Well, here's the scoop ... I don't think Tan nor I can endure months apart. I am trying to find out how possible it would be for me to live and work in Vietnam for half a year. A few question for those of you who know ....

1. How much are apartments to rent in Saigon? Ballpark. I guess we would want something decent, air conditioning, nice bathroom ... doesn't have to be the best but wouldn't want it to be the worst.

2. Is there a lease? How long?

3. If I want to get certified now for teaching English, I need the TESL, is that right? Does anyone know, can that be done online from anywhere or do I need to be in America to get the degree?

4. If you know, how much does it cost to get the degree needed for teaching English?

Thanks so much everyone, just trying to make some plans. I really never anticipated that this would happen, I thought Tan would be my motivation to keep working on my projects in America, but we are both simply falling apart. 2 mental basket cases, who could possibly make a better couple?

Teaching Forum:

http://www.eslcafe.com/

Apartments (beware of spammers/scammers):

http://vietnam.craigslist.org/

I was told that any TESL/TEFL degree would do. They have classes in Sai Gon. I have found prices ranging from $800 to $1500. Beware of the recruiters. They will promise the Moon and the Stars. You also need to be careful of the schools. Some have been known to get you out in the middle of nowhere and leave you hanging.

It's more expensive to live in Saigon than in NYC based on Craigslist, which is absurd and not true. You have to secure your apartment by way of not being a foreigner, if you get my meaning.

Very, very true. During my nearly two years working in HCMC, I encountered the foreigner premium often.

Costs will be higher in the heart of the city (i.e. Q.1, Q.3, Q.Phu Nhuan). Try venturing out to Go Vap District and/or Tan Binh District (near airport). I remember seeing houses for $200 to $300 per month in Go Vap. Before we left HCMC in 2006, you could find very reasonable accommodation (i.e. house w/air-conditioning, hot water, etc.) for $400 to $600 per month.

You can take the degree online in USA also and depending where you live they have 5 day courses. Some schools you have to beware about as they take advantage of you.
Usually the school you get the degree from will help you find a job. Good luck

I got my degree online thru global tesol. I taught for a year in singapore before returning to USA
Craig

Anyone know how much you can expect to earn teaching English?

I've seen quotes ranging from $8 per hour all the way up to $20.

I have seen decent deals on there. The only problem is are they legit. It's just a situation where you have to be on the ground to find what's best.

There were 2 things that drove me crazy over there:

1.) The garbage everywhere.

and 2.) The "Westerner" prices.

Here's a site my Wife recommended:

http://raovat123.com/

One big question for you Thuy: Are you a motorbiker, or a scaredy-cat? If you are a scaredy-cat, it's going to take a LOT more money to live comfortably in Saigon. And don't worry, my wife's a scaredy-cat when it comes to Saigon. She absolutely refused to go anywhere by motorbike the whole time, despite constant wheedling from me and our host.

Now now James, you should know the answer to that question without even asking. Look who you are talking to here!!! It's ME, crazy wild woman. OF COURSE I love the motorbikes. I even got Tan pinched by the cops because I was always encouraging us NOT to wear our helmets! I can even drive one (poorly - scaring the beejesus out of poor Tan, hihihi). Hell, I used to make him take me zipping around through the mountain areas of Nha Trang ... there is a waterfall up there ... no people .... and we would .... well, YOU figure it out. Is it any wonder he is begging me to come back?
ILOVETAN

Sorry to be a party pooper, but you've hit on a sore spot:

Last year I was working as a Technician for a Company that provided mattresses for long term rehab patients. There were two patients that I dealt with that I will always remember. One was a 23 year old girl who was now brain dead. What caused it? Motorcycle (no helmet). The other was a 50ish male who had an indention in his head that you could rest a basketball on (it was literally that big). He could talk but it was jibberish. What caused it? Motorcycle (no helmet).

Vietnam shows effect of motorcycle helmets
Injuries dropped up to 30% after their use became mandatory.

By Melissa Dribben

Inquirer Staff Writer
HANOI, Vietnam - About a year ago, Rose Moxham, an Australian writer living in Hanoi, stopped at a red light on her motorbike. Some of her fellow travelers stopped as well. But not all.

To understand what happened next, it helps to know a couple of things: Ninety percent of the vehicles on Vietnam's roads are motorbikes and until Dec. 15, 2007, fewer than 10 percent of riders wore helmets. The second is that, in this rapidly developing country, traffic controls are - like the Pirate's Code in Pirates of the Caribbean - more what you'd call guidelines than actual rules.

