Việt Nam Diaries, Pt. 5: Warming Up

Week 58 (January 2026)

Monday

After my online Vietnamese tutoring session, from 2:00-3:30 in the afternoon, I usually have to rest a bit before getting some more work done. I find time escaping me, and when the sun goes down I'm already hungry but don't have anything easy to prepare.

I bicycle to the market; just past the market is a lady who sells cooked food from a card table in front of her house. An extension cord runs to it and she has a portable electric stove on top, the same kind I have in my kitchen or that some restaurants here use for hotpot. She is always frying spring rolls (nem) in oil on this electric burner, and usually has some fried meat or fish on the table, and a crockpot on the ground next to her with some kind of soup.

Once or twice a week I go to her for 5 nem as an appetizer while I prepare to cook dinner. She wraps them in paper to soak up the grease and serves them with a tiny plastic bag of sweet fish sauce-based dipping liquid, orange-hued from tiny slices of carrot and garlic floating in it.

But today, she asks me if I want cảnh because she has something different today. "Cảnh măng vịt," she says. "Oooh!" I say. I haven't had this exact combination of duck and bamboo shoots, but I'm a sucker for the local bamboo shoots. They are brined to soften them up to be edible, but they are much fresher and tastier and crunchier than the canned bamboo we had in Texas.

The duck in the soup is mostly from the carcass with only a little bit of meat in the soup, but it's enough that I make it my whole meal with some rice. It's nice on a damp and chilly evening.

As I'm eating dinner, I get a message from Ms. D on Zalo. She is a new teacher who has just started at the school. There was no "winter break" as there were no major holidays, but at the beginning of January we had mid-term exams. Then one week, I noticed a new name on the schedule, and that's how I learned there would be an influx of new teachers, including one for English.

"I just found out that we are teaching tomorrow. I know it's late, but I was wondering if you can help me prepare a warm-up activity for class tomorrow."

I can't believe it! Not in a bad way, night-before preparations are not unusual for Vietnamese teachers, but none of my teachers ever propose this kind of collaboration. We are teaching a class about professions tomorrow, and she proposes a warm-up activity where I pretend to have 4-5 different professions - words that the students already know - and give clues as to what they are so that they have to recall the English words for them.

It's a classic TEFL warm-up game, and I have already done it with my English club in the past, so I pull out those notes and send her 7-8 ideas to see which ones she thinks would be best. But she is still learning her new students' level, too.

Tuesday

First thing in the morning, I try out the warm-up activity with two classes. The clues are like "I wear a white coat. I work in a hospital. I help sick people." "Doctor!" I also do professions like farmer, pilot, and singer. Acting a little bit; even the students who are normally disengaged are paying attention, bemused.

In another teacher's class later, we are teaching writing and there are lulls where we give them time to try to write on their own. I wander over to the first-floor door - open to let the breeze in - to see what's going on in the courtyard. A line of 12 students of mixed gender are standing in a line.

All high school students are required to take a National Defense course, so that they have some knowledge of basic training if they are ever called into action as soldiers. They do various drills, and practice taking apart, cleaning, and assembling mock assault rifles. There are two ex-soldiers on our faculty who come most days in fatigues to teach these classes.

Presently, they are standing at attention, but one boy at the end of the line sees me in the doorway, waves and shouts "Hi Ch-ris!"

I furiously wave for him to be quiet and pay attention to his teacher, and step back into my class.

Wednesday

I bike to the closer of two small grocery stores that I often frequent in two villages in my commune. Both of the grocery stores are quite new. They don't sell any fresh produce or goods that compete directly with the wet market. They have shelf-stable pantry items, toiletries, cleaning supplies, a few small shelves for office supplies, alcohol. There's one refrigerator case for cold drinks, and another which is mostly yogurt and hot dog-style sausages. There's a freezer case that is half ice cream, and half frozen meats which are mostly intended for the hotpot.

As I pull up to the store, a man on a motorbike with his toddler in his arm is getting ready to leave outside the store. The baby is looking at me with wide eyes. The father grabs his little hand and waves it, urging him to say "Hello!" I wave and say "Hello" back, as the baby continues to stare, struggling to process new input.

The shopkeepers know me and smile when I come in. I'm starting to ask questions when I shop. And this time I ask her what fish sauce is most delicious. I'm surprised when she doesn't reach for the small local company-looking bottle and reaches for a bottle from the Chin Su corporation - whose chili sauces are the default here - but it is a glass bottle version, so I guess it must be their premium product.

