Calendar Girl

Just another day in the life of a TEFL teacher.  

Another set of photographs.  One of my schools is busy putting together its annual school calendar.

‘Make yourself beautiful’  I was instructed.  

The Vietnamese teaching looking elegant in traditional dress. Me looking, well, let’s leave it at less than elegant.

The traditional Áo Dài has withstood the test of time for both elegance and practicality.  What could be better clothing for riding a motorbike.  Covers you up from head to toe, shielding you from the sun with no worry of your skirt shifting around to expose more than it really should.  

street cooking

And then another random bike ride.  

Off the main road into a street market.

Sensory overload.  Sight, smell and hearing confounded in a jumble of noise and colour.

Hardly big enough to fit a car down, pedestrians and motor bikes hobble slowly along.  

Fresh meat

Hypermarkets may think they invented the concept of one stop shop but here there was everything from lychees to fish, chickens to cucumbers.

May be we are not used to seeing a bowl of crabs crawling over each other, or fish still flapping in shallow trays but the freshness was undeniable.

Free range chicken joints

And everyone smiled and chatted.  Even to me.  The strange westerner taking photos of food.  Not that I could understand much.  

Fish, fruit, veg and crab

I managed to buy a pineapple, but ‘one pineapple’ smile, ‘thank you’ hardly hurdles me to the heights of linguistic prowess.  My acquisition of Vietnamese is much slower than my kindy classes’ grasping of our crazy language.