"It happened very quickly," Moxham recalls. "A young woman on her motorbike was knocked from behind. She dropped her bike, fell off, hit her head on the road and died. Just like that." She shakes her head. "Dead."

During the previous 18 months, Moxham says, she'd seen traffic in this capital soar, and along with it, a mounting carnage. Government estimates put the death rate at 30 a day - like losing a 737 planeload of passengers every two weeks.

"We were seeing dead bodies everywhere," she says. "The traffic here is so awful and it has become exponentially worse within less than a year."

On Dec. 15, however, Vietnam enacted Resolution 32, its mandatory helmet law.

Since then, officials report a drop of 20 to 30 percent in traumatic head injuries and deaths from motorbike accidents, making it one of the world's most successful public-health initiatives in years.

That good news arrived almost to the day that, halfway around the world, the University of Pittsburgh released a report showing that since 2003, when Pennsylvania repealed its mandatory helmet law for motorcycle riders, head injuries and deaths have risen sharply: an estimated 32 percent increase in head-injury deaths and 42 percent rise in head-injury-related hospitalizations.

"The countries that adopt and enforce helmet legislation reduce injuries and deaths. And the states that repeal them see an increase," says Etienne Krug, director of Violence and Injury Prevention and Disability for the World Health Organization in Geneva, Switzerland. "It's just a fact."

As any casual observer in Hanoi can see, the Vietnamese are obeying their new helmet law at extraordinarily high rates. Some put the figure at 90 percent compliance.

"I started wearing one when the government insisted on it," says Bui Thi Thao, 23, a graduate of the Hanoi Open University with a degree in hotel management. "At first it was uncomfortable, but now I'm used to it."

Shops display the utilitarian headgear in every style and shade from camo to cotton candy, stacking them like coconut shells. Men here aren't afraid, by the way, to sport pink ones. But women who ride their motorbikes to work in spiked heels and tailored suits have taken the stylistic lead. They now accessorize with sunhat-style brims in pastels and lace, florals and Burberry plaid that slip over their helmets and can be changed daily to match their outfits.

Numerous nonprofits and nongovernmental organizations have been working for years throughout Asia and Africa to promote the use of helmets. But just as in the United States, there has been resistance because riding bare-headed simply feels better.

In Vietnam, climate complicates the problem. Heavy motorcycle helmets were dubbed "rice cookers" for reasons that are drenchingly obvious to anyone acquainted with the summer's heat and humidity.

"The goal was to get as many helmets on as many heads as possible," says Terry Smith, a member of the board of the nonprofit Asia Injury Prevention Foundation. "The victim in many of these accidents is the wage earner. So when he gets injured, the social cost is enormous."

Smith, who has a doctorate in biomechanics and works for Dynamic Research Inc., a helmet testing lab in California, helped develop a helmet that was lightweight and ventilated enough to suit the country's tropical conditions.

These helmets are now being produced in a factory on the outskirts of Hanoi and sell for about $10 - about the same as the cost of the fine if police catch you without one. For the typical citizen, whose annual income is less than $800, those fines provide a powerful incentive to wear - if not necessarily properly fasten - the headgear.

During the first few weeks men, women and children all wore helmets, even though the law requires helmets only on children over 14. But then rumors began circulating that even the smallest helmets are too heavy for a child's small neck to support.

Outside Huu Nghi Viet Duc hospital, a large glass-enclosed bulletin board serves as a warning of the risks of overloading motorbikes, and neglecting to put helmets on children. It contains large photos in full, garish, bloody detail showing children with crushed skulls and limbs from motorbike accidents.

The prevailing wisdom, however, maintains that children are safer without. So now mothers on motorbikes dash through the city with bare-headed babies lying across their laps. And parents, both wearing helmets, sandwich their toddlers between them, covering them with tentlike nylon ponchos when it rains - but never a helmet.

Full-face motorcycle helmets surely would be too much for a child, said Smith. But the benefits of lightweight, kid-size versions, he says, "far outweigh any problems that may be associated with neck strain."

"The arguments we're hearing are 'I'm not riding fast' or 'I'm protecting my child,' " said Smith. But as the accident that Rose Moxham witnessed shows, you don't have to be moving at all to suffer a fatal fall.

"You're falling from five or six feet up," said Smith, "onto a flat surface. Before parents can do anything, it's over. Accidents occur quickly."

Not all victims, of course, are on bikes.

