Developing Vietnam : HCMC Update

Today's development post talks about Nguyen Thi Minh Khai mainly, and also some sites in District 5. For those who've spent some time in HCMC, you'll surely recognize these sites -- the question is, can you remember what was there before - because I can't!
Here, a newly finished office block on Vo Thi Sau (before the Hai Ba Trung junction).

Now down onto Nguyen Thi Minh Khai and from Hai Ba Trung heading down towards District 5. In a very short space there are a number of tall buildings going up. This is one is between HBT and Pham Ngoc Thach. Forget the floundering cyclist, it's the building on the billboard behind we are interested in....the Centec Tower.

A few meters down the road on the other side, before Pasteur, is the beginnings of the Pacific Tower.

And then just on the other side of Pasteur is the site of the 'Sailing Tower', which will have some kind of sailing boat look to it.

Further down, opposite Huyen Tran Cong Chua, is this interesting looking building.

Ex residents should recognise the next one, on the corner of Cach Mang Thang Tam and Nguyen Thi Minh Khai....it used to be an outdoor restaurant (the gray building, not the construction behind).

Over on Nguyen Van Cu we have 'Saigon Happiness Square' -- shops, hotel, office etc

Now heading into D5, and the massive site that I thought was Saigon Happiness Square, but obviously it's not....whatever it is, it's huge and there are two or more projects going up there. It's on 2/3 between Ly Thuong Kiet and Le Dai Hanh.

It seems that by 2009 we're gonna have a hell of a lot more apartments, offices and shops ready to go!

Tardy Projects

This is exactly the kind of thing mentioned in 'Bitter'.

'Tardy execution of projects in Ho Chi Minh City has seen roads messed up, people moving around with apprehension, houses sinking, dust flying around, and businesses lose customers

'After the barricades were removed, two deep holes remained unfilled, resulting in a dozen accidents to passengers who tripped, broke their arms, injured their heads.'

Talk of sleeping in masks because of the dust and slopping out homes. Sounds like fun. One thing to notice is an increase in the reporting of this kind of thing, which is good.

French Buildings and Sunset

Old French buildings are often hard to spot whilst motoring around, but if you stop and consider them for just a few seconds, their charm is irreplaceable.

Unfortunately a lot of these buildings are being razed to make way for newer high rises. They sit on street corners like dinosaurs, desperate for salvation from the bulldozer. I did hear that the city would be doing more to protect them from now on.

The city has also recently made an attempt to control wayward drivers with these banners strung over the road.

So, another sunsets over the city, and the daily grind below continues.

Bitter

Driving around the city one can sometimes become seduced by the glitzy new buildings going up. You think 'Hey, Vietnam is going places'. Or 'Hey, Vietnam really is developing quickly'. I've said the same myself right here. Let's redefine the development here right now - Vietnam is developing, but only in certain places for certain people. New office and apartment blocks don't signify any kind of grass roots development. Almost every vision of a well oiled, well managed country is quickly expelled as you crash over a pot hole thinking 'if only the money for this road found its way to the road'. Infrastructure is frankly pathetic. These are the basics - roads, trains, power, city management...it is with a sinking heart that I have to tell you, Vietnam has a long, long way to go. Flooding around the city is horrific, some roads are a total joke. A good example of what I'm talking about is the Van Thanh Bridge, which has notoriously wiped out around 40 houses, and it has to be said, is a total embarrassment. I went there today to have a look at the area. The bridge is, as I said, a shambles. Can you see the air time this van is getting as it crashes over one of many sunken joints in the road.

And what goes up must come down -- you can see this bus going down over the other side of the bridge. The buildings to the right have had their fronts ripped off.

Those buildings are ghostly -- a totally deserted row of buildings in the heart of the city, all down to the corruption and incompetence of some contractors.

From the other side of the road you can see the effects of the 'bridge' even better.

Just next to the bridge are houses lining the canal below.

The other side, in Binh Thanh District, the old apartments on Ngo Tat To.

Does this look like the middle of a modern city?

It is reminiscent of Manila where I witnessed a staggering gap between rich and poor. I know a similar situation exists in many other 'developing' countries such as Brazil or India. I hope Vietnam does not follow suit.

Here, apartments in Binh Thah (just off Pham Viet Chanh) are finished. The water side ones will have an interesting view as to the left is the zoo and botanical gardens.

This post may sound bitter, well it is. It is also frustrated, angry and fed-up. Don't worry, I'm not depressed. It's just a reality of living here, that there are huge contradictions staring you in the face. Just down the road from the bridge that has made x number of people's lives a misery is the site of Saigon Pearl....

