50). Remember that food was free for the 2 days of Buon Ma Thuot. We still need to drive this number down.
• $45 for sharing our double rooms, which includes splitting the cost of only 1 room for 2 days.
• $60 for new VISAs and a small sense of security.
• $12 for transit, even with Bonus Hog, our new bike. Any given day could involve multiple trips to our school (about $.75 each) and trips to outside classes ($1.50).
• $17 for a tailored shirt.

So the week that ended with Buon Ma Thuot was about $184/person, still higher than we want and higher than projections.

What does a teacher do after an awkward and authority-draining experience like Buon Ma Thout? How can you stand before a room of investment bankers with confidence after they have seen you groaning into a karaoke-club microphone? Do you remind them that your inebriated mumblings somehow earned you a perfect singing score? Well, no, that would probably be the wrong route to take. But I have a secret weapon in the war on humiliation.

Before I tell you what it is, a little disclosure: I did not have to bear half the shame that Matt did. First, there were only three of my students on this trip– the rest coming from Matt’s less advanced cohort– so I was already at an advantage. Second, the two biggest instigators were Ms. 100%, and the groups patriarch-of-a-supervisor, were both a part of Matt’s class. So stepping into my classroom on Monday was already easier.

I waited for the class to arrive that day with absolute stoicism. The surest way, I thought, to precipitate embarrassment would be to look embarrassed. I had nothing to be ashamed of. Maybe that wasn’t true, but I had to believe anyway or I would lose before the fighting began. So as I waited, I heard amidst the Vietnamese chatter the words “100%” and heard riotous laughter. This was it for me, I was done. But no, I can’t show fear. Students can sense it.

Throughout the class things got gradually worse. Isolated murmuring and giggles turned into Vietnamese chatter. Vietnamese chatter became Vietnamese conversation. Laughter spread indefatigably around the room until it was finally break time– my last refuge. Taking a long drink of water the answer finally dawned on me. I might know how to get out of this one.

Holding back my shame, I restarted class ten minutes later and began the conversation simply: “You all speak English so well, why are you speaking in Vietnamese?” That was it, a nugget of flattery so perfectly aimed at their hearts it distracted them from their mockery. They denied it, dutifully. “No, I’m serious. My job here is to allow you to speak, not so much for you to improve your English, but become more confident about the fact that you speak it so well.”

And that’s the secret. From then on, the room lightened up, and English replaced Vietnamese. Concentrated stares replaced laughter. And for me, smugness replaced self pity. So here’s the moral: never underestimate flattery, a secret weapon against subversion.

In episode 5, Brian alluded to the tension we sometimes face between being teachers and being adventurers. I also alluded to my hopes for relaxing and developing a more personal rapport with these ‘students,’ almost all of whom are older than me. You saw footage of us drinking (and drinking and drinking) with them…what you didn’t see was the ride back the next day, which was an agonizing 7-hour stretch in a cramped van on broken paths that barely passed as road – while extremely and obviously hungover. I had a foreboding sense that some irrevocable had changed in my relationship with these students, but I didn’t completely comprehend how until the next time I stood before them as a teacher.

All Monday, Rob and I discussed the nightmare scenarios for how class could go – laughter, mockery, disregard, unwillingness to respect a teacher they had seen both hammered and hungover barely 48 hours ago. I walked into the classroom, stood before the whiteboard, and had a sudden and powerful de ja vu. Echoing laughter when I stood there. Laughter literally in my face, bordering on mockery. Disregard when I tried to move quickly past the laughter and onto some subject completely unrelated to anything they might be thinking about as they laughed and laughed. Disrespect at my further attempts to get the class under control. It was all there, exactly as I imagined it. I had lost all esteem, and I wasn’t entirely sure what to do.

Looking back, I realized I should have just rolled with it. I should have laughed heartily at myself, asked them to tell any stories from the weekend, and then taught them some vocabulary about drinking (and recovering from drinking). After all, their reaction wasn’t malicious – they were genuinely amused. Instead, I fumbled awkwardly through the next couple classes, trying to make the room once again a place of learning English and not of laughing at the English teacher.

So the weekend came with a couple price tags, and dignified respect was definitely one of them.

Jet Set Zero crashes a Vietnamese wedding outside the city of Buon Me Thuot with their ESL students. “We’d heard some pretty wild things about weddings…”

In an effort to give you a better idea of how I spend my time working for JS0 I think I’ll start passing on various little nuggets about our editing workflow.  In this edition I’ll cover some of the joys of Apple software design.