To cross a street in Hanoi requires an act of faith. With over 60 percent of the nation under age 30, a noticeable contingent of riders is fueled by youthful impatience and testosterone. They text while driving, whip by pedestrians within a heart-attack's breadth, and weave in and out of traffic.

Pedestrians learn to cross streets steadily and slowly, while the honking flocks of motorbikes approach, part, fly around them, regroup and carry on.

The chaotic courtesy impressed Seymour Papert, a Massachusetts Institute of Technology professor and expert in artificial intelligence. Papert was at a conference in Hanoi in 2006. On the last day, walking from his hotel to the meeting, he was talking to a colleague about creating a mathematical model of Hanoi's traffic when he was hit in the chest by a motorbike.

After weeks in a coma, he was airlifted back to Massachusetts. Several surgeries and months of rehabilitation later, he now lives in Maine, severely debilitated.

In America, some states that repealed helmet laws have reinstituted them after watching rates of death and injury from head trauma rise. The Pittsburgh study, however, has not moved Gov. Rendell to consider changing course.

"The governor understands the statistics," says Chuck Ardo, Rendell's press secretary. "And he encourages all motorcycle riders to wear a helmet. But he believes it is a matter of personal choice."

As Pennsylvania's ardent anti-helmet groups have maintained, the protection helmets provide is no guarantee of safety in all circumstances.

For example, in Hanoi two weeks ago, Moxham spent the afternoon at the bedside of her friend, Hania Galan.

Galan, a young Canadian artist and former teacher at the U.N. Independent School, was found by the side of the road on June 9, her motorbike by her side. Her friends have heard that a motorbike cut her off and she swerved into a concrete barrier.

"She's been in a coma," Moxham said. "Someone found her and dropped her off at the hospital. She was wearing a helmet."

An e-mail circulated among Galan's friends last week reported that she opened her eyes in response to her name. Her family was joining her, and there were plans to have her flown back to Canada as soon as possible.

http://www.philly.com/inquirer/health_scie...le_helmets.html

sorry.... you're right, it is irresponsible of me to not wear one ... it is only because I remember when no one did and I enjoyed it so much. Such a free feeling. We wear one now all the time since Tan got fined.

sorry.... you're right, it is irresponsible of me to not wear one ... it is only because I remember when no one did and I enjoyed it so much. Such a free feeling. We wear one now all the time since Tan got fined.


No need for apologies. I'm no Angel myself. I didn't wear one around Cai Be (the short trips), but always had one on for the long trips. I guess that makes me a hypocrite!

We almost wiped out on the way to My Tho in March. We were on our way to sign our marriage papers. An old man pulled out onto the highway without looking. My foot clipped his motorbike. I just hunkered down and waited for the crash. Somehow Ba managed to keep us upright! I turned around and started yelling at the old man and he started yelling at me. Good times!

Congratulations on the fact that you are able to return. Maybe we can all get together in November or December.

P.S. James, I'm essentially a Scaredy-Cat!

Yes, the scariest moment on the motorbike was when a little child ran into the road when we were turning the corner. We didn't see him until it was too late. Tan slammed on the breaks but we nicked the poor kid. He fell and cried but was OK (thank God!!!!!). Apparently, the law in VN is that you are ALWAYS at fault - even if a drunk driver hits you and HE dies, you go to jail. Isn't that a nice law? I can't imagine why people are trying to get out of that country, can you? hihihihi ...

Tan is probably the worst VN driver there is, to make matters worse. He takes way too many risks and is totally a rebel on the bike. However, I LOVE going around with him on motorbike because when we are stopped in traffic and tons of people are around, they always assume he is my XE OM (hired motorbike driver) NOT my lover... it gives me GREAT joy and titillation to start rubbing his arms seductively and kissing his neck to the surprise of the other drivers. Or I will massage his neck and scratch his back and he will yell angrily at me in Vietnamese: HURRY UP!!! DO IT BETTER WHITE GIRL OR I AM NOT PAYING YOU. I think I already told the story of the foot massage in the park where he did the same thing. He cracks me up.

OK all, I am off to VN tonight ... PM me if you want to meet up! If I make it out of the hotel room to check VJ, I'll get in touch! hihihihihihi I am so BAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD. What do you want? 2 months without my yellow stallion ... and this time I am taking some fun "extras" that are too X rated to mention but they include that oil that gets hot when you blow on it and some altoids. YOU FIGURE IT OUT.
ILOVETAN