Sunday, September 21, 2008

We got paid last week!

I was surprised when the school called us to go to the office to get our Sept salary! I didn't know I would even get paid here. Even though it wasn't much compared to my old salary (I think I used to make twice as much in one day what I am getting here for one month), my teammates told me it's 50% more than what they were getting last year. We were all very happy! I was low on cash and was thinking I would have to take the bus downtown to get money at an ATM. I won't need to do that now, hopefully for a while. Yeah, we can go shopping at Metro (Costco equivalent here) now and get some blank CD's to use for our Listening class, and maybe some beef.
We waited in the school accounting office for about 20 minutes, and then it was our turn to see the office lady. She had us sign in two books, and then took a stack of bills out of the safe and put them in the counter. I walked away with a thick stack of 90 bills! I felt rich!
The office lady saw me for the first time and was wondering who I was, so my teammate told her I was new at the school, replacing the other teammate Adrianne who had gone back to the US. Her first question for me was, "Are you married?" The next was, "Do you have kids?" The third was, "Are they here with you?" And then, "How old are you?" All this in Vietnamese.
Then she said, "For a foreigner, your Vietnamese is pretty good!" Haha. I get this all the time, and I should just end the conversation there. I made the mistake of telling her I was actually not that foreign. Usually after people find this out, they have this expression on their face that says, "For a Vietnamese, your Vietnamese should be a lot better than this!"

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