The joke.

What kind of mad world is this, where an uneducated bum can be responsible for the education of children? Where talk of big bucks and easy hours is bandied about indiscriminately to lure the riffraff of youthful society to another country for what? For profit?

In a developing country with a per capita GDP of $1000, where unqualified and often uncaring teachers quite easily make that in a month, I start to wonder if this isn't all some sort of cruel joke. Sure, you're making a difference. Tell yourself that if it helps you sleep. You ride in on your white horse with the gift of white man speech. You're giving them opportunities. Maybe. But are you really doing it for them? How much impact can you have if you don't even really want to be there? Instead of caring, you work your 2 hours a day and spend the rest of the time eating, drinking all night and trying to corrupt the locals. If you're decent enough, you might make an effort to keep the madness out but there's plenty of people here who don't bother, spreading their particular brand of lechery across the town in a frantic effort to suck as much life and love out of people as possible. Then there are those who try to stay a step above the meaning of life here. Who adopt a colonialist attitude and swagger about with their air of superiority draped about them like a cloak that will keep the dirt off their fresh chinos. But that's impossible. The very act of trying to remove yourself from where you are, of denying the existence of the reality around you, is like branding yourself across the forehead - "I do not get it". There are good people here. Great people, too. People who care about what they're doing and what they're giving. There are people who are constantly trying their hardest to improve the product they're selling. There are also people who are only trying a little bit to improve and that's alright too. Just make a goddamn effort.

The idea of being paid relatively large amounts of cash, for relatively little work is an undeniably appealing prospect, but in an industry where the product is the possibility of someone's future, it wouldn't hurt you to try a little harder. Goddammit.

Hello Ha Noi

So, on the 7th of July 09, we flew into Hanoi. I didn't really know much about Hanoi, other than it being the country's capital. I chose to move here over Saigon based on advice from friends about the general difference in vibe between the 2 cities. For the sake of comparison, we can say that Saigon is like Sydney and Hanoi is more like Melbourne. One is a faster paced city and more image oriented and the other is a more laid back, cultural centre. It's hard for a new visitor to Hanoi to really see it as laid back, with 8.5 million people and around 4 million motorbikes, but it's there. We planned to spend about a week getting settled in before we started looking for work, but after meeting a whole bunch of awesome people, a week quickly turned into 3. Money started running low and we started looking at work that sounded dodgy, but promised to pay well. We spent a week trying to work out a deal to work with Mr Chung. A very confusing week, cause neither of us are still sure about what we were going to be doing for him. I think he wanted us to run his travel agency. Anyway, after much of talk of dollars, mercedes benz's and contracts, we decided to flee his presence and look for something a little more suitable. I eventually found some teaching work and Kenneth eventually found work at a new backpacker hostel called The Drift, as the chef. Kenny soon moved into the Drift and I moved out to my own apartment about 20 minutes away. Considering we'd been sharing a bed in a shitty one room serviced apartment for the previous few weeks, space was pretty sweet. The Drift quickly became our new home and Tif and Alicia, the australian owners, took us under their wings and taught us the ropes of life in the big city. The bar upstairs was a handy social lubricant and we quickly sorted through the backpackers to find a handful of people who were living in Hanoi or planning to live there. They turned out to be an alright bunch and are our housemates and burdens to this day. So, with homes, jobs and friends we considered ourselves to be settled and started getting to know the country.

In the 8 or so short months since, we've made a lot of friends and said goodbye to most of them. Being an expat can be bittersweet sometimes. We've traveled up and down and across the country, we've eaten strange things, some of them surprisingly tasty. We've learnt some of the language and learnt a lot about ourselves. Yes, we have gotten drunk but we've also been sober for roughly equal amounts of time. We've had so much fun and experienced so much that it would take me forever to write about it, so I'm not going to. That's why I'm doing this wrap up. Suck it if you were waiting for more. Anyway, now you're caught up.

Miss Saigon, you so hot.

