'nam

sort of difficult to begin to compose a blog after such a long hiatus. which is not to say there's nothing to report. i'm in ho chi minh city, for fuck's sake, there's too much to report. okay, that's a small lie too, i've been way too busy to initiate (or even partake in) much debauchery. but i have the rest of my life to make up for that. starting tonight! rugby games=broken bottles and knife fights. if i'm wrong on this, please don't crush my dreams by correcting me.

yesterday was the last day of my CELTA course here in ho chi minh city. hard to describe what the whole experience was like. it was simultaneously excruciatingly difficult and bearable. there were the obvious issues of time management and attempting to muster up the focus required of being a student again (albeit only for a month). but perhaps the most difficult thing about all of it was being surrounded by lots o' people that i have absolutely nothing in common with. sure, we're all taking this teaching course together so some strange force of nature brought us all together in ho chi minh city at this time for this common purpose, but that's a pretty small blip on the radar of my entire life.

i guess i should take a minute to explain what the fuck the CELTA is. it's a 4-week long teaching certification course. i was in a group with 5 other people and we went through 2 tutors in the course of 4 weeks, teaching 2 different levels of adults. tutors observed and assessed our teaching, and our peers smugly judged and nit-picked (okay, only some of them). i learned a lot of esl/efl teaching methodology, simply so i could be more effective and professional in my current career path of teaching english abroad. so that's that. in a nutshell.

there were initially 24 people on the course, but i think 1 or 2 dropped out along the way. of this number, about half of us could be categorized as young-ish, and the other half were older than my parents. so roles were already inherently assigned, simply by age. both of my parents are still alive, so it was strange to have some of these older folks patronize me, just like the parents i already have DON'T.

anyhoo, that was my biggest complaint about the course. seemed like groups were assigned simply to make things more difficult than they needed to be. but overall, i guess it was a rewarding experience. rewarding in that i will soon have an actual piece of paper issued by cambridge university that says i can now demand more money at whatever lucky school gets me in the future. woo hoo! time and money well spent. plus, it was an excuse to go to another country in asia. funny thing about that is that i've seen absolutely nothing of ho chi minh city aside from the walk to and from my school. i hope to get out and about starting next week. traveling north will ensue, in the company of two cool chicks from the course, mary and carli (representing south africa and kansas, respectively). the tentative plans cover halong bay, hanoi and sapa. sapa might be a bust as that area just had the shit flooded out of it a few weeks ago. we shall see. after that might head over into laos and then down to cambodia. this is all an idea in my head, there's been no fact-checking or timetabling. seems like both of those factors could quite limit this as yet fictional vacation. i guess just because countries are close together doesn't mean they can be frequented and then departed in a quick (or efficient manner). a travel agent should clear things up a bit.

anyhoo, this is all the bloggage that time (and a shopping date) allows me at this point. more celta/other asian country musings will ensue.