An Observation, and a Prognostication

An observation on restaurants in Vietnam:

They will never give you bread before a meal.
They will always give you a moist toilette or two. If you use it, you will be charged 1,000 dong. Slightly more than 6 cents is a good price for clean hands.
They will always give you toothpicks at the end of the meal if they are not already on the table. Picking your teeth is simultaneously socially improper and a national pastime. The result is that you will see people impatiently reaching for a toothpick as soon as they've had the last bite of their meal, hurriedly cleaning all their teeth and using their other hand to cover their mouth so that you can't tell what they are obviously doing. I like to just sit there with the toothpick in my mouth, like I'm either Clark Gable with a cigarette or a farmer with a weed in my mouth, but I don't think this is proper.
Most places will also give you a free iced tea, which tastes like green tea but I think it's slightly different. I've already gotten sick of it. I crave berry and lemon teas. I should try and buy some packets so I can make some at home.
I think that every restaurant must hire three times as many people as they need at any given time. Granted sometimes I eat at odd hours, but every time I've eaten out, there have been extra wait stuff just hanging around doing nothing, gazing off in the distance, half-interestedly watching a Viet soap or melodramatic music video, or watching me eat if there's nothing more exciting to see. Maybe in the States the waiters are just better at hiding when they have nothing to do.
When you have a motorbike, parking at anywhere in the city becomes a non-issue. Just pull up front and a security guy will take the bike and give you a ticket. Half the places I've parked at so far have not charged me. The most I've ever had to pay is 3,000 dong. That's like 20 cents. Less than a quarter to park anywhere in the city for as long as I want, or at least until they close. There's one area where American cities can look to Ho Chi Minh for guidance.

This week Elite has given me two classes to teach. That's only 3 hours of work... One class Monday evening, one class Tuesday evening. I like that I don't have to get up early, and I have time to really review my lesson and plan everything out before I start. I wanted to work more this first week, but I think it would also be good to ease into things, especially since it's a new format from the one I'm used to, but with a lot of the similar ideas. The school says that depending on how I do with my first classes, I'll get more the next week, and more the next week, etc., until I'm up to 20 or so hours a week. With planning time, transportation time, etc., I think that's pretty good. If I still feel that I have too much free time, I can try to take on some tutoring.

I am looking forward to my lesson tomorrow, though understandably a little nervous now that it's an actual job. I just gotta remember that I did two weeks of teaching and it went well, so this is just kind of a continuation of what I've been doing. In the teacher's book we got, all the activities are pretty much planned out for us, but I hope that in time I'll be able to tweak things a little more and more. Some of the games and activities seem kind of repetitive and I can think of more fun ways to do things. Some of them are good ideas, though. There's a lot of stuff in the lesson plan, and I hope we get to it all in an hour and a half. There's also a CD that they provided with audio clips of conversations and such that are part of the activities, so that will help to keep things humming along. My lesson is called "have you ever broken a bone?" and is all about injuries and medical advice and stuff, with some grammatical things thrown in, like separable phrasal verbs (which I didn't even know until I took the Languagecorps course). Anyway... I think it will go well.

Wish me luck!