Mui Ne: Day 1

Mui Ne: Day 1

On Thursday morning I awoke at 6:15 in order to pack my bag and grab some bread with egg and an iced coffee before boarding the bus at 7:30. I read my awesome book and listened to my music for most of the trip. We stopped twice—once at 9:45 for a short bathroom/snack stop and then once again at 11:00 to eat the lunches they packed us. They came complete with a bottle of water, banana, hard-boiled egg, piece of angel food cake, and a hamburger. We were back on the bus by 12:00 and I slept until we reached our hotel , Bien Dong, at 1:30 pm. DiDi, Jill, and I moved into room 422, which was on one side of a small, thatched-roof bungalow which was a couple hundred feet from the ocean. The downside was that our hotel was very far from downtown and anything else. Everybody else complained but I was happy to be near the beach and to be relaxing, reading my book.

Only 15 minutes after being let off the bus, I was in my bathing suit and on the beach. I took my camera and walked far down one way, back to where everybody else was swimming and building a Buddha out of sand, and then walked all the way to the other side. I got some really cool shells and pictures. The beach was really dirty and full of trash, however, which really made me wish I could just go back to the states and skip the “study trip.”

I returned to my bungalow at 3:45 pm and wrote a journal entry and then read my book while lying next to DiDi on our tiled front porch. I then took a shower and a short nap before going to dinner st our hotel’s main pavilion. I sat with the professor, Donna, Bryan, DiDi, Viet, Graham, and Natalie, and we had fish soup, greens and beef, rice, tomatoes, cucumbers, and Vietnamese iced tea. We then played sardines and tried to find Cathy and Tony but it was pretty creepy around there at night. We all got ready to go out and then met in the pavilion at 9:00 and got a taxi all the way into town, which was about a 15-20 minute ride. I hung out at this beach-side bar called Wax Club (like surfing wax) and had a Coke, an iced coffee, and lots of free peanuts. I played pool with Mike (and we lost miserably) and then had an awesome moonlit dance party on the beach with Monica and DiDi. I also met this older Vietnamese guy, Trang, who lived in California for many years and now runs a winds/kitesurfing lesson and rental place there on the beach. He was accompanied by his little friend Preston who was from St. Petersburg, FL and they offered to teach me how to windsurf but I didn’t have $200 to drop for the next day’s rental and lessons. at 11:30 Tang sat down with Meggie and me and corrected our Vietnamese until I left for a 30 minute xe om ride back to our hotel with Jackie. I washed up and was asleep by 1:00 am.