Four days in Hanoi has been very relaxing. The non-stop rain hasn't bothered me much, the highlights of the trip have been eating, chatting and sitting around. Four days seems like a major break when you're used to one and a half day weekends.
At the same time, it's weird to be somewhere so foreign. This is the first time since I was a kid that I've been in a country where I know nothing of the language and don't have any friends resident. I have very little awareness of Vietnamese culture and the currency still has me confused!
I felt like a real idiot shopping for souvenirs from mountain villages I didn't even get close to. At one point I was wishing that someone would confiscate that ugly lime coloured thread that the Hmoung hill tribes insist on using. Their baby carrying cloths would look much better on the walls of my room in Hong Kong without it.
Helplessness will be over soon because Dad, Mim and I fly back to Hong Kong tonight. It's just a shame that there's only a couple of days left before they have to fly back on Sydney on Friday night. I'll be working in the daytime so evenings are going to be action packed!
Tuesday, August 31, 2004
Sunday, August 29, 2004
Hanoi
I probably should have mentioned in a previous post that I've been planning a trip to Hanoi. My dad and sister arrived in Hong Kong on Friday night and we flew together to Hanoi on Saturday morning. We're going to return to HK on Tuesday night and then they'll fly back to Sydney on Friday.
Our holiday so far has involved a lot of eating and walking around. We're staying in the old quarter of the city and the old buildings and tree lined streets are very beautiful. Except for the huge number of motorbikes and scooters on the road, this place is incredibly peaceful... relative to HK anyway.
This morning we went to see the 'Hanoi Hilton'. During the colonial era it was the prison where the French kept nationalist insurgents. Then, during the Vietnam War, the Communists used it for captured American soldiers who had parachuted into the city after their planes were shot down.
The prison has now been turned into a museum which attempts to contrast two very different prison experiences. Preserved cells, guillotines and torture equipment show the harsh punishment meted out to Vietnamese by the French. In the midst of all this horror, a photographic display provides a juxtaposed view of the treatment of the Americans by the Vietnamese. Photos include:
- American prisoners recieving gifts sent by family
- American prisoners attending church
- American prisoners cooking (with several whole chickens)
- American prisoners talking with Vietnamese officers
My favourite photo was cationed 'Citizens and soldiers of Hanoi rescuing an American who parachuted into the lake'.
I'm inclined to believe that the treatment of prisoners in the two eras really was very different. Still, it was my first time to see such an obvious spin put on a museum exhibition. That was very interesting.
Our holiday so far has involved a lot of eating and walking around. We're staying in the old quarter of the city and the old buildings and tree lined streets are very beautiful. Except for the huge number of motorbikes and scooters on the road, this place is incredibly peaceful... relative to HK anyway.
This morning we went to see the 'Hanoi Hilton'. During the colonial era it was the prison where the French kept nationalist insurgents. Then, during the Vietnam War, the Communists used it for captured American soldiers who had parachuted into the city after their planes were shot down.
The prison has now been turned into a museum which attempts to contrast two very different prison experiences. Preserved cells, guillotines and torture equipment show the harsh punishment meted out to Vietnamese by the French. In the midst of all this horror, a photographic display provides a juxtaposed view of the treatment of the Americans by the Vietnamese. Photos include:
- American prisoners recieving gifts sent by family
- American prisoners attending church
- American prisoners cooking (with several whole chickens)
- American prisoners talking with Vietnamese officers
My favourite photo was cationed 'Citizens and soldiers of Hanoi rescuing an American who parachuted into the lake'.
I'm inclined to believe that the treatment of prisoners in the two eras really was very different. Still, it was my first time to see such an obvious spin put on a museum exhibition. That was very interesting.
Friday, August 27, 2004
Love and Life and the Experiental Metafunction
I've now been teaching English classes at work for over six months. Many of the students in the advanced class are the same ones that I started with and I'm having to become very creative in order to come up with new course content.
When I did teacher training we were repeatedly reminded of the importance of teaching language in context. A 'whole text' approach aims at studying and producing chunks of language with real meaning. Studying isolated sentences or (gasp!) words was strictly frowned upon.
One major advantage of this approach is that it makes the lesson more interesting for the teacher as well as the students. Role-play is a fun way of doing speaking activities. Reading is much more rewarding when the focus is on meaning rather than grammatical form.
After completing a unit on Hong Kong history I felt completely emptied of ideas. The survival English that the class needed for different scenarios in Hong Kong was acheived long ago. That's when I decided that we should take things easy and do a couple of weeks of study of pop song lyrics.
We started with Dionne Warwick's 'The windows of the world are covered with rain' which was very relevant to the student's experience of war and suffering. We then moved on to 'A house is not a home' which lent itself well to an introduction of functional grammar, an incredible theoretical framework for analysing language invented by Macquarie Uni linguist, Michael Halliday.
From there we have now moved on to my all time favourite, the Queen of hip-hop and soul, Mary J. Blige. We continued our exploration of functional grammar with 'Ultimate Relationship', a cool song about time that Mary spends in prayer and meditation each morning. In the last lesson we played a poker type game with cut out pieces of the song. Students got hysterically excited as they tried to collect lines from the same verse. After a couple of listenings the class was like a group kareoke session with all eleven students singing along.
I'm so glad I don't use the grammar translation method of teaching!