We (I) at the JS0 Production Office use Final Cut Pro to edit our show, and to help me (the sole editor) get some sleep during the week we have Bryan and Kevin diligently log all the footage they record in the field and then email me the log files.  When a batch of tapes arrives I just import those log files to Final Cut Pro, toss a tape into our capture deck and hit “Go!”  FCP reads all the times/lengths of shots from the plain .txt log file and attaches those attributes to clips coming in off the camera for a nice, tidy package that I can work with.  It’s a pretty slick-and-smooth workflow.

Usually.

Fuck you, Steve Jobs.

Windows plain .txt files use a kind of line ending character called a CRLF, or “Carriage Return Line Feed,” which includes more data than the simple LF or “Line Feed” character that Macs use by default when encoding plain text.  The two are incompatible for a number of reasons, and if you’ve ever tried to open a .txt file created in TextEdit on a Mac in NotePad on Windows, you’ll probably have noticed that all the lines are mashed together into one big jumble.

Usually Bryan & Kevin are doing their footage logging on a Windows machine, scribbling down frame numbers and typing them into a pre-formatted text file for me, which saves all the line endings as CRLFs.  But once in a while they happen to do the note taking on a Mac, which saves the batch files with my new enemy in this world, the LF character.

In Apple’s infinite wisdom they have decided that Final Cut Pro (which is available exclusively on the Macintosh) should only recognize CRLFs, and will completely ignore LFs, thus rendering an otherwise identical batch file unreadable.  Naturally this is completely undocumented and cannot even be found in a Google search or forum troll.  I should know: I just spent the last two hours screaming at my laptop and staring at tab characters and word spellings looking for a difference between two text files that, as far as TextEdit is concerned, simply doesn’t exist.

So, in conclusion, to get my Mac only editing software to recognize a .txt file created on a Mac I must convert it to a Windows only text format.

Thanks, Steve Jobs.  Now make me a cheaper iPhone.  And a sandwich.  Dick.

Long ago, as we headed to Buon Me Thout with our bank students, our dominant thought was, “well this could go so poorly, but at least we’ll get to ride elephants.”

The fact that we haven’t posted about the elephants should be telling.  The vans entered some amusement park compound nestled into the jungle and abruptly stopped near a tall thatched platform.  Before we had barely registered that an elephant was standing next to the little raised hut, we were quickly ushered out the doors, up the stairs, and onto some metal seats strapped the elephants back.  Viola! In 10 seconds we were lumbering through the forest on the back of an elephant.

Amazing, right?!?  Well, the elephant trudged along a well-trodden path, curved left, and walked back along the paved road–a short standard circuit that didn’t even outlast the novelty of the ride.  We climbed off metal seat, back onto the platform, and down the stairs.  Viola!  After 5 minutes, our overhyped elephant adventures had ended.

The most exciting part actually came when we approached and pet the elephants as they stood idle.  Here, I I could confront the elephant as beast wholly different from me – not as a means of ‘transport’ but as another living creature I had never encountered before, at least not this close.

This brief moment of wonder was fleeting.  The trainer shackled the elephant’s front feet and sent it off to shamble step by step into the forest.

Our whole trip has been characterized by extremely visceral interactions we never could have imagined or predicted.  A LAN party at a Cybercafe.  A Vietnamese wedding with our students.  Being mobbed by friendly and inquisitive young Vietnamese.  In comparison, riding elephants in this amusement-park compound simply felt anticlimatic.

Our preparation for this wedding reception/party started a little out of step.  We weren’t sure what to wear, what to bring as gifts, what to expect – anything.  Rob’s phone conversation with one of his students went something like this: “What should we wear? . . . Oh no – not where – wear like clothing . . . whatever makes us comfortable?  Should we at least have button-down shirts? . . . ok ok, we’ll figure it out.  Well what should we bring as a gift? . . . oh ok, no money? . . . what was that?  . . . an amulet? Ok, we’ll figure that out too…”  Didn’t bode too well.

Turns out that my white button-shirt and slacks were way too dressy, and I walked out of our room into the hallway to be greeted by a chorus of “whoa’s” and “ha – very handsome” (by which they meant “formal”).  So I went back to change into jeans and a striped shirt.  Also, we didn’t have an amulet.

