Vietnam

Can't believe that its March 24th already. Vietnam went by so quickly. The seas are really rocky right now. I just came from dinner and we had one good wave that caused drinks to hit the floor and people to drop their plates. But yeah, Vietnam was great.

The first day, I ended up being able to get on the city orientation tour with Kyle, Mike and Katie. As soon as we got off, there was a group of about 15 women dressed in traditional Vietnamese clothing holding a banner welcoming SAS to Ho Chi Min City. We all boarded the bus and our first stop was a Buddhist temple. On the way, I noticed that there was an abundance of scooters on the road. No real motorcycles, but for every car, there had to be at least 8 or 9 scooters on the road. The traffic was crazy here too. People would cut other people off left and right, but others didn’t seem to get pissed at this. Being in a bus was great though, no one tried to cut us off and we basically got to go whenever we wanted to.

The Buddhist temple was nothing special compared to the one in Singapore. I saw similar statues and people burning incense as an offering. After the temple, we had lunch at a very nice restaurant. Here, a coke cost 49000 dong, which is only about 2.50 American. I think the exact rate was 20,856 dong to the dollar, something ridiculous. We ended up eating some chicken soup, fish, rice, and shrimp. The food was very well prepared.

After lunch, we went to see a water puppet show across town. The stage was a pond of water at the foot of a building. In the building were people that would control the puppets. There were dragons, humans, geese, and what looked like a turtle, all of which did tricks on top of the water. For the finale, a dragon puppet spit fire from his mouth, which was pretty cool. The whole show only lasted around 10 minutes. After that, the people controlling the puppets came out from the back and bowed while we applauded.

After the show, we were taken to the former president’s palace, which was now the reunification palace. We were shown the various rooms where important representatives would meet as well as the bomb the shelter. After that, we were taken to Notre Dame church where we saw a service being held. It wasn’t really anything special, or anything I didn’t see before.

That night, Mike, Kyle and I decided we wanted to grab some Vietnamese food so we looked on wikitravel for a good place and we all decided to go to Allez Boo. As soon as we left the harbor, we were being bothered by people to get motorcycle rides. We ended up getting a taxi because we weren’t sure how safe the bikes would be. Once we pulled up to Allez Boo, the meter read 940, so we paid the driver 940000 dong. As soon as we all stepped out, the driver sped away and we realized that we almost paid 50 dollars for a taxi ride that less than 5 minutes long. We were pissed for the next few hours because it didn’t register with any of us how much we actually paid because the currency system was so inflated compared to the states.

At Allez Boo, I ended up getting steamed rice with crab meat, absolutely great. We all had a few drinks along with dinner and the total bill came to around $56, which was wasn’t exactly the kind of deal we had hoped to get. After Allez Boo, we walked for a few blocks and stumbled onto a place where the food was much cheaper. Here, the same dish was a fifth of the price compared to Allez Boo. We decided to sit down and have some french fries and garlic bread before we headed back to ship.

The next morning, Kyle and I got up early in order to get to the bus station for an early bus to My Tho, a city about 2 hours south of Saigon. The taxi ended taking us to a market, but still close to another bus station. We were sure that we paid him only $5 this time too. Once there we bought tickets from the station for 30000 dong each and got on our bus. We had to get off in order to transfer at another bus station. A few stops later, the whole bus seemed to tell us to get off for My Tho, like everyone knew where we wanted to go. I guess being American had its advantages some times. Once off, we were ushered onto a minibus where the man quickly demanded 500000 from both of us. This time, I knew that it was way too much, but Kyle said the he saw the man in front of us pay the same amount. I still didn’t think that $25 for a 2 hour ride was anywhere near reasonable, but Kyle had paid, so I did the same. The man walked right off the bus. After we discussed it, we tried to get our money when we realized that we made a big mistake. When Kyle stpped off the bus in order to make it clear to the man what we wanted, the driver started to pull away, so he had no choice but to get back on. Again, we got ripped off for around $20. These people were out to take advantage of any white person, and from then on, Kyle and I made sure not to do anything before we established a price.

