When I was in Haiphong, I noticed an ad for a performance in Ho Chi Minh City by the Prague Chamber Orchestra. I didn’t think of going, as I had been planning to go out of town, but as I still had a lingering cold, I stayed in HCMC and decided to treat myself to a ticket for the concert.
What a great Plan B that turned out to be! It was a great concert and a wonderful evening.
First of all, 3 others wanted to go to the concert, so I was looking for 4 tickets. When I went to the ticket booth, there was someone picking up tickets. When it was my turn, I walked up to the counter and the vendor picked up his water bottle and walked away ... saying something in Vietnamese, which of course I couldn’t understand. But I got the sense that what he was saying wasn’t good news. However, feeling quite determined, I stayed around for 5 minutes or so and when he came back he waggled his hand, which is to indicate “I don’t want or I don’t have”. Sort of like the Queen’s wave sort of motion. When I held up 4 fingers he really waggled. So I put up 2 and then 1. At any rate, he eventually got out the seating chart and it looked like there were 6 or 7 tickets left in the whole hall ... but he did find two together on the far left side of Row J. So I took them. There were no other tickets together and the tickets were 700,000 VND, which is about $42CDN (aka extremely expensive for HCMC!), so I got tickets for Jane and me, but didn’t get tickets for Barbara or Bronwyn. I really wasn’t sure if they would want to spend hundreds of thousands on poor seats and since I only had 1.5 million VND with me and no MasterCard machine that I could see, I looked after myself and Jane. She had invited me to a concert a few weeks ago, so my loyalty was squarely with her.
At any rate, after a lovely dinner at a French restaurant called le Jardin, which is on the grounds of Institute of Cultural Exchange with France (Idecaf), we hailed a taxi to the Opera House. It is really only a 10 minute walk, but our profiteroles were late coming (oh, no ... not tardy profiteroles!) and we were concerned about time. When we arrived at the Opera House, there were fancy schhmancy cars letting quite elegant people out of their luxury automobiles, cameras videotaping the luminaries in attendance, and people wanting to interview patrons of the arts, such as ourselves. We felt severely underdressed. We needn’t have worried about our timing. The performance was delayed for a few minutes. At 8 pm, the concert hall looked about 25% full. It reminded me of Qatar, where huge blocks of tickets would be bought by companies and then not used, so I was feeling very badly for Barbara and Bronwyn. However, the program eventually started and people continued to be seated throughout the rest of the performance. In the end, there were just a few seats unoccupied, but not many ... certainly enough for Barbara and Bronwyn, however. As I have mentioned before, the Opera House is an architectural jewel ... a beautiful French colonial building nestled near the 5 star hotels, swish restaurants and cafes, and an upscale shopping district. The seats are nice and red and plush, but not too plush.
However, the building was designed and constructed before the debut of the motorbike and motorcar, and so the sound-proofing from the street is not great and we could hear the added texture of traffic from time to time. The person who was playing a sports event on his mini TV prior to the performance and during the intermission mercifully turned it off during the concert.
The concert was really wonderful. It was full and quite long, and so interesting. I had consumed a cafe glace at le Jardin in case I got sleepy, but no need. The program included Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Beethoven, Bartok, and of course, Dvořák. There were two soprano soloists, a beautiful Vietnamese singer named Nguyen Bich Thuy, and a lovely Czech singer named Marie Fajtová. The conductor was a Canadian, Charles Olivieri-Munroe, who seemed like a very capable, charismatic, and charming man. In fact, the Kymlickas met him when they were in the Czech Republic two years ago, and they concur on his charm. Such a small world, no? I have to say my favourite pieces were the Romanian Folk Dances for Small Orchestra by Bartok and Song to the Moon and the Czech Suite in D major, Op. 39 by Dvořák. I really am a Philistine when it comes to music, but they were wonderfully played and just lovely. The concert proper was followed by three encores ending with a wonderful gypsy-inspired tango, led by the concert master that sent us off into the warm Saigon evening with smiles on our faces and lightness in our steps. A taxi was just waiting at the bottom of the steps to transport us back to Phu My Hung, so it was another lovely evening.
