My Lil’ Saigon

No writing today, but I have made some serious updates to my flickr account.

Flicker Update

I now notice how few pictures I took. Many of the ones I just put up were taken by my friend. I’d rather have my friends and family come and experience Vietnam.

Maybe…. next year.

After a long hiatus from anything blog related…..

I’ll now write a short story of intrigue and blah blah blah.

Motto of the Epic Tale: “We do stupid things”

Seemingly everywhere I went while my friend was here, something stupid was done. On my birthday, we probably shouldn’t have had that late night bottle of rhum. At Jungle Beach, it is possible we shouldn’t have volunteered to wake up at 3:30am to carry camera equipment up a mountain (small mountain at least). In Hoi An we shouldn’t have been trusting of our hotel manager when he told us the place down the road was excellent quality for cheap prices (tailor). When we were driving motorbikes, we shouldn’t have let the mechanics continue to take apart the bike when we both were almost positive nothing good could come out of what he was doing. Also, we should have backtracked rather than kept going forward to find the highway (which happened to be… right next to where we would have been if we had backtracked.)

Anyway. That is just a sampler.

My friend Luke found a great many things in Vietnam to be interesting, and I’m pleased to say he fared much better than most White folk. He actually ate real Vietnamese food without complaining about taste, cleanliness, or other. Except for the heat, and incredible pollution of HCM, I’m pretty sure he enjoyed the change of pace from Northern Wisconsin. Besides the first few days of getting used to the bargaining you have to do in the markets, I think everything went well, he did managed to buy 2 pairs of sunglasses, virtually the same, the second pair being 75% cheaper than the first. Nice work.

The overall trip did not go as planned. We spent more days than we should have in the city.

First 5 days: In HCMC, including my birthday.
Then off to Jungle beach for 3 days, 2 nights. I’ll get into that some more in the next posting.
After that: off to Hoi An for 1 night (over night trainride to get there, so we got there really early in the morning).
Back to HCM for 3 days.
2 days of “day trips” which were minimum of 12 hours, most of which was driving from place to place (some of which was sitting at a mechanics place watching them hack away at the bike for no good reason).
Then back to HCM for the last 4 days.

All in all, it was good. I really enjoyed being away from the school atmosphere, it made me miss working in the “real world”. Also I’m pretty sure I’ve contracted an unhealthy desire to own more motorbikes than I can possibly drive. Luckily I don’t have the money to follow through with that….