Sunshine, Beer and Pool

Good evening from Hanoi,

This has been another busy week finished off with a lovely relaxing weekend in the beautiful Ninh Binh. The weather is now changing in Vietnam with Becky feeling cold for the first time today and Rob feeling cold overnight. When we say we are cold this means we need to trousers, a light cardigan (optional) and the Air-Con probably has less of a need.

Becky is currently writing this from her school Tran Phu whilst Rob has had the morning off and is on his way to unfixed lessons this afternoon. In our timetables a large portion of our lessons are fixed; in fact Becky has an almost entirely fixed timetable. There are then spaces where BME can ask us to teach lessons quite last minute. If they email you after 20:00 the day before a morning they need you to teach you get paid extra and after 09:00 on the morning of an afternoon you are asked to teach. Inevitably the email always seem to come through 10 minutes before this cut off! Becky got a last minute text this morning informing her that her school was opening earlier so she had 10 mins to dash out and get to the taxi. Luckily she was up and does not take long to get ready. She was then observed by our employer in a grade 2 lesson which went well. Normally your academic lead will observe you and Becky has Thuy who is really nice. She took lots of pictures of Becky introducing halloween teaching. We give the students a bit of information on halloween this week and then next week we make halloween masks with them and can dress up if we want. Of course we are both very likely to do this!

Typical of what a bike might carry in Hanoi

Last week flew by as the time here seems to. Rob had an enjoyable week and had fun doing his grade 4 and grade 5 projects. Grade 5 were doing holidays and grade 4 were making passports. Rob had quite a chilled week in his secondary classes as they have an exam this week so the focus was on reviewing subject matter already learned. The level of English is quite low in one of his schools so although he had taught them well he isn't sure how this week will go for them. Fingers crossed they all smash their exams. We remember teachers worrying about us during examinations and now we have that feeling. Becky has got review lesson weeks this week and is going overboard to ensure her students remember all the vocabulary and sentence structures learned. On Thursday last week Becky went to her kindergarten lessons by bike and then helped with a grade 8 class cooking pork spring rolls which was fantastic. We then decided to binge on an amazing take away that evening. On the Friday Becky and Danni were at Thuy Linh and had an enjoyable afternoon. Becky played the zombie game with her class and Hang took some great photos! Becky and Mai had a great class with our grade 3's and we are very excited to be doing a halloween project with them soon. On Friday Rob had another relaxing day not having to speak much as his students did interviews about their summer holidays with one another and drew pictures of their dream homes.

Zombie in action (credit Hang)

And now there are more zombies... (credit Hang)

Becky demonstrates zombie with her cutest grade 1 (credit Hang)

Ready for Friday teaching! 

The cutest little gem <3 

Danni with new friends 

Grade 4 project

Grade 4 project

On Friday we headed off to Ninh Binh for the weekend. We were unsure if we were going to make it as our original booking cancelled on Thursday evening due to flooding in the region. We also checked the forecast and discovered more rain, wind and a typhoon were due and it might hit that area but also Hanoi, where we live. Thanks Joanne for giving us the heads up. It was quite difficult finding somewhere to stay but we ended up at the Tien Truing Hotel. After finishing work and snacking on french bread and camembert we headed off to the train station to go to Ninh Binh with Liv, Sabrina, Emma and Rachel. The journey was just over two hours and we had booked the budget hard seats. It was actually quite a pleasant experience and Rob, Liv, Sabrina and I decided to have a bit of a beer party on the train to pass the time. We had such a laugh and even made the train guard laugh a bit when Liv asked if he could give her free beer. Hey you never know!

The look of love between Liv and Sabrina

Our remains

Group selfie

 We arrived at our hotel around 23:00 to fortunately find it was open and not under water. It was a bit confusing at first, we were put into a room that looked nothing like our booking and were extremely confused. Then the hotel owner came in, discovered our air con was not working, and moved us into quite a nice, swanky room. He also spoke to us in very fast Vietnamese whilst we nodded and smiled and then hugged us a lot! It was bizarre but also quite nice... we think? We played a couple of games of pool, had dinner, more beer and then headed to bed.

Rob and his new friend - hotel owner

Me, Liv, hotel owner

The following morning we got up to walk to the Mua Caves. It was a boiling day, the complete opposite of what we thought the weather might be like. All of us got sunburned. Becky has caused some envy in already looking quite brown though.... There were tan lines galore but we all made it to the top of both pagodas for some stunning views. On the way to the caves we cycled which was an experience Becky kept saying is 'so Vietnam'. It was sad to see the flooded rice fields along the way and several drowned buffalo. The impact of the devastating floods on the people of Vietnam is catastrophic. We could not actually get down the road to Mua Caves due to flooding and had to be taken across by boat by some locals. We were happy to give them our custom given their main source of income has just been destroyed. Even once we got there we still had to wade through some water.... Rob and I are becoming seasoned pros at walking in floods and we feel our weekend trips have a bit of a theme.

Rachel, Liv, Me and Sabrina (Credit Emma)

Wading through water

On our boat

Queen and Princess

Post-walk coke

Dragon on the pagoda

Rob and Liv

Sabrina and the view

The view 

The flooded rice fields we had to cross

So Vietnam - Liv

After the cycle back we went out for lunch at a lovely restaurant called Chookies where we had a bit of a boozy lunch. We headed back for a nap whilst the girls went shopping. Unfortunately we discovered many of the sites we wanted to see were shut due to water levels, so much like Cat Ba, we feel we may need to revisit Ninh Binh. In the evening we drank our nice white wine over a few games of Sevens and Rummy with Liv and Sabrina before heading down for drinks with Rachel and Emma and of course getting more beer. When it got late we decided to order some interesting pizza. At the time it tasted like the best pizza ever... on inspection in the morning we weren't quite sure! We played lots of pool and were joined by Danni, Rachel P, Caitlyn, Emma and Olivia.

An intense round of cards

We felt a bit knackered the next day but were still up for breakfast! We then discovered the massive pagoda we wanted to visit was also not open due to flood water so we relaxed around the hotel in the sunshine, played more pool and then went to the Chookies beer garden down the road where we all ate a lot of good food and relaxed doing things like watching Mad Men (for Sabrina) and reading our ibooks/kindles. It was then time to head to the station for the journey back. This time our carriage was less glamorous and felt more like the authentic Vietnamese train journey (ie. barred windows, armoured shutters, flickering lights and general overcrowding). Nonetheless we played rummy and drank our beers and had a good journey, even when the lights kept randomly turning off. Liv, Sabrina and Rob enjoyed watching Becky read the 50 shades style book she had downloaded and it resulted in a lot of amusing conversation. We grabbed an SUV, got back home and everyone went off to plan for Monday and head to bed. It was a really relaxing weekend and we can't wait for our next trip.

Sabrina loving Rummy

Next weekend we are heading to Halong Bay for a BME trip and of course we will post lots of beautiful photographs.

Until then, lots of love.