What a great Plan B that turned out to be! It was a great concert and a wonderful evening.
First of all, 3 others wanted to go to the concert, so I was looking for 4 tickets. When I went to the ticket booth, there was someone picking up tickets. When it was my turn, I walked up to the counter and the vendor picked up his water bottle and walked away ... saying something in Vietnamese, which of course I couldn’t understand. But I got the sense that what he was saying wasn’t good news. However, feeling quite determined, I stayed around for 5 minutes or so and when he came back he waggled his hand, which is to indicate “I don’t want or I don’t have”. Sort of like the Queen’s wave sort of motion. When I held up 4 fingers he really waggled. So I put up 2 and then 1. At any rate, he eventually got out the seating chart and it looked like there were 6 or 7 tickets left in the whole hall ... but he did find two together on the far left side of Row J. So I took them. There were no other tickets together and the tickets were 700,000 VND, which is about $42CDN (aka extremely expensive for HCMC!), so I got tickets for Jane and me, but didn’t get tickets for Barbara or Bronwyn. I really wasn’t sure if they would want to spend hundreds of thousands on poor seats and since I only had 1.5 million VND with me and no MasterCard machine that I could see, I looked after myself and Jane. She had invited me to a concert a few weeks ago, so my loyalty was squarely with her.
At any rate, after a lovely dinner at a French restaurant called le Jardin, which is on the grounds of Institute of Cultural Exchange with France (Idecaf), we hailed a taxi to the Opera House. It is really only a 10 minute walk, but our profiteroles were late coming (oh, no ... not tardy profiteroles!) and we were concerned about time. When we arrived at the Opera House, there were fancy schhmancy cars letting quite elegant people out of their luxury automobiles, cameras videotaping the luminaries in attendance, and people wanting to interview patrons of the arts, such as ourselves. We felt severely underdressed. We needn’t have worried about our timing. The performance was delayed for a few minutes. At 8 pm, the concert hall looked about 25% full. It reminded me of Qatar, where huge blocks of tickets would be bought by companies and then not used, so I was feeling very badly for Barbara and Bronwyn. However, the program eventually started and people continued to be seated throughout the rest of the performance. In the end, there were just a few seats unoccupied, but not many ... certainly enough for Barbara and Bronwyn, however. As I have mentioned before, the Opera House is an architectural jewel ... a beautiful French colonial building nestled near the 5 star hotels, swish restaurants and cafes, and an upscale shopping district. The seats are nice and red and plush, but not too plush.
However, the building was designed and constructed before the debut of the motorbike and motorcar, and so the sound-proofing from the street is not great and we could hear the added texture of traffic from time to time. The person who was playing a sports event on his mini TV prior to the performance and during the intermission mercifully turned it off during the concert.The concert was really wonderful. It was full and quite long, and so interesting. I had consumed a cafe glace at le Jardin in case I got sleepy, but no need. The program included Mozart, Rossini, Donizetti, Beethoven, Bartok, and of course, Dvořák. There were two soprano soloists, a beautiful Vietnamese singer named Nguyen Bich Thuy, and a lovely Czech singer named Marie Fajtová. The conductor was a Canadian, Charles Olivieri-Munroe, who seemed like a very capable, charismatic, and charming man. In fact, the Kymlickas met him when they were in the Czech Republic two years ago, and they concur on his charm. Such a small world, no? I have to say my favourite pieces were the Romanian Folk Dances for Small Orchestra by Bartok and Song to the Moon and the Czech Suite in D major, Op. 39 by Dvořák. I really am a Philistine when it comes to music, but they were wonderfully played and just lovely. The concert proper was followed by three encores ending with a wonderful gypsy-inspired tango, led by the concert master that sent us off into the warm Saigon evening with smiles on our faces and lightness in our steps. A taxi was just waiting at the bottom of the steps to transport us back to Phu My Hung, so it was another lovely evening.