Final Word - The Best Of

It's been two years now of blogging here at the Final Word. I thought I'd take this chance to say thanks to everyone who has read and commented over the past couple of years. I've blogged about pretty much everything : work, getting married, the development in Saigon, the future of Saigon, moving house, advertising, parking, driving, helmets and the rain. I've counted the number of foreigners in the city. I've written about Xmas, TET and Independence Day. I've blogged other places in Nam like Vung Tau, Dalat, Nha Trang, Hoi An, Hanoi, Phu Quoc, Con Dao, Mui Ne, and then further afield from places like Cambodia, Malaysia, Singapore and Thailand, Korea, and even a Tsunami report. Then there are all the pointless in between posts and random pictures, of which there are lots, like sitting in my rocking chair for example....

So with ever more self indulgence creeping quickly onto the white screen of this post, here are my top ten from the last two years.

1) Misunderstanding the horn- an attempt at comedy on the Saigon traffic...looking back I'm not really enamored with my writing back then, but whatever.
2) Getting married Vietnam Style Part III- One small part of the story of getting married. The experience of working 'with' a government office.
3) Independence Day - I had a great day that day, loved driving around taking these pics, they are some of my favorites that I've taken in the city.
4) Con Dao- my first piece of travel writing was based on this post.
5) Getting married Vietnam Style Part X - reasons I don't really need to express...! It's great to have everything recorded and look back on it.
6) Hoi An - again for the pics, and cause it was my honeymoon....!
7) Are you hard headed? - I like this one cause it is about something very real, it's the first real researched piece I ever wrote, and it got a good reaction.
8) An everyday journey - This is a piece of creative writing I did. Although I never got much feedback, I was 'well chuffed' (very happy) with it.
9) Will 2020 ever come to Saigon? - About the future of Saigon, and provoked an interesting discussion.
10) Vung Tau - Mainly the pics, and also the reaction - seemed a lot of readers had a connection or were interested in Vung Tau!

That's it. Enjoy!

Cable

This story first appeared on Thanh Nien on May 7th (here) and I've been following it ever since. It just has some hilarious connotations. The first story said this:

A company under the Vietnam Ministry of Posts and Telematics has confirmed 11km of fiber-optic cable stretching across Vietnam had been stolen off the coast of a southern Vietnamese province.

Big deal you might say. Then on the 29th of May we had this.

A 98-kilometer segment of the TVH fiber-optic cable responsible for transmitting large volumes of data for landline systems and the Internet was stolen off the Ca Mau coast. Bui Thien Minh, deputy director of state-run Vietnam Posts and Telecommunications Group (VNPT), one of the owners, said repairs were estimated to cost US$2.6 million.

Together with SMW3, the other undersea fiber-optic cable, the damaged network accounted for 82 percent of all data transmitted from and to Vietnam. The rest is transmitted by three land cables and a satellite system. Minh said if part of SMW3 too was stolen Vietnam would be cut off from the outside world. The Internet would collapse first.

Asean Explorer, a Singaporean ship specializing in cable repair hired by VNPT to survey the problem, said the repairs would take 88 days. Minh said this could take much longer due to paperwork, especially for permission for the vessel to operate in Vietnamese waters.

PAPERWORK! Jesus. Does someone need to be slipped an envelope for this as well?

Then, the next day, we get this - unbelievable!

In August last year the government of Ba Ria Vung Tau province issued a note permitting coast guards to cooperate with civilians in salvaging unused undersea cables laid before 1975.

Such cables are no longer in use and are lucrative as scrap.

This spawned a rush by fishermen to haul up cables along the southern coast and many reportedly failed to distinguish between unused cables and those in use.

Some severed the TVH cable, one of the only two operational undersea cables connecting Vietnam with the outside world.

Last month the Ba Ria Vung Tau government withdrew the permission and banned all kinds of cable salvage.

A reader wrote to Thanh Nien expressing his indignation at the decision which allowed people to recover “cables laid before 1975” at “predetermined coordinates”.

He said the fishermen and soldiers involved were mostly ignorant of coordinates and could not know which cables were laid before 1975 and which after since they lay deep under the sea.

Note the bold above 'lucrative as scrap'. From today's story:

Such scrap cables fetch a mere VND7,000-VND15,000 (less than a dollar) for one km while one km of the TVH line cost $13,000 when it was laid 1-2 m beneath the seabed in 1994.

With Vietnam apparently left hanging by a thread by some fisherman looking for a bit of scrap metal, thank god for this story which first appeared on Thanh Nien in April. Bring it on!

English teaching in Saigon : The Jungle

The thirst of young people in Vietnam for the universal language that is English has inevitably created a market for schools. Big schools, little schools. Good schools, bad schools. Schools with accreditation, schools without accreditation. The debates go on and on. For the wandering but honest ESL teacher, it can be a real jungle.

Breaking down the kinds of school in Saigon is probably unwise, but not impossible, so I'm going to try it.

First we have two different sectors. We have students who attend International Schools and preparatory schools (much the same thing). Secondly, we have Language Centers, whose classes are based outside of school hours (in other words, evenings and weekends). I will start with the latter.

