Da Lat: Day 3

On Monday morning I woke up at 7:15, threw on some clothes, and went down to the hotel's breakfast place. I ordered the scrambled eggs and bread with hot coffee and milk. I ate at a table with Jill, DiDi, and Oliver and we had a good time before finishing the meal and returning to my room at 8:00. Jill rebraided my hair as I watched an old episode of the "Friends."

Our group met in the lobby of the hotel at 8:30, boarded the bus, and arrived at an old Vietnamese king's summer palace after only 20 minutes. It was all French architecture and old furniture since this Nguyen guy (see first picture) began his reign in 1925 and was overthrown by Uncle Ho and his force of fellow Commies in the mid-1950's.

The house was nice and big and we all wandered around with denim booties to cover our dirty shoes. These allowed me to slide all over the wooden and tiled floors of the palace, which was fun. At one point I got DiDi to open a closet in one of the bedrooms and Tony popped out and startled her. I also sat in the king's hammock when our tour guide moved onto another room and wasn't watching. :) We spent an hour inside the palace and then went outside to the front lawn. There we found ponies and their mothers and we pet them for a bit before heading back to the bus.

Another ten minute bus ride brought us to these two Buddhist pagodas. This gave way to a one hour stint of photography and climbing about seven flights of stairs to get to the top of the taller pagoda. There was also a life-sized dragon that was made out of beer bottles. We all got back onto the bus at 11:00, drove for five minutes, and got off the bus to find that we were going to traverse the "secret streets" of Da Lat for an hour. I wasn't feeling that well (maybe because the weather and therefore the temperature was changing every ten minutes). We walked through some small neighborhoods, visited an old train station that the French built quite a while ago, and finally walked back into town.

We ate lunch at the same restaurant at which we had dinner our first night in town. Lunch was lamb, crunchy sesame chips, curried potatoes and tofu, veggies, noodles, and bread and ended at about 1:30. At this time Jill and I grabbed our backpacks off the bus and headed directly across the street to this outside internet cafe. I ordered a hot coffee with milk, answered emails and wrote in my journal. I posted two blog entries and then walked back to the hotel at 4:00 pm.

DiDi, Jill, and Brittany were chilling in my room and we braided hair, listened to music, and talked until 6:00, when we set out to find dinner in the center of town. Jill set off to the internet cafe and I found some my xao bo with DiDi and Brittany at this little roadside place. We paid and went across the street to get some trung vic lon (fetal duck in egg) which was delicious as usual. I was also able to introduce it to Brittany. Then Sarah called and she joined us. She was entertaining and screamed when she caught her fetal duck "looking at her." We finished eating, paid, and sat there talking for more than an hour.

Since that egg place was on the side of this big run of stairs in the center of town, we exited onto the stairs and saw something funny happen. A police car drove by and caused plastic chairs, stoves, and baskets to go flying. The unlicensed street vendors moved out of the area and then went right back to what they were doing when the cop car was no longer in sight. The four of us then sat and had the four different types of snails and befriended a nearby elderly woman who was crushing and then gumming some of the intoxicant beetle nut. After a bit I left to go see if Jill was still at the internet cafe down the road. I arrived at the cafe and saw my professor and his wife Donna, who invited me to sit with them. They said Jill had already left and I ordered an iced coffee with condensed milk and we discussed the upcoming weather and I had the opportunity to fully explain my recent church debacle. I was then approached by my waiter from the previous night and he wanted to speak in Vietnamese and we did just that for a bit before I had to continue speaking to my professor and Donna. They even paid for my coffee and I left to walk back to the hotel at almost 9:00 pm.

I arrived back at the hotel and watched two episodes of the tv show "Friends" on my bed with DiDi, Jill, Brittany, and Sarah. We watched the episode where Ross tries to write down all 50 states in six minutes and after the episode ended I tried it with Brittany and Sarah. I only wrote down 38 states after six minutes and then we tried to remember the other states, which ended up taking us to Meggie and Brittany's room to find a map at 11:00. Meggie realized that we had forgotten Kansas and we kicked ourselves and then watched one more episode before I got a bit lost in the hotel on the way back to my room. I got back at 12:30 am and found DiDi lying diagonally across our bed. I moved my stuff to the larger triangle of free bed space and after a bit she woke up, asked me what I was doing changing sides of the bed, hit me in the face, and went back to bed. I laughed and fell asleep by 1:00 am.