HJS

My brother’s 23! Hope your day was great; hope your year’s even better!

So the man finally came. Three hours late, as I was heading out the door for work–having avoided bathroom breaks out of fear that I’d miss him–our insipid magical-wonderland doorbell chimed. The man darted in without making eye contact, grabbed a dining room chair and climbed up to poke a screwdriver into a panel near the ceiling. After a near hour of tapping and cell-phone consulting and disappearing into the hallway for what I can only guess were smoke breaks, he was finally reading to pound on my precious Mac until the right set of buttons fulfilled the cyber spell.

And I thanked him, in my way. He’d already proven deaf to English curse words.

But the good news is: We “have” the Internet. I’m typing on our kitchen table, looking at red-tiled rooftops and a huge summer sky. We are ready to respond to an onslaught of e-mail. Send away!

Of course, the DSL only works as long as the electricity does, so we’re hoping that the trip I’m about to take to the bank ensures no repetition of last night.

I arrived home to find our three maids (Yep. $50 a month for twice a week!) scrubbing in the flickering glow of citronella candles. The power had gone out that morning before I left, but it tends to do that every few weeks in HCMC–they “turn off” sections of the city occasionally to maintain the supply. It usually switches back on within hours, so I hadn’t expected this day-long outage.

Well. It wasn’t long before Joel was suspicious; as I hung out, uncomfortably, with the maids, he strolled the floors of the building and discovered that we were alone in this crisis. Luckily, one of the maids is bilingual, and she helped us through the hours-long process of opening our mailbox, finding what turned out to be a late notice (from the previous tenant–our friend/landlord hadn’t paid it), bribing (ooh–three whole dollars) the building manager to switch it back for the night and engaging the whole floor of curious onlookers in the process of examining our bill, chastising us for not paying it, laughing about our innocence, calling our landlord on our cell phone and finally establishing that I could go to the bank downstairs with the paper and give them money to deposit in the account listed.

We’ll see.

It’s funny how this routine thing is such a trama/adventure for us here. Stuff like this happens all the time in the States; we went for weeks without a working furnace in our San Diego apartment. The difference, of course, is that I can read bills in the States. Here it’s just shapes on a page.

Anyway, it’s all okay, just irritating, and it’s making us wonder if we should move to the foreigner’s compound, where they have helpers who take you by the hand and guide you through this stuff. But we love this apartment, and our maids are great hand-holders. When they left last night they told us how much they enjoyed helping us out with this problem–it was great English practice, they said! Sweethearts.

In other news, the job is going well and we are about to enjoy one of the perks of university-teaching: Frequent breaks! Next week is a “down week,” and we are heading to our favorite place in the whole country: Mui Ne! I can’t wait to sit in that lush garden and look at the sea and think about something other than grammar!

Hope you’re all well. Cherish your electricity!

Hug everyone for us at once,

Heather (and Joel!)

And we still don’t have Internet access.

Ah, Vietnam. The honeymoon phase might be over. Of course, whenever I think things like that, I look out our 11th story picture window and gape at the lush fields and yellow morning light and wonder if I’ll ever be able to leave.

(Don’t worry, Mom: I will!)

It’s the oddest juxtaposition of “roughing it” and luxury. We live in a fancy condo, take morning swims in a perfect pool, get massages and multi-course meals on a whim, and hike through muddy water in our business clothes to catch the bus to work with the catfish farmers.

But the job is going well. It’s much more work than we’d hoped it would be, given the setup of the courses here. We each have two classes: one that we teach on Mondays and Tuesdays, and one that meets Wednesday/Thursday/Friday. Each class meets for four hours at a time, and there’s little to no repetition of material, so we’re creating four hours of new lessons each day. (In contrast, our jobs in Korea had us teaching the same one-hour class six times a day. Tough the first time, maybe, but easy as pie by the fifth!)

Perfectionists that we are, we probably took it all a bit too seriously at the beginning. We had our first teaching observations this week and earned very nice, don’t-worry-you’re-super reviews, so we’re readjusting our outlook and trying not to be so obsessive. Gotta find time to enjoy that gorgeous pool!

Everything else is okay, but we dearly miss Internet access. I’m typing this downstairs at the cafe again, and between the Chinese movie on TV (dubbed imperfectly in Vietnamese, so both languages are yapping at me, one after the other) and the cigarette-sucking patrons and the lack of air conditioning, I am very, very eager for the man who comes once a month to flip the Internet switch to finally make his visit–supposedly this coming week!

When that happens, after it happens, nothing is quite the same. (That sentence is for Angie!) We’ll be able to use our cool video chat system again and finally talk to you guys in person! Get your webcams ready!

Hope you’re all doing great. Here’s wishing a belated happy birthday to our sister Joy–and, come to think of it, to Grandpa Underhill (don’t think we said that on here yet, though we thought it many times!)

Maybe by the NEXT birthday–my Dad’s on the 17th–our birthday song warblings will be heard live in Lodi!

Talk to you all very soon!

XOXO–Heather (and Joel)

Hey all,

Our first month at RMIT went well, and we’re adjusting to life in Vietnam. Our apartment is great, but we still don’t have Internet access, so we’re downstairs in the cafe right now, sputtering along with crappy wifi.

We just read an editorial on the New York Times site that ruined our day. We hope it ruins yours, too. (Well, maybe not RUIN–but impact, let’s say. It’s sobering stuff.) Here’s the link.

We read “The Jungle” a few years ago, and regretted not reading it sooner. Have a go, if you feel like it. It’s an important read for anyone interested in our nation’s history.

We love you and hope you’re all doing well!

–Heather and Joel