Once we arrived in My Tho, we took separate bikes to a hotel in the middle of a small village. Here, we met Nikko, a man 36 years old who had moved from Finland to Vietnam around 10 months ago. He spoke English but it wasn’t the best. The price of the room at the hotel, which was $8, also included a free bike rental. So for the next four hours, Kyle and I biked around the village, going back into neighborhoods and seeing the Mekong Delta. At around 4, we decided to head back to the hotel, but we were a little lost. Luckily, Kyle had brought the business card of the hotel. We asked about ten people before we finally arrived back at the hotel.

After a nap, we wandered to the main part of the hotel and had elephant ear fish for dinner, which was a native fish to Mekong Delta. We stayed and talked with Nikko, the hotel owner, a lonely student about our age from Japan, and a younger couple from the UK that was staying at the hotel too. It was about 10 before we headed to bed. We woke up at around 9, said goodbye to everyone at the hotel, and got motorbikes back to the bus station. Our plan was to travel a further two hours south to Vihn Long, but because we got ripped off neither of us felt like dishing out more money to have the same thing potentially happen again. Once we got back to the ship, we got changed, ate, and then went to the war museum.

The war was refered to as the American War to the Vietnamese. After leaving the museum, I felt like a dick for what we did to these people. The pictures and accounts both Americans and Vietnamese people made me feel so terrible for America’s actions. After leaving, Kyle and I walked around and decided to eat on the ship and then go out to the night market. Mike had left for Cambodia earlier that day and wasn’t going to return until after on ship time, so it was just me and Kyle for the rest of the time. The night market was amazing. If you wanted something, they had it. Ffake DVDs, shirts, dress shirts, tailors, shoes, food, fake watches, backpacks, everything. I ended up getting a north face backpack for Abby for $6.25. Kyle told me that they normally go for around $100 back home, so I thought I made out pretty well. There were plenty of other deals like that, but because the bus back to the ship ended at 10:30, we left early.

The next day, Kyle and I spent all day wandering around the city. We weren’t really looking for anything specific, but just walking to take in the atmosphere. That night we hit the night market and had a good time bargaining with people, but we didn’t buy too many things. After getting back at 10:30, I decided to go out to a club called Lush. The club wasn’t anything out of the ordinary, but I refused to buy a beer for 75000 dong when I knew I could get one a block down on the street for 10000. We left at about midnight and went to Apocalypse Now, which was another night club. I was with Janie and her friend and we decided to walk because it wasn’t too far away. On the way, Janie almost had her back purse stolen right off her shoulder by a man on a scooter. The scooter had driven up onto the sidewalk and the next thing I knew, I heard Janie hit the ground. At first I thought she had been hit, but she was just holding onto her purse when the man had grabbed onto it. It turns out she got drgged for about 5 feet before the guy on the scooter let go. Thankfully, she only had a few scrapes and she didn’t lose anything. It was something that they warned us about, but something that I never expected to happen. Apparently, there were three or four other similar events that happened that night as well.

The next morning, Kyle and I decided to head to this local place spend the rest of our dong. We heard about it from one of the younger doctors on the UVA medical staff that had joined us in India. When we got there, the place was full of Vietnamese and everyone stared at us as we walked in. Before we sat down for a minute, the waiter brought as a bowl of moist peanuts and a 2-liter jug of beer. After a while, locals started coming up to us and trying to talk with us. They were all very friendly and just wanted to practice their English. A little later on, people started singing and dancing around the place, probably because they were drunk. at around 3, Kyle and I headed to the market where we tried to spend the rest of our dong that we didn’t spend earlier. I tried to get a fake rolex for 100000 dong, but no one would go that low, so I settled for a T-shirt instead. We got back on the bus at around 5:15 and got back on the ship at 5:30. Vietnam was a great time.