So, it was great to see where Patty lives and her school and the neighbourhood she lives in. I stayed at the hotel where she and most of the teachers at Apollo live. She has to work long hours and while she was able to meet me at the airport, she had to go to work and teach until 7:30 or so ... on a Saturday!! After I walked her to her school, in order to see where to meet her later on, I wandered around the area and followed lots of little streets/alleys and went into little markets or chos. People all seemed very friendly and all the little children wanted to say, “Hello!” and then go running off giggling. Very cute. I was struck by how clean and well-swept these little streets and alleys were, as that is not really the case with many similar districts here in HCMC. It was on my way home that I wandered into the Thai massage parlour ... jajajaja .... so I spent a couple of hours reading instead (#*.*#) until it was time to meet up at the Hong Kong restaurant. Again, we wandered around and so many people know Patty and the children all seem to love her ... as well they should. 
The next morning we went to the English mass at a church on Lac Tray and I got to meet Father Phong ... dare I say, the famous Father Phong, who works at this church and another one in Nam Phap, which is a district near Patty’s school. He seems like a lovely man and there were students, Filipino parishioners and some Vietnamese parishioners as well. The responses and the hymns were so unfamiliar to me that I hardly knew what to do, but I am so glad we went. As we were leaving, we saw Father Phong on the back of someone’s motorbike ... probably whisking off to say another mass. Patty has been volunteering at the Nam Phap church teaching English and I think she is quite famous for this. Father Phong’s doing. Father Phong has arranged for several people to volunteer and some of the classes have as many as 100 participants. I can’t imagine! He suggested that I consider moving to Haiphong ... 
After church we went to Cat Ba island, which is in the general district of Haiphong, but is actually quite a ways away. It is a large island in Halong Bay. We took a bus boat bus combo and it probably took us an hour and a half to get there. It was a fast boat. We arrived in Cat Ba Town in the late afternoon and settled into a clean and very cheap hotel right overlooking the harbour. It is not prime season and so there were not a lot of tourists, but the ones we saw were mostly foreigners. We had dinner in a nearby restaurant, which was fine until it came to tea and coffee time. It was very hard to make ourselves understood for some reason. We strolled along the harbour and tried for another drink, but it was not exactly right either ... so sad! We had a lovely view of the sun going down and while my photos don’t do it justice, it was very silvery and shiny. It was so pleasant to be near the water and to hear the sound of the waves and to be in a quiet place. Although Haiphong seems sooo much quieter than HCMC, it was still great to be in a more serene location.
Mostly, though, it was wonderful to be with my dear friend and to chat about this and that ... kids, friends, books, food, religion, politics, Qatar, and Anthony, New Mexico, where she spent a year since we last saw each other. I couldn’t believe how long it had been since we saw each other last ... I can hardly wait to see her again. In fact, Patty is the one who told me about the job at RMIT, so is totally responsible for my being here. 
I was lucky to have the time to take two days off, as my stream is in down week mode right now. Lots to do to get organized from last cycle and to gear up for the next. Hope my first foray out of HCMC is the first of many more lovely and pleasurable jaunts! If you want to see more pics, please go to 
I guess the park was set up some years ago by the government and there are often traditional shows, like water puppets and music and weddings, but we didn’t see any of that. Except this was maybe a wedding display. However, there were several photographers, so it could have been a real wedding...
I’d love to go back and see the entertainment, however. The park was wonderfully quiet and so we strolled through the gardens and eventually landed up at the buffet. They had so many wonderful Vietnamese dishes and I just didn’t know enough about them. Omigoodness, there was so much of every different kind of soup and salad and grilled fish and noodle and rice dishes. And then there were lots of desserts that I had no idea about ... lots made with beans and tapioca and fruit. As it got darker, they lit and set out floating lanterns on the water. It was just lovely. Of course it was great to be with our students. Theirs was a very strong class and Kathy and I knew by then they had all passed (but we couldn’t say a word, of course!) 
It took a while to see whose responsibility Kathy and I would be, but in the end Khoa took me and Phu took Kathy, as they both live in District 7. Khoa really wanted to drive fast, but he had been told by Vu (the oldest) that he couldn’t, so he took it easy. He did, however, let me know he had never driven so slowly before! As we left the skies opened up and we were in the midst of a really driving rain. Thank goodness it wasn’t a cold one, as I was absolutely soaked (even with a rain poncho) by the time I got home. It was a great drive home, partly because of the rain, and a wonderful end to a very interesting course. I really wish I had been able to take pictures of Phu ever so seriously driving Kathy home. However, it was really pouring by then. It was a wonderful time and we were so grateful that the students went out of their way to do that for us. Several of them went off to their home provinces the next day, so it was very nice that they took the time to spend the evening with us and show us something new and very interesting.
