Tuesday, 13 July 2010
Day off! The first monsoon of the year hit last night and is still chucking down over hanoi. Half the roads in the city, including the one outside the school, are flooded and so classes were cancelled! Sadly this means (presumably) teaching a make up class one weekend. Unfortunately with flooding in my part of town comes power cuts and after a couple of hours I decided to try and escape to get some air con and light asmy house is pretty dingy. Doi can itself is knee high in water so I had to find another way out of the lanes. I tried two or three routes but kept meeting a wall of water before finally my last possible route out of the lane maze was dry enough for me to drive along without killing my motorbike. Am now settled in at Joma with air con, light and hot food. Fingers crossed the route I took to get here doesn't flood in the meantime as I really don't fancy pushing my bike home through deep dirty water!
Sunday, 11 July 2010
Have now booked some plane tickets for my trip home! I'll be in the UK from the 12th Sept til the 14th Oct and hope to see lots of important people and eat some good British food! Ended up booking with Thai all the way as the travel agent managed to get the return ticket for $1200, which was a pretty sweet deal as on the web it was coming up at nearly £2000, so getting the same flight for less than half the price was good. Plus this way I only have a couple of hours in Bangkok each way and don't have to deal with Thai immigration whereas most of the other options I looked at involved flying out of Hanoi on Air Asia to other Asian cities at ridiculously early times and then waitng for several hours in most locations to connect. Also a lot of the deals (stuff like supposed £500 returns between London and Hong Kong) either didn't seem to really exist or were't happening when I wanted to fly. The only cheaper option I could find was a combination of Vietnam Airways and British Airways. Not gonna be doing that any time soon as I actually want to get home!
Alison and Calder are leaving Vietnam for good a couple of days after I leave so we're all counting down to our departure. 9 weeks! I will have to return though and without Alison and Calder will probably become something of a hermit because they are my main partners in crime. Nat and I usually only make it our with their encouragement so who knows how social we will be once they have gone. My trips to Derry's probably won't be as frequent after they've left either. I went there on Thursday with them for what was supposed to be just a quick drink so we could discuss the end of Dexter (no one else at work has seen it and so we weren't allowed to talk about it in the teacher's room!) but it turned into several drinks which probably didn't help my current insomnia. I got talked into covering a morning class on Friday morning (I went for my break on Thursday and Alison starts with "Nic do you love me?" followed by "YOu know you just bought that expensive ticket home? How would you like to earn $80 by covering an easy class?" and I couldn't say no!) so it sucked waking up at 6am. Haven't been up that early for a long time! It was an easy class though (exactly the same as my afternoon class so minimal prep was required) and as an added bonus the power was cut at about 10.30. The school policy says that if it's not gonna come back on any time soon we finish class early as without air con the place basically becomes an oven and so all I had to do in the morning was watch some presentations and give some feedback. An easy $80! It does make it along day though and unlike the long days I did in place like ASDA it is pretty tiring, as you actually have to use your brain for 8 hours rather than daydreaming for 8 hours whilst carrying out simple repetitive tasks. Thankfully both the classes were full or noce students.
Went to Derry's last night too with Alison, Calder, Nat and a new teacher, Poor Steve. Nat seemed to be in the mood for drinking and so was I (normally we have a drink or two each then stop) so at one point we ended up with tequila, and Poor Steve sampled some potent homebrew so it was a rather merry evening. Poor Steve wasn't entirely sure of the way back home from Derry's as it was his first time there and so at the end of the night I had to lead him back to a familiar part of town. He was on a bicycle so I had to drive along really slowly for him to follow making it an intersting journey home!
9 weeks to go!
Alison and Calder are leaving Vietnam for good a couple of days after I leave so we're all counting down to our departure. 9 weeks! I will have to return though and without Alison and Calder will probably become something of a hermit because they are my main partners in crime. Nat and I usually only make it our with their encouragement so who knows how social we will be once they have gone. My trips to Derry's probably won't be as frequent after they've left either. I went there on Thursday with them for what was supposed to be just a quick drink so we could discuss the end of Dexter (no one else at work has seen it and so we weren't allowed to talk about it in the teacher's room!) but it turned into several drinks which probably didn't help my current insomnia. I got talked into covering a morning class on Friday morning (I went for my break on Thursday and Alison starts with "Nic do you love me?" followed by "YOu know you just bought that expensive ticket home? How would you like to earn $80 by covering an easy class?" and I couldn't say no!) so it sucked waking up at 6am. Haven't been up that early for a long time! It was an easy class though (exactly the same as my afternoon class so minimal prep was required) and as an added bonus the power was cut at about 10.30. The school policy says that if it's not gonna come back on any time soon we finish class early as without air con the place basically becomes an oven and so all I had to do in the morning was watch some presentations and give some feedback. An easy $80! It does make it along day though and unlike the long days I did in place like ASDA it is pretty tiring, as you actually have to use your brain for 8 hours rather than daydreaming for 8 hours whilst carrying out simple repetitive tasks. Thankfully both the classes were full or noce students.
Went to Derry's last night too with Alison, Calder, Nat and a new teacher, Poor Steve. Nat seemed to be in the mood for drinking and so was I (normally we have a drink or two each then stop) so at one point we ended up with tequila, and Poor Steve sampled some potent homebrew so it was a rather merry evening. Poor Steve wasn't entirely sure of the way back home from Derry's as it was his first time there and so at the end of the night I had to lead him back to a familiar part of town. He was on a bicycle so I had to drive along really slowly for him to follow making it an intersting journey home!
9 weeks to go!
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