It was 9.45 p.m. Pratik and I were on Ton That Tung Street, going towards Pham Ngu Lao; the tourists, probably in their early twenties, smiled as they walked past in the opposite direction.

Seconds later, there was a shout, and we heard someone flying past us. One of the boys was running frantically after a speeding motorbike.

Having lived in Saigon long enough, I knew the motorbike thieves were on the prowl.

While the athletic of the five ran after the thieves, we turned around to see the rest of the group looking absolutely stunned.

The thieves had snatched a shoulder bag off one of the girls. Thankfully, she had emptied the purse of everything but her iPhone. She was too shocked to say much, but said she was so glad she had taken her passport out of the bag before leaving the guesthouse.

Every few days, we hear of stories of tourists getting mugged in the city, mostly in District 1 in the backpacker’s area. While most people I know in Saigon have been robbed at some point of time – of phones, money, pendants, MP3 players, you-name-it, it’s so easy to stay safe here too.

1. Wear a small backpack. Put everything in it. I’ve been using a raggedy backpack (bought for $4 on Bui Vien Street) for a year and half now. It holds everything, is light, and keeps my hands free for Taekwondo moves if need be. Wearing bags cross-shoulder isn’t good enough. A friend got dragged face-down, 200 meters before the thieves let go. She kept her bag, but was bruised all over. It’s not worth it.

2. Put your jewellery away. The motorbike thieves would do anything for a quick buck. Even if it is a funky pendant bought in a dollar store, the thieves are gonna take a chance and snatch it off your neck. In a city of people becoming increasingly careful with their bags, this seems to be the latest craze among motorbike thieves. My TA had a $3 pendant snatched off her, and a colleague’s student lost a solitaire.

While I’ve never heard of earrings being snatched, I just don’t take a chance. The thought of bleeding earlobes is enough to deter me.

Turn your ring inwards on your finger, so the lovely solitaire doesn’t attract unwanted attention. A friend’s wedding band went missing after a prostitute grabbed his hand on the streets. The friend noticed only when he returned home.

3. Wear a money belt. All along Bui Vien and Pham, one can buy these for as little as $3-4. Wearing them under your t-shirt is the best way to keep your money, phone and passport away from lurking thieves’ eyes.

4. Don’t flash your flashy gadgets. Not on the streets of Vietnam. If you get a call while you’re on a bike, or walking on the sidewalk (what little there is), stop, get as far away from the street as you can, and then answer the call. Hold the phone in the ear away from the motorbikes.

5. Get a taxi after dark. Once the streets start emptying, its that much easier for motorbike thieves to spot their prey and get away without being noticed. Mai Linh and Vinasun taxis in Ho Chi Minh City are the safest ones. They’re less likely to rip you off and cheaper than most others. Be careful of fake Mai Linhs and Vinasuns… there are plenty of illegals M-Linhs, VSuns, Vinataxis on the streets. Xeoms go for about VND 10-15,000 for every two kilometers.

6. Wallets in front pockets. Keep your back pockets empty, especially in the backpacker’s area – Pham Ngu Lao. If your trousers/jeans/shorts are loose, there’s a good chance you’ll never feel your wallet or phone getting picked. Best to keep things in a backpack.

Until my first morning, when roosters woke me up to a cacophonous crowing match at 5 a.m. Now that does not happen in Indian urbania.

That’s how a typical day in Saigon begins for me. You’d think it was an unearthly hour for roosters to be crowing, but look out the windows, you’ll see old men already sitting down for a game of backgammon, women sweeping the alley, men grooming their roosters (yes, the same dreaded roosters that wake me up every morning), teens heading to the park for a game of badminton or ‘shuttlecock’, and school kids sipping pho and chanting trigonometric theorems.

Earplugs in, curtains drawn tight to block out the warmth of the sun, back to sleep.

The harsh Saigon sun manages to pierce through my dark brown curtains around eight. There’s no point in staying in bed anymore. I wake up and head downstairs for a drink of soy milk. Fresh milk is hard to come by in Vietnam, and expensive. For a dair-oholic like me, it’s a tough choice between no milk and soy milk.

It’s a weekday. I don’t have to go anywhere. I teach ESL classes in the evenings.
But I need to plan for lunch. The street outside my alley (everyone in Saigon lives in alleys – well, almost everyone) has a vegetable market every morning.

I step out into the searing heat, armed with a bamboo beach hat and sunglasses, at half-eight, but by then, the freshest vegetables are already stewing in someone’s pho. Yet, the tomatoes, onions, garlic, ginger, avocado, eggplant and okra I buy are some of the finest specimens I have come across.

