On Thursday morning, I went with my friend Dung to his university, where he studies English. I'm not sure why I wanted to go; it was kind of interesting but predominately as boring as you'd imagine 3 hours of basic English grammar to be, and included a period where the teacher was like "Now everyone must use this opportunity to talk to a native English speaker! Come on everyone, don't be shy!" which was really awkward, because I don't like being the centre of attention. But the upshot is that it got me thinking about how basically Vietnam and England are exactly the same (except for the ways in which they are really different).
On the break halfway through the class, a group of us went and sat outside by some tables under some trees, and it was just like sitting outside the Buttery at uni between lectures - drinking tea, the boys smoking, taking the piss out of the girls, talking about nothing, putting off having to go back and work.
It's the same with the kids I teach. Before you come here, you read about the country, and so come with all these preconceptions - Vietnamese kids are this certain way, they're good at this, they're bad at this, they're unlike European kids for these reasons. But actually, they're far more similar than they are different. Seven year olds are really cute and like singing songs. Thirteen year old girls hate thirteen year old boys. Every class has the clever one, the joker, the cool one, the quiet one. It's the same in Vietnam, the same in England, the same when I taught Italians and Spaniards and Turks. I also taught two Uzbekis - it's hard to generalise because there was only two of them, but I'd bet that people in Uzbekistan are largely the same as people everywhere else.
This isn't meant to read like some profound statement on our universal brotherhood or any wank like that. It's just a thing that's true, and I like it. It makes relationships with people a lot easier, because once you get past the initial we-look-really-different, I-don't-understand-what-you're-saying, you can just behave like you would with anyone else. Maybe that's obvious, maybe I'm a massive xenophobe, but it's taken me a couple of months to work out.
Tomorrow I have to run this half marathon. I'm really nervous, because even though I've trained loads, I'm still really slow. Coming dead last would be quite humiliating. Actually, fuck it - if I can run 13 miles, I'm better than most people.