One very wonderful thing about RMIT is that all the exams are set in Melbourne, so we don’t have to make up the tests. Yay!! And when we mark, we don’t mark our own PET or Monday/Tuesday classes. Writing is blind double-marked and moderated by different teachers. Speaking is recorded by the interviewer and evaluated by a key assessor (expert second marker )if the student fails. We upload the file onto the shared drive and it gets looked after tickety-boo. I am not a key assessor yet, but next go-round I will be. As Steve, my level leader says, next cycle I will be an old hand ... he might have said hag, but he swears he didn’t (#^.^#) . At any rate, I will have to do more key assessing if there are disputed scores or jagged profiles. I am not sure if I am standardized in my marking ... have always had trouble with that, but I passed the assessment training and so according to RMIT, I am good to go. Self-confidence aside, I like that there are checks and balances, especially as there are just two exams ... a lot of pressure on both the students and teachers Insha’Allah it will all work out and the ones who are ready will pass.
We had seen some of these sights on the city tour, but this was the first time I had revisited them with a map and a clue about where I might be. I walked along for an hour or so ... looking at wedding parties, little parks, window shopping, chatting with vendors, and rubbernecking. Typical tourist. 
I was the only visitor and only two of three floors were open because it was Saturday! It is a relatively small building, in spite of its fairly large exterior. The first floor had lots of traditional dress and jewelry and an interesting display on gods and goddesses worshipped in Vietnam.
The second floor was devoted to female heroines and martyrs of the American War, as they call it here. It was somewhat reminiscent of the War Remnants Museum. There was a lovely French-Colonial house on the property, but I don't know what its purpose was ... I think somebody important lives there. 
After checking our the museum, I hopped on a bus, with the understanding that all buses go to Cho Ben Thanh Market. Well, it let me off at a different place in/near Ben Thanh. I needed to find the other bus terminal so I could catch the trusty #34 back to Phu My Hung. It was an incredibly busy and crowded area. However, I saw the distinctive clock tower and door of Ben Thanh (There is one in each direction.) and I thought I would cut through and go to my familiar terminal. But it was in a part of the market I had never been before. It had a pretty courtyard and fountain and one of the people reminded me of my students.
It was in a section of the market that sold shoes ... gazillions of shoes. I quickly got lost and went outside to get my bearings and got even loster. Oh my, was I lost! And I was in a REALLY crowded and busy side street with hundreds of vendors and hundreds of motorbikes and cyclos (like rickshaws) and a mass of humanity. I just plodded carefully along and eventually got to a street with cars and flagged a taxi and went back to District 7. Quiet, spacious, green Phu My Hung:-)
I was in a bit of a hurry, because I had an appointment to see my physio guy, David.
First I met Anthony, who is the office manager and go-to guy. He is a lovely man and probably weighs 90 pounds. Anthony speaks two Chinese languages, Cantonese and Mandarin and English and Vietnamese. David is from is from Taiwan, but I have just heard him speak Mandarin with Anthony and some patients ... his English is limited. So Anthony does a lot of translating. I asked Anthony what happens when they get a Korean patient and he said that usually he can communicate with them in English, but if not, they will get a guy from the pizzeria next door to come and translate into Vietnamese and then Anthony will translate into Chinese and so on. They are looking to hire someone who can do that Korean translating. At any rate, David did a check and said (aha) I have a problem with my knees ... the ligaments and muscles are tight, so we have been working on stretching them. Yowser. There are several technicians who put on hot packs and do ultra sound as well as sadistic stretching exercises and muscle-releasing 'massage'. They all have elbows of steel. Kitty and Linder are the main ones. They have little English ... Pain? and OK? seem to be the extent of it. They are very sweet, however. I asked Kitty to let me photograph her elbows, but she demurred.