I stop by at a friendly flan-seller’s stand. It’s not really a stand. She sits on a low stool, her glass case is in front of her, just big enough to hold twenty plastic cups of flan and icy lentil drink.

She can’t speak any English, but I love her ready smile, and she makes a mean flan-ice-coffee. First, she packs half a cup with crushed ice, carefully scoops a caramel flan into it, and tops it with a few shots of Vietnamese black iced coffee. Now, if you know anything about Vietnam, you’d know there’s a strong coffee culture here, and Vietnamese coffee is among the best in the world. That flan-ice-coffee is as good as it gets on a sweaty morning.

Back home, marinate the Basa fish fillets, sauté the veggies, and lunch is done.

There’s not much one can do in the oven that is a Saigon summer afternoon. Sit home, bask in the breeze of the air-conditioning until it’s time for school.

I’ve been here a few months, and I’m over the period where I’d be slaving away over lesson plans. I don’t usually go to school before 5 pm, and I’m out by half-ten. My evening students are teenagers – mostly friendly, mostly fun. High school students in Vietnam often have 12 hour days. Apart from school, they have extra classes, English classes, physical education classes, and even army training! I feel terrible having to teach the sleepy-heads, and the only way of getting round it is to play a ton of games and make the lesson less like one.

9.30 p.m. – It’s pack up time. A ten minute walk brings me to the backpacker district of Saigon. Pham Ngu Lao is a bustling two-block metropolis at night. The doner kebab stand looks enticing but they’ve hiked their prices twice since I’ve been here (just about four months).

Mmm.. the French pancakes beckon. For d25,000, or $1.5, that’s still steep by Saigon standards. The Sri Lankan restaurant, which opened this March and scored a spot among the most popular new restaurants in town, is closed now. This city is certainly in flux. The national bowl of pho gleams neoningly down at me from a dozen restaurants, but nah.. tonight’s a night for being adventurous, I decide.. geckos perhaps, or duck fetus.

With ice-cold beer of course, which really means, beer with ice in it, which inevitably waters the beer down, and then you’d have to order more, and more, and more…

November – Did the CELTYL, or the YL extension to CELTA
December – P was in India, so I worked extra hours to keep myself busy, very busy.
January – P came back, and we prepared for our upcoming vacation
February – Traveled in Malaysia, more about that in another post
March – Languished in India
April – Returned to Vietnam for a second year at ILA
May – Here I am.

Since I’ve moved to Vietnam, I get a few emails every few months, mostly from CELTA trainees at St. Giles San Francisco (my alma mater) asking about the job, the move to Vietnam, and the kinds of questions to expect in an ESL interview.

So I thought I’ll list some questions I remember being asked, and some my trainers at St. Giles had warned me about. Hopefully, if you think about these questions before your big interview, you’ll be a little more prepared, a little more confident, and that much closer to getting that job.

1. Why do you want to teach?
2. Why do you want to teach in Vietnam/Prague/Istanbul?
3. What ages and levels have you taught before?
4. What was the size of classes you have taught?
5. Have you taught one-to-one?
6. How do you think teaching a group may differ from teaching one-to-one?
7. Have you taught any exam classes?
8. Which books did you use during your CELTA/TESOL?
9. Did you enjoy the CELTA/TESOL course?
10. What was the most important thing you learned during the CELTA/TESOL?
11. What are your strong points, and what do you need to work on in your teaching?
12. What languages do you speak?
13. Do you think ESL teachers should try and learn their students’ first language to be able to communicate better with them?
14. Which teaching methods do you prefer while teaching?
15. Are you ready to deal with the madness of a third-world country?

Make sure you read the post on things to do before you accept an ESL job offer

Few publications even think it worthwhile to pay for writing, and many offer pennies. It’s enraging to see the list of qualifications required by almost everyone in the writing gigs category on craigslist.org – rockstar writer, knowledge of several different style sheets, experience and published samples – and then, more often than not, all they offer is ‘A byline and the chance to be part of a growing magazine’.

And with pitches, one in fifty editors cares to respond even to decline the article. And the ones that do write back, mostly do so to reject your idea or worse, accept it but without payment. Because the darned print industry has no budget to commission freelancers anymore.

So it’s even more frustrating when you do give in once in a while and accept the offer of byline-without-pay, and send in all the writing and photos and bios and head shots before deadline, only to never hear back from the editor again. Not even if it’s just to find out whether or not the story has been published after all.

