Moving to Can Tho

Hi Howie..

It looks like Hotels maybe the best move in Can tho..What you say always makes a lot of sense...you have the knowledge...
In Asia it's always good to be able to leave in 2 mins..

Freedom is Happiness and People can be a Nightmare...

Stay Happy and Free...Thanks again man.. Steve

Howie, all I can say is that you are soooooo yucky!! Why eat some poor creature that is meant to be man's best friend. Anyways, I think that I am going to have to have a long talk with you about that over beer.

Steve wrote:

Freedom is Happiness

You said it!  Nothing beats the ability to pack up and go, at a moment notice.  A lot of people had died for that freedom; and it's a shame if we take it for granted.  Over half of the Vietnamese population can't do that.  All you have to do is talk to them, and you will see how frustrating it is.

As for the hotels, a little secret:  In Vietnam, one does not get to own a hotel without being "somebody" or knowing "somebody."  As strangers, we need the supports of such people, at least until our feet are planted.  Disturbance?  I have been in Vietnam for over 5 years, and I travel the country extensively.  The only time that I was interupted was by a young Vietnamese-French woman, over a domestic issue.  But, as soon as I turned her over to the hotel staff, who were in much better shoes to intervene, I was back on my merry way again. 

MIA2013,

Yes, we do need to talk!  I can't believe you would turn away from Freedo, and let him get all cold and mushy...  And you call yourself an animal lover? 

Hi Howie..

Will try  over in a couple of days.
If you have time please give Hotel names
approx 200$ per month..just to start me off..

Cheers Mate....Stay Free and Happy....

Best I can find online rite now is Hotel Xoai
They offer a little discount and looks OK for now..

Have a Nice weekend man...

Steve,

As I had mentioned in my previous posts, I have never been to anything south of $300/mo. anywhere, in Vietnam.  The best that I can tell you is to look into the mini hotels on Nguyen Du, Ninh Kieu District.  That's the expat area, near the Old Market, city center and whatnot.  That is near the heart of Can Tho.  After that, you might want to look for something in South Can Tho or the 91B areas.  They are a little further out.  But, they are newly developed areas, thus more affordable.

Dude, too bad I am like half the world away, otherwise I would take you there and help you with the negotiation process. 

Hey, you might want to hit up cang_duc.  He is a member and lives in Can Tho.  I had coffee with him before, he is a very nice young man.

Best,
Howie

Hi Howie..

Thank you too much again.. when It come to knowledge your the Man..
You have enough to write a book a book about Can Tho..and I suspect other places to...I have a great respect for real Info..

You are too Kind Man .. Cheers..Best Wishes Always..

91B area seems good, my old company rents a 3 floors house there just less than 10 mil.

Many Thanks to you for your info..

Will try to keep in touch for when I come to Can tho
now in HCMC...Regards ....Steve

i'm also in hcm now

Hey Cang,

Good to see you on here again.  What are you doing in Saigon?  You are not going to that coffee shop again, are you?

Wild_1 wrote:

Hey Cang,

Good to see you on here again.  What are you doing in Saigon?  You are not going to that coffee shop again, are you?

yeah, i'm still here, but only reading people's posts
anyway, i just apply for a job in Sg, don't want to leave but have to......may go back to Can Tho later...........
and Quyen, she's living Can Tho right now, she moved to Can Tho, then i went to Saigon, that's funny haha

That is good though, Cang.  So, where are you living now, in Saigon?

Wishing you Good luck with finding the Job that you like...Steve

deleted to save me from further embarrassment

@cang, miss you down here.

Hi,

I've been living for the past 5 years in Chau Doc where I married a Vietnamese citizen. I now have a 4 yo son and I'm starting to think about which school he's going to attend.

I don't like HCMC and Hanoi, too chaotic for my taste. I'm looking for a school in the South of Vietnam and I found only two till now, Pacific College in Can Tho and GIS in Long Xuyen.

I'm looking for a school in which half of the classes ate taught in English and half in Vietnamese.

Does someone know if one of the before mentioned schools fulfills these requirements?

Any suggestions will be highly appreciated, I'm willing to relocate even to HCMC in case that the schools in other cities do not offer a good schooling.   

Thanks for helping,

Pietro

i think both schools are taught in vietnamese. Just more hours of english than normal school.
why don't you let him studying in a vietnamese school, and you can teach him english at home.

I'd avoid TPHCM, it is not only chaotic but quite polluted.  Even on an empty street the ubiquity of tobacco smoke in ambient air is so bad that one can be sick for a week after only two days walking around.  Cần Thơ is much more relaxed and you can get from place to place in less than the hour it takes for most any destination in HCM.

How have you liked living in Châu Đốc?  I confess I would find that distinctly challenging.

@cang_nduc

Thanks for answering.

The main reason I would like a mixed international school is that I don't speak Vietnamese. Teaching him English that is my third language after Italian and German could be tricky. I'm not referring toi grammar but to pronunciation, mine is a mix of British and American.

