Nha Trang: Day 1

On Tuesday morning I woke up at 7:00, lay in bed for a while, and then got up and packed my bag. DiDi, Jill, and I went to breakfast in the hotel and I ate scrambled eggs, bread, and hot coffee with milk. I ate quickly in order to get back to the room and upload the previous day’s pictures and finish a journal entry.

By 8:30 we were all checked out of the hotel, on our bus, and on our way to Nha Trang. Becca forgot Tica’s cell phone in their bathroom and we parked our bus just outside the city limits and waited for a boy on a motorbike to bring it to us. We got it after 15 minutes and continued our travel on windy roads that we not meant for buses for an hour or so before stopping by the side of the road. We got out and Viet explained the coffee bean plants we were looking at. Another hour in the bus brought us to this snack/bathroom stop at a scenic overlook and I got out, took pictures, and then got back on the bus.

I listened to my new music until the bus stopped at a restaurant for lunch. They had a real crocodile living in front of the place and that was cool. I partook of the set menu of rice and egg, soup, French fries, pork, Coke, and then longons (this type of fruit) for dessert. We were back on the road before 1:00 pm and I listened to Advent chant until we pulled into the parking lot of the Cham ruins in Ninh Thuan. The Cham are a Vietnamese ethnic minority of which there are 200,000 people left in Viet Nam. They have darker skin and are closely related to the Aboriginal people of the south Pacific. We hiked up a few stairs to see this temple the Cham built in the 14th Century. They were very involved in trade and commerce by boat/sea and had been introduced to and then began to follow Hinduism. I got some great pictures and, come to think of it, this was my first visit to a Hindu temple! We were back on the road by 2:30 pm and I read my book and listened to more music.

We arrived at our hotel, the World Hotel The Gioi, in Nha Trang at 4:30 and DiDi, Jill, and I moved into room 105. We dropped off our stuff in the room, called a taxi to the hotel, and then I ran across the street with Jill to grab some candy. Returning to the hotel with our candy gifts, we were joined by Brittany, Cathy, Tica, and Monica. The six of us took a taxi to meet this woman, Thuyet, at her tailor shop. Jill’s family friends in Maine have adopted three Vietnamese children and we went to meet the woman who is their friend and she got into another taxi with us in order to visit the Nha Trang orphanage.

I had worked on keeping my expectations for the orphanage very low and expected an Oliver Twist-like situation. Therefore, I was pleasantly surprised when it was not so. The orphans live in “families” of about ten kids and one mother and it was all pretty clean. They played with their toys, sang songs for us, and asked me to take their picture. They loved the candy we brought too. I felt particularly drawn to the special needs kids and spent a lot of time interacting with this one little girl in a crib. I felt she needed some good ole’ human touch and spoke to her in Vietnamese even though she just smiled, made gurgling noises, and grabbed my hands. I asked her name, which was Uyen, and received her story as well. She was born premature and was not strong enough to walk, the mother figure told us. Even though she was six years old, she was about the size of a two year-old and was confined to her crib. I felt really bad because maybe if she was in the United States she could be receiving the necessary intensive physical therapy to strengthen her legs and could someday walk.

We saw about four different “families” and most of them wanted their pictures taken, especially two older, outspoken boys with Downs Syndrome. We saw the older boys all studying, and playing soccer as well as the piano. I was able to speak with then in Vietnamese and that was a lot of fun. I asked one little boy if he studied well and he said “kind of” which was accompanied by a big smile, of course.

I was a bit disappointed by the family friend, Thuyet, as she kept pointing out and labeling the “handicapped” children. Thankfully, she stopped this after a while because I just kept saying “khong sau” (don’t worry/doesn’t matter). At one point, she was asking a 12 year-old boy about his studies and he reported that he was in first grade. This was because he had just arrived at the orphanage and had just begun his studies. I saw him get very embarrassed when Tuyet told us about this in English and I looked him in the eye and told him not to worry about it.

We saw all the kids and then left in our taxi at 6:30, which put us back in our hotel room at 6:45. I took the time before dinner to upload pictures to my computer and write most of a journal entry. We all met in the hotel lobby at 7:30 pm and walked literally around the corner to get dinner. I sat with DiDi, Brittany, and Sarah and we had a set menu of fish, rice, beef with sesame seeds, greens, spring rolls, and Coke. The meal ended with dessert of pineapple and bananas and at 8:30 I went with Jill and DiDi to find some trung vit lon (fetal duck eggs). We found them right across the street and DiDi and I ate a couple while Jill watched in disgust.

We came back to our room at 9:00 and I got onto the internet, posted a blog entry, briefly talked to Andy (thank God), and then went out to the beach with a bunch of people. It reminded me of Savin Rock in West Haven. The tide was too high to sit on the sand and DiDi and I got bored and took a xe om to this bar/dance club right on the beach called The Sailing Club. We hung out, I had a Coke, and then we were joined by the rest of our group around midnight. Shortly after, I left on a xe om with Jackie and I was cleaned up and asleep by 12:30 am.