Life in Hanoi: 54 days of Vietnamese culture

 Written on September 19th: I’m sitting in one of the best places in Hanoi right now, drinking Highlands coffee and enjoying the view of Hoan Kiem lake. It’s my last day in Vietnam and I came here to reflect on the past 2 months of my life here. 

Introduction to Hanoi & Aiesec project

Past 54 days I spent in Vietnam. I decided to apply for the Global community development program through Aiesec (www.aiesec.org). The process is easy, I needed 2 weeks to go through everything: first introduction interview, where you get information about different programs, then educational seminar, where you make your profile on the Aiesec page and learn how to use a base. Afterward, it depends on you - I was searching for internships near Indonesia since this was my place for holidays in July. I knew, that I don’t want to work with children, since I don’t know what to do with them and I preferred some kind of event management program. I found Global leadership activating day, a day-long conference about leadership and multicultural environment and I liked it immediately. The working tasks described were building content, searching for sponsors, and promoting the event, so it seemed perfect. Also, the fact that I would work with 20 students from all over the world made me excited. 

My second choice was GCDP in the Philippines, which was more focused on making workshops about globalization - a big motivation for going there was also the fact, that TEDxManila was happening at the time. Anyway, I decided on Vietnam and I was kind of happy about that since I was following the Facebook page of the project in the Philippines and it often said: “We are sorry for the flood in dorms, please stay inside because of the storm, thank god that we have WI--FI here”.

Livin’ in a Vietnamese family

My arrival in Hanoi was far away from perfect - it was raining as hell, there were 0,5 meters of water on the street and I had no idea with whom am I going to live for the next 7 weeks. Aiesec member Lizz was waiting for me at the airport and she told me, that they found a host family that his 17-year-old son. I taught: “What the hell am I going to talk about with a 17-year-old Vietnamese boy?!” 

Well, when I came to their house there was his 19-year-old sister as well, so I was very happy about that. I got a nice place to stay, much better than I expected - I had my room and my bathroom - awesome! The family turned out to be nice and a bit crazy at the same time; I enjoyed my host father’s stories and in the end, we could communicate with our Czecho-Slovenian language, which we invented to communicate. He spent 3 years in the Czech studying and since we both know a little Russian, we found our way. I am still very sorry that my host parents didn’t speak English because I am sure we could talk a lot more and I would learn even more about Vietnamese culture. 

My host family is very rich in Vietnam: both parents are teachers of math and they have a private school at home. They have 300 students and they earn 3000 dollars per month! I was really surprised to hear that because this is very nice even for a Slovenian salary. They don’t have to pay any taxes, the government hasn’t figured out the system yet. The average salary in Vietnam is just 100 dollars per month and many people have a shitty jobs selling fruit or other things on the street. I was spending time with my family when we had lunch or dinner and we often talked a lot. 

My host father was a very interesting person to meet. He had a terrible childhood, during the war he spent 9 years away from his parents in a place where he went to school with other children of war. His father was a soldier at that time, and his mother was a nurse. He discovered his passion for teaching just when he was 30 when he met his wife and today is a very respected teacher. students love him and he loves them. I believe his daily routine goes sth like this: he wakes up at 6 am, has breakfast, and reads the news, at 8 am he goes to the swimming pool, at 10 am he comes back and he spends time online reading about the stock market and other news. At midnight he eats lunch made by his wife and then he takes rests till 2 or 3 pm. Then he meets his friends in a bar, has a few beers, and plays some chess. At 6 pm his class starts and he finishes around 8.30 pm. Then he has dinner at 9 pm and then he goes to sleep. It almost feels like he is retired since he is working just 3 hours per day. Not a bad life with salary 30x times higher than average.

My host brother and host sister are very focused on school and for any Slovenian student, so much hard work is impossible to imagine. My host sister studies in the US, and her father pays 10.000 USD per year although she got 80 % of the scholarship. My host brother is in high school and he is getting ready for a university exam: he starts preparing 1 year in advance and every day he has classes from 7-11 am and 3-7 pm. All Vietnamese students have to take extra classes in the afternoon because their school system is pretty bad and you can’t pass the exam without taking extra classes. Being good in school is very important to them and parents even sell their house to get them into a good school - they take care of being the best much more than Slovenian students, which are more focused on having fun. 

The experience of living with local people was the best thing about this internship and I want to do it again in some other country: there is no better way to learn about other cultures. Finding family was easy because I didn’t have to deal with it: Aiesec took care of everything. The motivation of my family to host me was to improve their son’s English: I hope he learned something:)

So, what’s up with Vietnam? I want to share some facts that are interesting or surprising:

You got to love the food: it’s diverse, tasty, and has surprising flavors put together.. definitely the best thing about living in Hanoi!

In the end, I can say that it was an awesome Asian summer and I don’t regret any decision I made. The purpose of the trip was also to get away and think about what I want to do with my life and I cleared my head about some things, so the purpose was achieved:)

This post first appeared on(http://ovcaovca.blogspot.com/2012/09/life-in-hanoi-54-days-of-vietnamese.html)