Melbourne

back in Melbourne. the food is excellent, the weather is strange, service is relaxed verging on bad, light goes on forever, i think ill get used to everyonthing next week, tuesday around three. What else? i still havnt caught up with anyone. I keep thinking i see friends and then realise they look nothing like my friends. i thought i recognized the green candidate for northcote from the election poster. I thought a girl i taught from northcote high school was an ex girlfriend untill she said hello mr morris. all whiteys look the same. Everything is the same but different.

Vietnam

one week isnt nearly enough time. Crossing the road in Saigon is a zen art form im proud to say i mastered. Huge shock after well ordered tokyo.

after a trip to the mekong delta im now in a beach resort with a swedish couple who seemed keen to befriend me. i think i know why. we talk about travel, vietnam, food and the superiority of the aryan race. then they bicker. met some australians in the mee knog delta whose names may have been kath and kim, I havnt seen the g string hanging out the back of lowcut pants look for quite some time. their plans involved tracking down a cheap copy of niptuck season one on dvd when they got back to saigon.

for about 6 or 7 dollars american you can hire a guy and his motorbike for nearly the entire afternoon. took a great trip this way to some sand dunes, kids offered us slides down the dunes and pieces of mandarin, they taught me dirty words in vietnamese and i taught them nice ones in english. they were happy to play with us, take small bits of money and drink our drinks. it was one of the nicest things i think has ever happened to me. im embarrassed to say some of them had better english than my students in japan....the imperative of surviving on small tourist dollars is a teaching tool i never tried using but it obviously works.

tommorow me and my man bike are going to a fishing village a bit down the coast. should be nice, saw hardly any tourists there when we went past it today. After that its back to saigon for one more night, maybe go to the tunnels on monday then fly back to melbourne in time to watch gardening australia with mum.

and bulgarians are hilarious

Disorientated

Feels like ive been blindfolded and turned so many corners now that when it comes off im not sure if ill be competing in a spelling bee, about to be eaten by canibals, naked in front of my grade 4 class or waiting in a dentists chair.

I found out today i am going to have to spend my last day in japan waiting for no less than 3 utility men to come around. After that I am going to see Mogwai. That will be my last night in Japan. I will be flying out the next morning at some ridiculous hour that seemed reasonable 4 months ago.

Work has not found a replacement for me. Either this is the truth or head office do not want me training a new member of staff and believe it's more important that the new teacher be told how to sell GEOS lessons and sign up new students than they actually know anything about the 120 students they will be taking over from me.

So whoever they get, they wont know that Kouji will most likely not come in the room for a new teacher, they wont know that Shioris mum makes her 5 year old study English for two hours a day , they wont know that all you need to go to keep Hinata happy is give her a stamp every page she turns, they wont know that Aimi never sees her Dad , they wont know that kengo is the greatest dancer and about the nicest young man they will ever meet, they wont know that Sumire is about to have a baby sister and wears a different hat each week. They wont know any of these things at first but they will and I hope they enjoy finding out it out. It would be sad if they didnt.