In less than two weeks of our arrival, I found myself standing in front of Vietnamese students in a well-respected Saigon language centre. My job hunt had been fairly straightforward – a combination of luck, skill, preparation and networking landed me at the very school that the Jet Set boys taught at one year ago (an amazing coincidence if you consider how many schools there are here).

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I am happy to report that one of the Jet Set Zero crew is now employed in Saigon.  As mentioned in my earlier note, “Unemployed in Saigon”, last week I had an interview with the hiring manager of the Cleverlearn English Language Centre and today I had to prove my skills by teaching a mock English class.  Let me be clear that I have no experience doing this so it took my best acting skills to pull it off.  As preparation, I asked for advice from a couple folks currently taking their ESL certification in Saigon (certification which I do not have), youtubed ESL teachers doing their thing and googled ESL tips.  Man, the internet is a great thing.

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The only thing worse than working a job is looking for a job.  Finding employment in a foreign country is rarely easy – you often land not knowing a soul and are unsure of where to start.  There’s also the current economic crunch whose fingers reach farther than you would think.  At home, I have never had a problem getting work…usually, you ask around to people you know and someone knows someone who is looking for an employee.  Problem solved.

I am confident that job hunting will be the most unpleasant part of the whole Jet Set Zero experience for me.  I don’t mind working, but it takes a lot of time and effort to network and apply for positions in a city you are unfamiliar with.  I started my job search by googling language schools in Saigon and sending my resume off indiscriminately.  I spoke with someone who teaches at the university and she told me that although it’s fairly easy to get a teaching job, there is a current oversupply of teachers. Crap. I got in touch with a couple people who are doing local ESL work and they suggested a nearby language centre and gave me a contact name.  This turned out to be an awesome tip as the contact person they know is in charge of deploying teachers for many different schools throughout Saigon, not just the actual language centre (which is good because without TEFL or specific ESL certification I’m not actually qualified to work there).  I was very excited to get a response asking me to come in for an interview.

So I went in this morning to meet Bich, the centre’s HR person, wearing one of my two nice outfits.  It’s strange after working in HR for so long to be on the other side of the table.  I didn’t have to say too much as she spent most of the interview explaining how the schedules and classes operate.  Apparently she liked the way I listened to her because she invited me to do a demo class on Tuesday where I will teach a mock lesson to some of the staff to test my teaching skills.

The only problem with this is that I have no idea what I’m doing.  I’ve never taught before and don’t speak more than a couple words of Vietnamese.  She gave me a sample lesson to use as a guide and I’m supposed to teach for 45 minutes.  So it should be very interesting to see how it goes.  My master plan is to get the job (obviously) and then use my clout to get the other Jet Set members jobs as well.  Wouldn’t that be nice!

I also put up a post on the Saigon group for Couchsurfing which was titled “I NEED A JOB!!!!”  I got a response from someone in Saigon who is looking for an individual to do some web-editing work, and I am currently waiting to hear back about that.  And, like the English teaching, I will have to fake my way through that as well.

Other than that, the other alternative to find teaching work is to walk through the districts and physically go to the schools, flash my white skin and drop off resumes.   I’m really hoping that it doesn’t come to that.

So I will follow up on the site next week in regards to the job search situation!  Vietnam is cheap but my money will not last forever…

Istanbul, Work and Home

We live in Beşiktaş, Istanbul, a quiet but central neighborhood near the Bosphorus strait; my job however is located in what feels like the other side of Turkey. It’s an area called Avcılar (pronounced Avjilar), and while it’s technically around the midpoint of the European side of Istanbul, it’s none the less a long trip. Every day it takes four buses, 6 Turkish Lira, and about two hours for me to make the round trip commute, which is why I’m really not very happy about showing up today and being told that the boss forgot to tell me he’s on holiday! Now I get to hop back on the bus and spend another hour playing Lemon-aid Tycoon on my cellphone. *sigh*  At this rate, you’d better watch out Jen, my lemon-aid empire is set to de-throne you as our resident lemon-aid tycoon!

I’m working an insanely demanding job, with a long commute spread across many buses and trains, which take me a 10-hour stint of intense concentration.  Unfortunately, I’m still on our travel budget, which is still hobbling along after Japan.  So what sees me through the day?