When I did teacher training we were repeatedly reminded of the importance of teaching language in context. A 'whole text' approach aims at studying and producing chunks of language with real meaning. Studying isolated sentences or (gasp!) words was strictly frowned upon.
One major advantage of this approach is that it makes the lesson more interesting for the teacher as well as the students. Role-play is a fun way of doing speaking activities. Reading is much more rewarding when the focus is on meaning rather than grammatical form.
After completing a unit on Hong Kong history I felt completely emptied of ideas. The survival English that the class needed for different scenarios in Hong Kong was acheived long ago. That's when I decided that we should take things easy and do a couple of weeks of study of pop song lyrics.
We started with Dionne Warwick's 'The windows of the world are covered with rain' which was very relevant to the student's experience of war and suffering. We then moved on to 'A house is not a home' which lent itself well to an introduction of functional grammar, an incredible theoretical framework for analysing language invented by Macquarie Uni linguist, Michael Halliday.
From there we have now moved on to my all time favourite, the Queen of hip-hop and soul, Mary J. Blige. We continued our exploration of functional grammar with 'Ultimate Relationship', a cool song about time that Mary spends in prayer and meditation each morning. In the last lesson we played a poker type game with cut out pieces of the song. Students got hysterically excited as they tried to collect lines from the same verse. After a couple of listenings the class was like a group kareoke session with all eleven students singing along.
I'm so glad I don't use the grammar translation method of teaching!
Thursday, August 26, 2004
Improvements
I noticed a sign yesterday in the lift lobby of D-block in Chungking Mansions:
'Since the usage of this lifts is over 42 years old the operations are mechanical and not electronic. Management desires to upgrade the quality of resident life and will make improvements to Chungking Mansion lifts beginning in D-block...'
About time! Chungking Mansions must be the only place in Hong Kong where it's not uncommon to queue for up to ten minutes for a lift. Also, the lifts only stop to pick up passengers on the way down, very frustrating for those of us who have a reason to travel between different floors.
Like the lifts in Chungking, I also had a major overhaul this week when I shaved my head on Tuesday. I was very pleased with the reaction at work, a confirmation of my theory that African and Chinese people are much better at giving compliments than westerners:
- 'Mr Joe, you look like an African now' (yes, a very strange one! a Nigerian friend once told me that they call albinos 'unfortunate Europeans')
- 'Mr Joe, you look like a young boy' (very welcome after last week's comment on my age!)
- 'Mr Joe, you look very smart' ('smart' is nearly only used for looks in many varieties of English)
The one disadvantage of my new look is that the pawpaws of Temple St no longer recongnise me and are seeing me as potential client material again. It took me a while to figure out why I was getting a lot more waving hands, inviting looks, 'ho dai'(very big) and 'maaih la wei'(come and buy) than usual...
'Since the usage of this lifts is over 42 years old the operations are mechanical and not electronic. Management desires to upgrade the quality of resident life and will make improvements to Chungking Mansion lifts beginning in D-block...'
About time! Chungking Mansions must be the only place in Hong Kong where it's not uncommon to queue for up to ten minutes for a lift. Also, the lifts only stop to pick up passengers on the way down, very frustrating for those of us who have a reason to travel between different floors.
Like the lifts in Chungking, I also had a major overhaul this week when I shaved my head on Tuesday. I was very pleased with the reaction at work, a confirmation of my theory that African and Chinese people are much better at giving compliments than westerners:
- 'Mr Joe, you look like an African now' (yes, a very strange one! a Nigerian friend once told me that they call albinos 'unfortunate Europeans')
- 'Mr Joe, you look like a young boy' (very welcome after last week's comment on my age!)
- 'Mr Joe, you look very smart' ('smart' is nearly only used for looks in many varieties of English)
The one disadvantage of my new look is that the pawpaws of Temple St no longer recongnise me and are seeing me as potential client material again. It took me a while to figure out why I was getting a lot more waving hands, inviting looks, 'ho dai'(very big) and 'maaih la wei'(come and buy) than usual...
Monday, August 23, 2004
So old
I wasn't worried about turning 25 or getting older at all until my boss wished me happy birthday on Friday.
'How old is it this year? Thirty again?', she said with a smile.
I almost died! It would be one thing for her to guess that I am over thirty. Being confident enough to joke about it is a lot worse. If she was from Hong Kong I might not have minded so much but she's English. Suddenly I felt very aged.
Last week I also had to put a ban on asylum seekers calling me 'Uncle Joe'. 'Mr Joe' is bad enough, particularly considering that many of them are about ten or so years older than me.
At least I'm not the only one getting the weird terms of endearment. My 21 year old colleague has become 'Chini mama'. The 'chini' part comes from her name. What they don't realise is that 'chini' means sugar in Nepali.
'How old is it this year? Thirty again?', she said with a smile.
I almost died! It would be one thing for her to guess that I am over thirty. Being confident enough to joke about it is a lot worse. If she was from Hong Kong I might not have minded so much but she's English. Suddenly I felt very aged.
Last week I also had to put a ban on asylum seekers calling me 'Uncle Joe'. 'Mr Joe' is bad enough, particularly considering that many of them are about ten or so years older than me.
At least I'm not the only one getting the weird terms of endearment. My 21 year old colleague has become 'Chini mama'. The 'chini' part comes from her name. What they don't realise is that 'chini' means sugar in Nepali.
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