3rd of July, 09, we fly into Ho Chi Minh City/Sai Gon. Having grown up learning about the war, hearing stories about the war and with some of my favourite movies being about the Vietnam War, Nam has always held a special allure in my mind and is a big reason why I chose to relocate there. Tan Son Nhat airport certainly held up to that ideal. Taxiing in on the plane, we rolled past giant military helicopters and fighter planes in giant 70's style hangers, looking like they came straight out of Apocalypse Now. The city was overwhelming. None of the glitz and glamour of the bigger Asian cities I'd been to, but with the same amount of people, motorbikes and pollution. We headed to Pham Ngu Lao, the backpacker district. We checked into our cheap and seedy hotel and set out to explore. The area buzzes with the sound of money to be made and is filled with locals mostly looking to exploit ignorant travellers. After walking around for a while, we sat at a streetside stall for our first bowls of authentic pho. Much simpler than the restaurant fare found back home, it was sweet and cinnamony and very satisfying. We spent a night hanging around here, sampling the local nightlife before we decided to get some culture. The obligatory tourist destinations were visited. Reunification palace, the sombre and awe-inspiring war museum and a day trip outside Sai Gon to the Cu Chi tunnels, a gigantic network of underground tunnels built by the Viet Cong during the American War. We crawled through the same tunnels they did and marvelled at how small Vietnamese people really are. We were on the trip with a group of Americans, who felt pretty bad about marvelling at blown up American tanks and watching short films about "great American killer heroes" on the 4th of July. Suck shit, yankee. Our time in Sai Gon was an eye opener to life in Vietnam. We got ripped off, we got drunk, we got scared crossing the roads, we rode three grown men on a motorbike, we got hassled incessantly by hawkers and we had a pretty good time. We hung around trying to find some action for another 2 days before deciding to catch a plane up to our ultimate destination, Ha Noi.

The story so far...

So having the made the difficult and heartbreaking decision to leave my life in Oz, I packed up and left for Thailand on June 16th, 2009. Travelling with my trusted sidekick and asian ghetto pass, Kenneth Lancelot, we headed towards the hustle and bustle of BKK. Khao San Rd, backpacker central, was the worn out and used up whore I remembered from my last trip. Killing time till we could head towards the islands, we quickly fell into a pattern of drinking early and excessively. There's not much else to do in Bangkok, apart from visit the shopping centres and all the temples. After ruining our lives for a week and avoiding 19 year old gap year binge drinkers, we headed to Koh Chang, a large island on the way to Cambodia, and then to it's smaller sister island, Koh Maak. As Maak is only a tiny place and it was the offseason, the place was practically deserted. We only saw a few other tourists there and they looked like long termers. We spent our time swimming and riding motorbikes through the jungle, trying desperately to avoid monkeys due to Kenny's phobia, or lying in hammocks reading. The only nightlife on the island consisted of sitting on the porch of one of the bungalows with some warm beer, cheap rum and music "blaring" from the iphone's tiny speakers. Bliss, for a short time, however we had a flight to make to Ho Chi Minh City, so back to BKK we went for more noon to midnight drinking and socializing. A pattern was established for this trip, whereby the night before you have to get up for an early flight/train/bus turns into the biggest night yet. We survived and managed to get up, or leave the hotel anyway, at 6 am for our flight to Nam.

The usual shit...

Since it seems likes this "blogging" craze is here to stay, I thought I'd finally catch up to the rest of Gen Y and add my voice to the crowd. I know what you're thinking, just what the world needs; another whining sycophant blabbing on about his life in a desperate attempt for attention, but I think the pros outweigh the cons in this case. I'm currently living abroad, making an attempt to see as much of the world as possible before I "settle down" and do all that career and mortgage stuff. Living in Vietnam at the moment and teaching english, I've been here for 10 months and am planning on making a move in the next few to Kuala Lumpur to try and find some work there. After that, who knows? So this blog is an opportunity for all my friends and fam at home to keep up with what I'm doing without me having to talk to them about it. Stay tuned for the inane, the exciting and the boring details of my life.