Better have some native speaker teach the language.

Pietro

i don't think those kind of schools there will focus much on the pronunciation.

I'll be in Can Tho sometime between mid-January and mid-February, with trips in and out to Nha Trang and Phu Quoc. Barring a few nights in Tam Vu, Hau Giang (out past Cai Tac) I'll probably be roaming around the Ninh Kieu. We used to stay at the old Navy Base but that went upscale. Now we just look for anything in the 22 dollar range.

I like the city museum as it includes exhibits on the Khmer and Chinese who preceded the Viets into the area. There also had some good charts on Mekong Delta watercraft types. The Confucian Temple / Chinese Assn Hall on the Ninh Kieu is also worth a few minutes look. They have a hand-out sheet in several languages on the history. A couple of blocks away was another Chiense Ass. Hall with what looked like a mosque in it, but it was closed on my last trip.

For me, Can Tho is the New Orleans of Vietnam.

Chris: Took the wife's sisters to Hanoi twice. They liked the people, water puppet show, Halong Bay, Sapa, Son Tay, etc, but had a difficult time understanding Hanoians (and vice versa). And they did NOT like Hanoi food. I like Hanoi and the Hanoi accent, and the food is interesting in it own way, but without Mekong Delta rice and the Southern entrepreneurial spirit, the North would be a far poorer place. For all its idiosyncracies Southern dialect is the language of Vietnam's primary movers and shakers.

The southern dialect is too variable to understand.  D-, gi-, and v- are all pronounced y-, R comes out G, and dấu hỏi and dấu ngã are the same.  And ừ sounds like swallowing a frog.

People on my street born 20 km apart sound as different as Hindi and Danish.  The Hanoi dialect is much more consistent, clear, and distinguishable.  I can halfway understand the news but people in the market, I'm not even sure it's Vietnamese sometimes.

I was studying diligently and then I just got discouraged, I need to get back to it.  I can read everything but the newspaper, I can write, I can speak and be understood by people who know me but even when I pronounce slowly and carefully to anyone else I get these wide eyed looks that I have to struggle to not react angrily to. 

Understanding is very hard, and often it turns out to be all words I know.  People will not slow down.  Xin nói lại châm hơn, no effect.  I admit, I'm frustrated, but I've met people who've lived here 16 years and don't speak a word and I don't want to be one of them.

The trouble learning the Northern dialect is that in the South many of them wont bother to listen once they know its the Northern dialect, and vice versa in the North.

ChrisFox wrote:

I'd avoid TPHCM, it is not only chaotic but quite polluted.  Even on an empty street the ubiquity of tobacco smoke in ambient air is so bad that one can be sick for a week after only two days walking around.  Cần Thơ is much more relaxed and you can get from place to place in less than the hour it takes for most any destination in HCM.

How have you liked living in Châu Đốc?  I confess I would find that distinctly challenging.

That's to you for using the accenting marks on local names instead of English-tizing them.  It'll help foreigners pronounce them correctly when asking locals "How do I get to Châu Đốc?". 

ChrisFox wrote:

The southern dialect is too variable to understand.  D-, gi-, and v- are all pronounced y-, R comes out G, and dấu hỏi and dấu ngã are the same.  And ừ sounds like swallowing a frog.

...

I began learning the "official Vietnamese" (what comes out from Hà Nội) when I was back in the States so I still have a hard time listening carefully to the southern dialect.  The main reason is it gets hard to decipher the vocal language back to written form (so I can translate via dictionary). 

When I hear a word that is unfamiliar to me, I try to spell it out so I can use the dictionary to translate.  For example, in the South, I hear someone say "zề"...can't find it in the dictionary.  I try "dề", no, that doesn't sound right.

Whereas when I hear someone with a northern accent say the same word, I hear "về"..I spell it out and look in the dictionary.  I get a hit.  It's easier to learn.

I am hopeless with the central accent however. 

Probably like any language, just need to hang around and get familiar with the local area that you're living in.

Just like how Americans would need to slow down and train our ears super hard when taking to a Brit or an Aussie.

colinoscapee wrote:

The trouble learning the Northern dialect is that in the South many of them wont bother to listen once they know its the Northern dialect, and vice versa in the North.

Maybe true about the prejudices.  But there's always been migration from North to South.  Reason: Weather and Jobs.  So I think the trouble is worth it to learn the Northern dialect.  If you can do it, learn them all.

Well the Central dialect is very hard

I've never run into being tuned out for sounding Bắc.   Not once.  I hear plenty of northern dialect down here and it's a lot easier to understand; if I hear "về" I know what I'm hearing and I don't miss the next six words trying to figure out if it was giâi, dây, or vê. 

And all the news and government stuff is in the Hanoi dialect so even if they don't speak it, they can understand it, and where the words are different people still know them.  It seems that it's more the north that looks down on the south, just as in the USA we tend to presume, often unfairly but not altogether inaccurately, that a rural southern accent means "uneducated racist."