Starts with a 900 KRW ($.75) can of coffee.  I like this brand because it’s not packed with sugar, which usually just leads to a sugar crash midday, always an awful experience at this job.  Also, I ate some instant ramen: 600 KRW ($.50). Total: 1500 KRW ($1.25)

Then lunch…

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Big surprise: I’m not teaching English.  Hordes of screaming children would have overrun me and my feeble attempts to order them around or herd them with my crutches.  So I had to find a new job that didn’t involve jeopardizing my knee.

A couple weeks ago, a strange opportunity popped up in the classifieds section: an editing job helping rewrite translated text for an MMORPG (like World of Warcraft) being imported to the US from Korea.  Flexing my nerd muscles, I threw together a creative cover letter that landed me an interview.  I got the job on Monday and started Monday evening. 

One of my first tasks was learning the game, so I spent some time playing the Korean version alongside my new boss.  Much less exciting than it sounds – it really just amounted to a lot, “oh what’s this say?” “where should we go now?” “what is that we’re buying?”  But it’s definitely a gaming environment.  On my first day, my officemates challenged me to a Starcraft match over lunch to see who would go buy ice-cream (unfortunately, we had a deadline, so I had to postpone the inevitable ass-kicking that would ensue).  Also, when I left the office on Friday at 7pm, 2 guys were questing together on another MMORPG.  It felt like a caricature of a Korea, in office format.  It should make for an interesting 7 weeks…

Let’s not confuse ourselves.  I would change the soiled underwear of every kindergartner at Brian’s and Rob’s school if it would give me my knee back.  If anything would undo the financial damage, physical pain, and the instability my knee will have for the rest of my life, I would do it.  This job is a small luxury amidst disaster, maybe like winning a poker game during a shipwreck.

And actually, one unacknowledged tragedy of my knee dislocation is that I don’t get to teach alongside Brian and Rob.  I mean, I’m not shedding tears here, given Brian’s horror stories, BUT if there was anyone among us who had a prayer of enjoying that job, it was me.  I LOVE kids, and anyone who has seen me around them would quickly conclude I simply never grew up.  I love to play with them, I love making them laugh, and when they don’t listen, I can just pick 2 or 3 of them up and relocate them, which usually gets all the children’s attention.  Unfortunately, I never even got to try.  So instead of playing roller coaster with kindergarteners, I’m leveling my Korean character…

Note: If you’re in Seoul and have a free bed or couch, let me know.  One of these days, the wrath of Rob or Brian might just spill over…

I have officially ended my employment at the penal colony. I mean,
Queequeg coffee house. Given time to reflect on my experience though,
I’m not sure that it’s entirely fair to draw the comparison I did
yesterday. Queequeg is an elaborate bureaucratic machine
created for the sole purpose of etching abitrary statutes into your
bleeding flesh— true— but, you’re certainly not the only person choking
down cotton felt.

My coworkers at Queequeg have made the experience human and
memorable. I was lucky enough to work with a diverse and generous group
of people, who surprised me constantly with their talent and warmth.

Thanks for the experience and I hope that this project honors it.

I like to think of Queequeg as a peculiar apparatus that was cleverly designed to seek out and shred every trace of dignity a man can hide. The aparatus has three parts: The Till, The Office, and The Crucible.

The Till, or register, requires me to swallow an endless series of minor humiliations from a firehose of zealous
customers. They will not hesitate to degrade me over a nickel or dime overcharge, and would rather etch the mistake into my forehead than acknowledge my humanity. To them, guilt is beyond any doubt.

The Office— the supposed refuge from our customers teems with the rotten-sweet smell of bananas, stale coffees, and syrups. My addiction to caffeine is well-nourished, while my soul starves slowly and quietly.

The Crucible is the bar, which isn’t, as you might think, fueled by coffee, but rather fear and frustration. The apparatus feeds an endless stream of unmade drinks at me, with cryptic and constantly changing recipes. The transparency of my surrounding allows customers to get a truly pure look at my suffering.

The aparatus was carefully designed and maintained faithfully by the culture it has created. For the first six
hours I feel nothing but pain, but after a short reprieve, I can finally purse my lips in concentration and understand— at last— its meaning.

Would you like a sample of my dignity?