The language center is where you will find journeymen ESL teachers and also younger non-career teachers (by that I mean those who are TEFL certified but are only teaching as a means of living abroad for a few years). There are two kinds of language center. The 'heavyweights' have been established for a long time and have a good reputation, essential in attracting good quality teachers. ILA is the biggest of them all, with international recruitment campaigns for teachers. Every Saturday and Sunday the school causes chaos at kicking out time, with hundreds of kids needing to be picked up from this narrow entrance on busy Nguyen Thi Minh Khai.

VUS is another monster with a number of campuses across the city.

Then there are other schools with good reputations like my old employer CleverLearn or long established Apollo set up and managed by my fellow Saigon Raider Khalid Mahmood. For students, these places offer 90 or 120 hour courses in General English and exam preparation courses like TOEIC, TOEFL and IELTS.

With the hugely increasing number of Vietnamese studying overseas, their scores in standard tests become insanely important, as a particular mark is required for university courses in western countries, and of course for the C.V as well. The trouble is that these tests neglect to examine real fluency in a language - take a look at some of the questions as a native speaker and you'll be reaching for the answer book saying 'WTF' as well. Hence, they require training. Hence, exam prep is now big business for language centers. ACET is another good school that does massive business with exam prep courses.

For teachers, each school has its own rep. ILA is known to be cliquey. You can work without meeting many other teachers at VUS. Smaller schools tend to be more personal, possibly a nicer environment to work in. Pay ranges from $13-$15 per hour at most of these language centers. In the heavyweights, you really have to do some hard time before getting a good schedule and good classes. You will be started in the kiddies Saturday/Sunday morning, where wee and poo line the floor, and your whole concept of self respect is called into question (I turned down a job at ILA when I arrived in Nam because that is what they offered me). Respect to those who are qualified to and love to teach the early learners. My limit is Grade 3.....

After the heavyweights, you have the minnows. These schools are about as subtle as a brick falling on your head. They may be chains across the outlying city districts or just a one off school that has to change the name on its front three times in a month. If your school is called 'Outerspace Language Center' or 'Phuc and Vu's excellent English Language Adventures' (ok I made the last one up) then you're in trouble.

These schools can't afford to pay native speakers the wage that qualified teachers work for, so they employ almost anyone. I met a retired police officer from Texas who just walked into one such crap hole without a minutes worth of experience and started working almost immediately....'I don't know what I'm doing, they just wanna talk to me' he said in his southern drawl. Undeniably, and as spoken about before, there are some troubled characters on the teaching circuit, and it's not hard for them to eek out a weeks beer money from some language center somewhere or other. Salary from $8-$13, and mostly NOT reliable when it comes to payday.

The website Saigon ESL lists language centers by district (here) and also gives them a rating based on experience of previous teachers. I take it all with a pinch of salt having met my fair share of potential 'contributors' The only thing some of these people should be contributing is a piece of nonsensical graffiti to the inside of their padded cells. Generally however, if you see a school marked TOTAL HELL HOLE STAY AWAY on the site, then it's a good indicator to,errr, stay away.

The language centers recent focus on exam prep is either a lucky coincidence for them, or some good predictions about the market. They have a cash cow they can rely on, but their old banker, the kids programs, may be set to suffer. Affluent families can now also afford to send their kids to an International School (IS) or a prep school. First there are the fully accredited IB International Schools.

Currently we have IS (International School of HCMC), BIS (British International School), SSIS (Saigon South International School), AIS (Australian International School) and ABC, with two more coming this September, AIS (American International School, going through accreditation process) and RIS (Renaissance International School). There's also the Singapore International School. These schools are full of expat kids, including an awful lot of Koreans.

Tuition fees range from $7-$15,000 a year, depending on school and Grade level. Most average ESL TEFL certified teachers don't even look into opportunities at these schools, and they do prefer MA TEFL teachers that's for sure, but if you don't ask, you don't get.....Expect much better pay and conditions in these schools, and normal working hours.

Along with the IS Schools are the prep schools - that is high schools with lessons probably in English and Vietnamese, preparing students for study abroad. APU is one such school, as is Asian High School.

For ESL teachers, there are plenty of other options out there such as Vietnamese universities, corporate teaching and horrific kindergartens, but for now that is the end of my definitely non-exhaustive list and summary of teaching English in Saigon. For me, it's a case of finding the right environment to work in, and also the right conditions to let me enjoy my life, in other words, no evenings and weekends. I haven't worked at a language center for nearly two years, and I'd like to keep it that way. The opportunities are only set to increase in the coming years, with most if not all the above IS schools having plans for expansion. Parents are pulling kids out of public schools, and don't forget the 1000 odd students at the Korean School, half of whom are probably on the waiting lists..... all good news for teachers of English!