In an attempt to be published outside Indian newspapers, I wrote to a large South African conglomerate that had earlier rejected one of my pitches saying that though the story I proposed was good, they did not offer any payment. I asked if they would be interested in republishing one of my travel stories, Eatopia in Vietnam, which the Asian Age printed in July this year. The travel editor, Omneshnie Naidoo, wrote back promptly to say they would and requested photos etc. Sure, sent it all in, and asked when the story would likely be published.

Nay say. Never heard back from her. So for all I know, she took my story and published it with her own byline! Unfortunately, the website of The Mercury, the newspaper she works with, has a lousy website, and as far as I can see, hasn’t published my story online. But I would really like to see the story in print. Considering I’m not in Kwazulu-Natal, where the paper is published, I don’t know how to go about getting any information from Naidoo and co.

First it was Delhi, where I just shut myself up for the most part, hanging out with a closed group of friends, not venturing anywhere beyond was absolutely necessary. I know it was a knee-jerk reaction to the events of early 2004… wow, six years ago. But that’s what I did with my life. Pined for one boy, spent all day in the company of books and bookish girls, and I’m not saying it was a bad thing at all.. it’s just that I was letting go of myself, bit by bit… letting go of the girl I used to be.

No one would say I’d lost my touch in those days. I was still quite fiery, but even then, something within me was dying out. I remember those sultry summer afternoons when I would lie alone, singing the same songs over and over again, face down, twirling my slippers round n round on the floor, in sync with the song. I’d get bored and solve a Sudoku puzzle, I’d pick up a book to read, then back to same songs over and over again.

Cut to 2006. Stuck in a room with four other girls, two of whom were depressingly dirty, I still managed to keep myself from screaming and hurling obscenities every time I saw the muck.

Until in Ahmedabad, I had stopped by the roadside for the hundredth time that day, asking for directions to an elusive celebrity’s home. And I suddenly realized how nice I was being to the man who had waved me off without giving me directions. A few years ago, I would have bludgeoned the man or at least say something nasty so he’d have a rotten evening. But I was keeping my cool, not getting frustrated. That’s not who I used to be.

That’s not who I am. I keep things shelved away too long nowadays. I think twice before verbalizing anything I want – at least anything significantly different from the norm I want. Oh, I have no qualms in asking shamelessly for the fifteenth glass of water that I don’t wanna drag my sorry ass downstairs for. But if I want to go out and do something on my own, I think for days, weeks, before saying it out loud, before doing it, for fear of disrupting the easy inertia of routine we’ve fallen into.

Since I returned from Cambodia, I’ve been itching to shut myself up in a room and think and write all about the trip. But I haven’t done it, for fear of ruining a perfectly nothingless afternoon. I have held back too much. But I don’t feel like I can break free right now. Not until I feel secure, which I don’t, in Saigon. I pine for the company of family and friends, for the beauty of our home before. But I’m stubborn about not wanting to go back to India and we left our home because, despite the beauty, we decided to leave it.

I don’t really know where this rant is going, so I’m gonna just sign off for now, hoping that things won’t fall back into old routine, and I will find some way to break the monotony.

I need to start living my life again, on my terms. It’s not gonna be easy but it’ll kill a lot slower than suffocating in this sludge.

It’s really simple too and does not need any resources. I hate using games which can’t do without soft balls, or baskets, or blindfolds. Well, this one needs no prep at all.

Walk into class. Draw a grid (3×3 or 4×4 or 5×5) on the board. Elicit question words and fill them into the grid randomly.

Divide the class into 2 teams. Give each team a symbol (e.g. , * , $ )

The team to go first chooses any square and uses the question word in it (e.g. how) to form a question. For e.g. How old is the teacher? or How old is Tracy (a student)?

If the other team guesses the correct answer, it can put its symbol in that square. If they don’t guess the correct answer, the team that asked the question can put its own symbol in the square. Now, the other team chooses a grid and asks a question. And so on..

The team with the most number of squares under its belt wins the game, or the team which gets 3 symbols in a row (horizontally, vertically, or diagonally) wins the game.

Gets the kids really competitive, as they ask wild questions to trick the other team.

And it works for all levels and ages – pre-intermediate to advanced, little kids to adults!

There are a few lists of useful ESL websites but as time went on, I had my own growing list of sites I referred to almost on a daily basis. There is such a wealth of information out there, but it’s frustrating how many websites need registration, or worse, contribution!

