Teaching and Tunnels

My first week teaching has been very busy.  I have three different classes twice a week and each lesson is two hours 45 minutes (including a half hour break).  The students all concentrate really well which really impressed me.  The company that I am working for are paid by parents to teach their children extra, so we teach them on top of all their Vietnamese lessons, it is a lot of work for them but they want to learn and value their English lessons, so different from when I was at school, but it makes my life so much easier.  My lessons went well, including my observation lesson, so hopefully when my 45 day probation is finished I will still have a job.  I did drama with them on Friday and they loved it!  It was great to see them active and using their imaginations, however I'm not sure that the class next door liked the noise.  They were doing horror stories so there was lots of screaming and murdering and zombies, as I'm sure you can imagine.  I did try to keep the noise down, but 30 11 year olds, who were told they could act out killing each other, do make a lot of noise.  Worth it, though.  I love teaching, kids are great and it is so much fun.

Today, Mara and I did our first tourist bit.  We did a tour round the Cu Chi Tunnels, just outside Ho Chi Minh City.  They were fascinating.  I have studied the Vietnam War at school and uni but seeing the tunnels and how the Viet Cong guerrillas lived in order to fight the Americans is amazing and makes it so much more real.  The tunnels were tiny and we had to crawl through them.  They were very hot and the original was rather air less (we didn't go down that one).  It is amazing how many people lived in them for so long.  The one we went down was very dark, even with the odd light along the way, and I find it very difficult to imagine going down there in the pitch black.  Very scary, especially with all the bombing.  The VC were so inventive when it came to living, surviving and fighting back.  The traps were lethal; most had long, sharp spikes in them, to either injure or kill Americans.  They were all so well hidden that no one would have any idea they were there.  It was well worth the trip even if I was extremely hot and now have aching muscles from crouching and crawling through tiny tunnels! There is so much history and culture here that really appeals to the history geek in me.