34 days into our volunteering in Hanoi and we are finally getting to the blog! After a sad goodbye with Candice, we headed to our volunteer orientation with all the other Lattitude Vietnam volunteers. There we met two girls, Gabby and Sarah, who are in Halong City, and two British volunteers, Phil and Fabian, who are in Hanoi as well. For our orientation we took a tour of the city (which we already knew pretty well), had some yummy Vietnamese food, and learned some useful Vietnamese phrases. Our placement contacts picked us up from the orientation hotel with two bouquets of flowers in hand, and they weren't for the girls! From there we were shown the school (which we had already checked out) and our guesthouse. Our guesthouse was a pleasant surprise as we have a fridge to use, a full kitchen (not that we have been cooking that much), A/C, a TV, wireless internet, washing machine, and friendly downstairs staff! While our location is a 40 minute walk or 15 minute bike ride to our school, we are greatly enjoying the area around our guesthouse. We are situated around the largest lake in Hanoi, West Lake. The entire lake is ringed with a beautiful almost Mediterranean promenade, and a mix of renaissance French and modern architecture.
The first friend Chris made in our guesthouse was this little gecko in his muesli!
Our room (a little cleaner than usual)
Our volunteer placement has been lots of fun. The children are extremely high energy, and we quickly learned a number of games that can be used to both entertain as well as teach the required curriculum. We are forced to think on our feet quite a bit because we don't know what we will be teaching until we arrive at class each day. The teachers generally show us some material in the text and ask us to do a page or two and we are left to decide what the best means of delivery will be. The children have quite a bit of trouble pronouncing English names; Andrew even decided to change his name to Andy for teaching purposes, while Chris is content with being called 'Krit'.
While the children are loads of fun, teaching is both a physically and emotionally exhausting endeavour. We have gained a lot of respect for teachers through our experiences thus far. We must complete five 3.5 hour shifts per week, each with roughly four 45 minute periods. There are shifts from 7:30 am to 11:00 am and from 5:30 pm to 9:00 pm every day, and we often use the time in between for afternoon naps!
We have also discovered that private English teaching can be a highly lucrative part time job in Hanoi. With hourly wages between $15 and $25 US per hour, we have been able to make $90 to 175$ per week to add to our spending money! Through our extra work we have met several very nice families that have offered to teach us Vietnamese cooking and take us on vacations with them.
Since beginning our volunteering we have made two weekend trips. The first was a great day trip to Hoa Lu and Tam Coc with the British volunteers. Hoa Lu is an ancient Vietnamese capital city that has been fairly well preserved, while Tam Coc can be best described as Halong Bay on land.
Our second trip was to the city of Hai Duong, about 60 km away from Hanoi, to teach at a new school that Lattitude will be placing volunteers at. The school was very impressive, well organized and with over 1000 students. The school's president took us out for all meals and put us up in their on-campus house. The son of the school's president even took us out for karaoke!
We now have just under 50 days left until our flight home, with a week in Hoi An planned for the beginning of August.
