I arrived in Vietnam 2 weeks ago. So far I’ve been spending most of my time working, and trying to find a rhythm, that would leave me with enough time to enjoy being here. I haven’t yet reached a balance but still working on it.
The main problem comes from my job shared hours. I’m working remotely, for an US company (based in San Francisco), and I’m part of a SCRUM team which is mostly in european timezone. That means, I’m respectively, 14 hours and 5 hours ahead of them. To be able to work remotely, SCRUM teams have some shared hours when all team members need to be online, so we can do our stand up meeting, and then get some things done together. There are usually 3 shared hours a day, and then I still have to put in at least 5 more hours, that I can arrange during the day as I please.
Fitting those 5 hours is quite easy, some in the morning, more in the afternoon, or I can also plan to work through the afternoon. This freedom in arranging these hours is quite nice.
However my shared hours are set between 9 PM and midnight. So I’m working every evening, which leaves little time to go out during those times. Luckily, people tend to eat quite early here so we can easily go out for dinner and be back on time to start working again. It’s definitely not ideal as a couple though, as I can’t spend my evenings with my other half.
Anyway, this is only supposed to be for a few months, until my VISA (H1B) for the US is ready.
In the mean time, I’ve been looking to get some vietnamese language lessons, and I just a missed a new session which started the day after I landed. That’s a shame, the next session is in November, which is quite far away. I found some other classes but heard mixed feedbacks about it.
Yesterday I started a yoga class too, from what I understood the teacher is at the terminal stage for a cancer, so she started yoga 14 years ago, and she’s fighting it back. This class is definitely not for foreigners, it takes place in a tiny room in a back alley somewhere in Hanoi. There’s no air conditioning that westerners would probably expect when doing indoor exercise, just a couple of ceiling fans, turning slowly.
The place was full of vietnamese women from all ages, even a very young kid, who was probably with his mother, we were 2 guys, and I was of course the only foreigner. It was quite an experience. Having been avoiding any kind of exercise for the last .. 15 years or so, and sitting down behind a computer all day, I knew I was definitely not in shape, and especially when it comes to stretching, or sitting in that lotus position. One of the exercise was about sitting cross legged and then leaning forward until the head touched the ground in front of you. No need to say I didn’t go very far down on that one ! I was told I’ll get better at it, so we’ll see about that ^^
In the evening, after a delicious korean diner, we went to a bar that had a special salsa night, where we met one of Nhung’s friends. The dancing level was quite high, but after a couple of mojitos, I took Nhung out on the dance floor! As I expected, most people were looking at “the foreigner” but I think I did ok ! Our salsa classes in Amsterdam ended at the end of July, and I have to admit we didn’t practice since, so I was a bit rusty, trying to remember some moves. I remembered most of them, so I wasn’t completely lost. Anyway, we are going to try to pick up some salsa classes here also, and maybe also some bachata classes which seems to be very popular here. For each salsa song played, there were 2 bachata songs.
I think Nhung wants to go dancing salsa again tonight, we’ll see how that goes.
That’s it for now, cheers!
Anthony