I've seen bilingual blogs of northern and southern Vietnamese describing their hatred of each other, and it's remarkable how much pronunciation figures in that hatred.  Really, I want no part of that, an of course I can pronounce the southern dialect with a little effort (except the southern dấu nặng, I can't get that right to save my llfe), and like most people schooled in the Bắc but living Nam, I tend to hybridize (northern tones, southern consonants), but just as I grew up in the south and never picked up mushmouth or "y'all," I'm keeping my northern tones.

It annoys me that people don't try harder to understand me, like someone who says "what?" before he realizes he understood you just fine .. particularly since my own pronunciation can't be that different from the vast range of differences I hear on one block.  Not to mention *nobody* can understand rural people, to say nothing of the Huê dialect.

@Tran Hung Dao: spelling is really important to me and I ask all my friends to keep me in line and correct my mistakes.  I write Vietnamese on Windows, Mac, iOS, and Android and when I wipe out my Windows box with Linux I will do it there, too.

Wow, we both chose về  as our example!!

Living in Chau Doc is only possible if you have some interest that keeps you busy, in my case software and reading.
No expat community, there was a New Yorker who used to live here six months a year but he vanished. I'm now in contact with a Canadian Vietnamese born and a Singaporean.
But there is not o place where westerners meet, the average stay of the tourist is one night so only small talk with them.

We share two interests.  I did Windows for 25 years and had planned to retire but a year of idleness almost killed me so I taught myself iOS and now I write apps for social networks. 

There are westerners here but I know very few and live pretty far from the place most of them congregate.  I have on Australian friend and know a few others very distantly. 

I'd find living in rural VN unbearable.  It's just too grim.

Outside of the schools in Saigon, Pacific College is the best that south Vietnam has to offer.  But when it comes to these institutions, you must understand that their main purpose is to teach English and western cultures, not Vietnamese.  The Vietnamese schools are more than capable of providing that...

As for the Vietnamese language, there is no right or wrong accent.  If you want to get into government (politics), learn the north accent.  On the other hand, if you want to get into business or just be at peace with everyone, learn the southern accent.  Just like English, with the British and American accents, you will just have to pick your poison.

[Moderated: Inappropriate]

Nothing like generalising is there.

[Moderated: Off topic]

It is a pretty hard language.  I speak two other foreign languages and I've forgotten three others, including Cantonese, so VN isn't my first tonal language though it is a lot harder than Chinese.  the tones, I mean, I never even began learning to read and write Cantonese.  But the grammar is super easy, though some constructions are hard to understand... An toàn trên hết, "out of room to go higher in safety" for what we would say as "safety first."  In all other languages I've learned, the four basic sklls -- reading, writing, speaking, understanding -- all came at the same pace.  In Vietnamese, the understanding is way behind the other three, which is really odd. 

Cantonese tones took me six weeks, period, then suddenly I recognized their musical intervals (like G C E) and had no trouble ever again.  It took me a year to get the northern tones down pat and more than an additional year to hear them clearly.  They still don't jump out at me and the differences between people are really profound.

[Moderated: Off topic]

Anyone on either side of the native-language divide interested in working together?  You don't learn a language without constant practice and I'm not practicing enough.  People in  Cần Thơ meeting to practice, people farther writing back and forth to each other.  I'm in for both because I really don't retain vocabulary I haven't read and written. 

Twitter is good for frequent practice because of the brevity but I try to read the newspaper, which is far and away the most difficult Vietnamese for me.  I was translating web page from VietnamWorks but words for recruitment and salary negotiation aren't all that useful when I'm still lacking a lot of more basic ones.

A bunch of us meet a few nights a week at Trung Nguyên at Big C around 6PM, anyone interested in joining?  Answer here or if you'd prefer private, at caothien9@yahoo.com.vn.

@Wild_1

Had a look at Pacific class schedule and it seems balanced between English and Vietnamese.
May be you know how it compares to IPS (International Primary School) and AHS (Asian High School) in HCMC?

I was not able to grasp the Vietnamese language and so the communication with my son is very basic, all the remaining family with the obvious exception of my wife speaks only Vietnamese.

It's fine to me if the school is westerners biased.

Relocating to Can Tho, two quick questions:

1- best district for a child (i.e, parks, safety, low traffic and so on)
2- average cost of renting an unfurnished house of around 150 s.m. (Vietnamese prices as my wife is Vietnamese)

Seamad,

I am not too familiar with the 2 HCMC schools that you mentioned.  But, south Vietnam is my kind of place and, within it, Can Tho is my type of area.  Subsequently, Pacific would be THE school for my kid.

1)  Ninh Kieu is the best place to live in Can Tho.  It is the equivalent of District 1, save the traffic and pollution.  Cai Rang (south Can Tho) is moving up, but it is still a few years behind. 

2)  It will depend largely on your ability to negotiate.  But for that size, you can expect to pay from 6 to 10 million Dongs/month, in Ninh Kieu District.  Elsewhere, you will be looking at 1/2 to 3/4 of that.

Best of luck,
Howie