11:20am We arrived somewhat awkwardly and are shepherded into the banquet room, calm but for small chatter and the air of anticipation.  Everyone smiled very sweetly, and it was clear that no conversations in English were going to happen beyond our small group of students.

11:28am We took our seats at two of the closest tables to the stage.

11:30am We were poured hefty mugs of Saigon Green beer.

11:31am A toast was proposed at the table and someone blurts out “100%,” which means drain your glass.  The mugs are immediately refilled, and I mean immediately.

11:33am Another toast was proposed and the Chief Accountant tapped the bottom of his glass, indicating another “100%”  The mugs are quickly refilled.

11:35am Another toast, this time beginning with “100%” and punctuated by a loud “Bo Hai Ba Yo!” – One Two Three Drink!

11:38am Another toast, another 100%…so far, no Jet Set Zero member has proposed a toast, nor will one ever at this wedding.  The revelry was all by the Bank staff, aka our students.  They were having a grand old time, and we were along for the ride.  Also, no other table even has beers nor have voices other than ours rose above the ambient chatter.

11:39am  One of my students – the lead enabler in the group – turned to me, jabs a finger in my direction, and says, “Tonight I will kill you!  You will all die!”  By which she meant that she’d drink us under the table.  Another person from the bank warned us that she was the “strongest drinker in our department.”  We were hesitant about all the drinking, but the bank staff knew the bride intimately and they were proposing all the toasts.  And we weren’t going to back down in the face of such a challenge from Miss Ta.  It was on!

11:40am – 12am We lost track around the 12th toast, all of which were “100%.”  The wedding reception hadn’t formally started yet and so far, no one other table has raised a toast.  At some point, I turned toward the camera and said “This whole affair will be a trilogy for us.  First, a spectacle.  Second, a debacle.  Third and finally, shame, our shame.”  Even if our students were becoming the life of the party, it still felt odd, almost inappropriate, to participate as their “teachers.”

The Chief Accountant and the department’s mighty drinker led us on toast after toast after toast.   All 8 members of the bride’s family visited us with a broad smile, a hearty handshake, and another “100%.”  We did have food throughout it all, but one would think that Saigon Green was aperitif, appetizer, main course(s), and dessert. 

The whole reception climaxed with group karaoke, which in fact was a concession to them all encouraging Jet Set Zero to sing solo.  They wanted an English song, so we called out “I Will Survive” – an inside joke reference to previous Karaoke nights together.  It wasn’t until later that we realized how inappropriate that would have been to sing at a wedding…at any rate, we didn’t sing “I Will Survive” nor did we even sing a song in English.  Rob, Brian, and I stood at the back of the group on stage clapping in some parody of rhythm, watching the hall slowly empty of guests.  I think I saw 1 person clapping when I focused on the crowd to get them clapping with us, but the rest either wouldn’t make eye contact or were getting up from their seats.  Our one consolation was that the groom was almost doubled over laughing – a genuine laugh of having good times.  So we made the wedding couple and their families enjoy what was otherwise a mild early afternoon.  It all sounds a bit alcoholic and debaucherous, but again, we didn’t initiate any of it.  When in Rome…
Also, I once heard another table give a cheers…but only once.

The bride and groom were beautiful together, standing showered in confetti and then little bubbles that poured from the ceiling.  It was quite an adventurous wedding party, which is what we’re told they should be.  The focus was on everyone having a fun time in collective celebration, and the bank staff definitely acted like members of the family.

Matt and I teach a corporate class at a small investment bank three days a week. Until recently, this class was my crown jewel– my favorite class to teach. The students were quick and their English was very good. They all seemed very interested in my lessons, which had veered from a mundane set of handouts on “Friendship” and “Free Time”, to discussions about rhetoric and salesmanship. Everything was going well. Until they invited us to a wedding.

I had misgivings. First of all, they didn’t invite us, they invited Matt. We had heard that we needed to experience a Vietnamese wedding, and so when the opportunity arose, we jumped at it. I’m told that a followup email invited me, along with the rest of the group. As a rule, we don’t tend to do well in public as a group.

Travel involved not only spending a weekend with my adult students, almost all of which are older than I am, but also a 7-hour-each-way trip in a small van, meant for no more than 10 people, let alone 20+. My grip on authority in any classroom is tenuous at best, and letting my students know that I’m human is probably the surest way to disolve it altogether. We had no idea how right that would be.

Me at a Vietnamese Wedding