I go to the fruit vendor in the market that I normally go to to buy some tangerines, and she's washing some egg-shaped brown fruit I don't recognize. "Quả hồng xiêm," she tells me. I tell her I don't know it, and she gives me a small bag for free, with instructions to peel them. They are sapodillas, and they are incredibly sweet with yellow, kiwi-like flesh inside.

Saturday

After classes I get on the bus and go to the city. A few of my students are on the bus as well and it's quite crowded.

My closest volunteer neighbor and closest friend Sean is a representative of the Peer Support Network for volunteers in northern Việt Nam. It's a volunteer-led group that exists in all Peace Corps countries, so that you have a peer you can reach out and talk to when you are frustrated or lonely. It is not a replacement for therapy, which also exists, but a supplement. We don't all need therapy, but we all have difficult and isolated lives.

Today, members from both my cohort and the new cohort meet in a treehouse styled coffee shop on the southside of the West Lake for a few hours to catch up and chat and compare our experiences. We all have funny stories to tell and things to vent about.

Afterwards, Sean and Sophia and I wander around to look for something good for dinner. This side of the West Lake is also very nice and full of high end coffee shops and bars overlooking the lake. There are temporary shops setup along one road with flowers from all around Việt Nam. People are buying flowers for the upcoming Lunar New Year holiday (Tết ) and loading potted kumquat trees full of the little orange fruits onto the backs of their motorbikes.

This area is also near the Japanese embassy and there are Japanese immigrant operated restaurants everywhere. We have a nice and cheap meal in a cozy little place decorated like a Japanese home and then go to a rooftop bar with Japanese-style cocktails.

Week 59 (February 2026)

Sunday

In the morning, I catch back up with Sean in the Old Quarter to hang out and look for a few things. For one, I always need an ATM, and I am hoping to buy some decorations for my room for Tết . The shops along any street are bursting with red decorations and LED powered color-changing red lanterns.

Looking for something to eat, we often take the opportunity in the city to eat something approaching American brunch. But now we've also been here long enough to just crave good Hà Nội food. And we are quickly tempted by the smells coming from the grill of a good bún chả place. The only seating at this bún chả place is in a narrow alley and out in front on the sidewalk; one of the owners pulls out two plastic stools for us on the sidewalk. The auntie is squatting on the pavement in front of a portable charcoal grill, charring skewers of meat.

The bún chả is incredible, with both pork sausage and some pork belly as well. I've never had it with two kinds of meat. The sauce is rich with salty-sweet flavor, and there's a good mix of clean fresh lettuce, mint and cilantro for dipping.

Then, although I am stuffed, I can't resist the rare opportunity to try a very seasonal delicacy: chả rươi. Rươi are a type of worm, a sand worm, which have a population boom towards the end of the year in the rice fields. This is probably too late in the season for fresh rươi but I forgot to try them my first year too. They are cleaned and put into an egg fritata with dill and orange zest. The flavors are subtle and meant to make the worms taste as palatable as possible. They certainly are very chewy.

So much of northern Vietnamese cuisine seems to me to have been borne out of times of struggle and famine. Even iconic dishes like phở and bánh mì (traditionally with cheap canned paté) were invented for tough times, packing a lot of flavor and nutrition with only modest, cheap ingredients.

It's a cool but sunny morning in Hà Nội. Beautiful after a long grey winter. Sean and I both comment how much more comfortable we are and able to enjoy the charm of this city that at first was loud and daunting.

Arriving back in my village in the late afternoon, the football (soccer) fields are finally getting their turf. Exciting stuff! Even though I won't be playing; I could never compete.

Over the next few days, the artificial turf is fastened well and then soil is spread over it in such a way that it settles into the turf and fills the gaps in the gravel base underneath.

I let myself in the unlocked gate to the deserted school that feels strangely like home now. The little guard dog chained up wags his scrawny little butt at me. He is a noisy little alarm who barks at anyone who so much as walks past the front of the school. But I have been here long enough now that without really being trained to it, I am on his "friendly" list and he doesn't bark at me.

Monday

After class I try to take a nap between lunch and my Vietnamese lesson, when all of a sudden jackhammers start somewhere in the building. Then it gets even louder as iron bars and concrete clatter onto the pavement outside of my room (on the back side of the school). They are tearing out all of the windows on the third floor to replace them for some reason.

For a little while, I worry that they're going to be doing my floor too, but later I ask around and they say only the third floor. This building had been renovated before I even arrived, and now that all the buildings are done they had to put some finishing touches. One good recents improvement is that the hallways now have metal shades like blinds for the direct sunlight they receive at midday.