Heavens.. if I were an experienced teacher with worksheets and games to contribute to the ESL world, I wouldn’t be trolling the internet desperately searching for the same.

So here’s my list of the most useful ESL websites. Most of these don’t require registration and NONE of them require your contribution, thank goodness for that. Plus, I hate lists that go on for 43 pages, so this one is short and sweet. In all probability, whatever you need – be it games, grammar clarifications, worksheets, or ESL songs – you can find it at one of these addresses. But of course, if you wanna just troll.. that can go on forever.

Anyway, here goes -

GENERAL:

1. http://www.breakingnewsenglish.com/ The BOMB website – Instant lesson plans.
2. http://www.usingenglish.com/handouts/
3. http://bogglesworldesl.com
4. http://www.eslflow.com/Fillers.html Good stuff

READING:

1. http://www.rhlschool.com/reading.htm Reading Comprehension
2. http://www.miguelmllop.com/practice/intermediate/readingcomprehension/readingcompindex.htm
   
3. http://a4esl.org/q/h/holidays.html
   
4. http://esl.about.com/od/englishreadingskills/English_Reading_Comprehension_Skills_for_ESL_EFL_Learners.htm
   
5. http://www.booksshouldbefree.com/ Audio books and other free books

SONGS:

1. http://www.esl4kids.net/songs.html
   
2. http://www.songsforteaching.com/esleflesol.htm Songs for teaching
3. http://www.canteach.ca/elementary/songspoems.html Lots of songs and chants.. pretty awesome

GRAMMAR:

1. http://www.eslcafe.com/grammar/confusing_words_come_go.html Students in Vietnam really need this grammar point drilled into them
   over and over again
2. http://englishforyounglearners.org/funny/ English for Kids
3. http://www.eslflashcards.com/ Free flashcards
4. http://abcteach.com/directory/languages/eslenglish_as_second_language/esl_grammar/ A few free posters to explain grammar points

VOCABULARY:

1. http://www.eslall.com/exercises_66_l0.html Hangman Online finally! phew..
2. http://www.saksena.net/partygames/bingo/ Bingo Generator. Pretty Awesome!
3. http://www.learnersdictionary.com/ Webster’s ESL dictionary. Perfectly graded language to explain even the most complex words
4. http://www.english-test.net/

Sunset from our apartment in SJ

As I was growing up, and it wasn’t THAT long ago.. As I was growing up in the 90s in India, I always saw the sky studded with stars. I took them for granted. I never thought, then, of an eventuality where the stars would not sparkle any more.

In Guwahati, Patna, Ahmednagar, Dehradoon, Pune and Ferozepur.. the stars always shone.

And I missed them only when they were gone. I first noticed the starless skies in California, in San Jose, where the only thing in the sky is the moon. A bigass moon it used to be too. But strangely enough, no stars.

Of course it was the pollution in the SUV-ridden valley. The pollution made for glorious sunsets – pink, green, purple hues in the skies. And from our beautiful 9th floor apartment, we watched those sunsets every evening, marveling at myriad hues of light.

Until the sun dipped, and a lone star remained – all others too obscured by the same pollutants that catalysted the sunsets. We used to sleep watching the moon from our bedroom window. Through the clear glass, the moon sometimes looked so big it would fill up the entire window. But always, the absence of shimmering stars struck discordant, like the absence of seeds in watermelons (I never could get used to the seedless varieties).

And now, sitting on the roof in Saigon, gazing up at the skies, I see again the midnight gray skies, despairingly empty of any shimmer. Sometimes, on a really, really clear night, I can spot the tail of the Ursa Major. But it’s not enough.

The human race, as a whole, is culpable for the absence of stars in our lives. It’s as if the most beautiful citizens of the night have gone into self-exile, damning the human race with an impenetrable, opaque grayness.

I think, and I don’t know whether I’m right, but at this point of time in my life, I think, that it is really ‘every man for himself’. People must fend for themselves, and equally, we all must take the responsibility to do what’s best for us – for each one of us. Because what’s best for each one of us has to be best for the planet too. We have to fight the pollution, keep our running costs to a minimum, recycle and reuse, and move to the countryside if that’s what it takes to see the stars again.

I can’t wait to move to the countryside.

Nothing has really worked enough to excite my students. Has anyone had more success using the internet as a viable teaching tool to produce language in ESL classrooms?

Any suggestions will be welcome.

And, if anyone wants to use http://www.wix.com/ to have students create websites, I’ve got a whole tutorial written up. Just ping me.