Tuesday

I have another warm-up activity for Ms. D's Tuesday morning class. This time the lesson is about choosing between going to university or trade school after high school. For a couple days I worked on a powerpoint game, like the kind I used to make every week for English club. It takes a few hours to put together, but I'm hoping it can be used multiple times.

The game asks the characters to create a fictional peer and then select his favorite subjects in school and hobbies. Like a mini-roleplaying game, they are given stats that affect their test scores and then what universities they can choose to go to. Depending on their choice of university, I then reveal what career the student has and how much money they make.

The game doesn't go extremely well, because the students absolutely would not entertain choosing different hobbies. They only wanted football and karaoke. I should have known. They keep making identical characters. Only towards the end of the warm-up period did they seem to understand that it was like a roleplaying game.

Students and teachers associated with the Youth Union are putting up decorations at the front of the school for Tết all afternoon and after dark. Mrs. H, the school's janitor, who is usually cheerful, sounds exceptionally cross at having been forced to work so late. I can hear her yelling instructions at people from across the courtyard.

In the evening, when quiet settles in, I have my door and window both open (with mosquito netting soundly covering both) to allow a cross breeze to cool my room. I don't start using my AC until late March.

I'm watching a movie and when the movie features a barking dog, I hear the guard dog on the other side of the courtyard whining curiously.

Wednesday

Today there's a competition for "good teachers" in our district at our school. As I head for class, the courtyard fills up with cars and there are a bunch of teachers loitering in front of the meeting room, taking pictures with the brand new Tết display. Some of them are surprised to me see, but I don't have time to fully introduce myself on the way to class. I greet them in Vietnamese just for the satisfaction of giving them a second surprise and go to class.

During our first class, the drum that signals the beginning and end of class goes off 15 minutes early; the students lose focus, and Ms. D looks at me confused. The school has had a teacher competition before, but I don't remember them changing the schedule for it.

"Maybe it only applies to the competition?" I offer.

She consults with the teacher in the next class, who doesn't know what we're supposed to do either. We get control of the class and keep teaching our lesson, but later it becomes clear that we should have moved on to our second period class.

After I finish my classes, my head English teacher asks if I want to attend one of the competition classes, and so I get to sit in on a geography lesson. The lesson today is about Russia. There's a warm-up game with trivia and then break-out sessions where three teams in the class are assigned to study topics like weather, natural resources, or the economy. Then they present their "findings" to the rest of the class with elaborate, pre-built dioramas.

The thing about teacher competitions in Việt Nam is that they are fully staged. The dioramas were either brought by the teacher or built specifically for the show of the competition. It follows the same curriculum of a regular class but uses extra preparation that the teachers could never achieve on a daily basis.

The students are all given the answers for this lesson ahead of time to make this class; which goes rather hilariously wrong this morning when a student jumps ahead in the script and gives an answer prematurely.

It baffles me as to how these teacher competitions are judged, and how they prove anything about who the "good teachers" are.

Thursday

On the way to the breakroom in the morning, some of the women staff members suddenly beckon me into their office. They are enjoying a snack and want me to try it.

"Bánh đa kê," they tell me. I'm very familiar with the unsalted sesame-studded rice cracker bánh đa, which is made in a nearby village to mine so it's sold and eaten everywhere here. But I've never looked at it as a sweet snack.

Here, they've spread onto the cracker a warm, gooey paste with the same mildly sweet flavor as green mung bean desserts (there are mung beans in the paste for flavor). It's unusual but tasty.

After assuring them that I find it "ngon", I ask them to write the name down for me on the handheld whiteboard I keep with me in my laptop bag. I need to see how kê is spelled and whether it has a tone, because it's not obvious to me. Afterwards, I am able to look up the word and determine that the paste is made of millet.

In the afternoon, I follow Chị to the garden and help her plant sprouting onion bulbs into a narrow strip of garden outside the football stadium. Some students with afternoon classes leave the school and point excitedly at me kneeling in the dirt, digging holes in the damp earth with a small shovel.

"When it grows, you can come get onion any time," she says.

In vague ways, due to her limited English, she moans about how the students don't appreciate how good they have it these days. They are comfortable and don't have to work hard.

"When I was their age, I had to gather dead plants to burn to cook."

Việt Nam now has so many modern conveniences that it's hard to imagine that most of my colleagues likely grew up in extreme poverty and could tell me what that was like.