Travel Day!

This fine Saturday began early, at 5:30 am. I woke up to Jill's alarm clock (set a few mintues before mine), hopped out of bed, and coaxed Jill out too. Throwing on a swaetshirt and grabbing my camera, I walked a few paces to the beach and met Tica, Monica, Brittany, and Mike. I took pictures as we walked down the beach and the sun rose over the water, since it was the Pacific Ocean. I even saw these three Vietnamese guys fishing and dragging their nets out of the water by running and dragging it together. I talked to the older guy for a bit and then continued my walk to this outcropping of rocks. I set to work finding shells and after a while everyone left except for Mike, who went to climb this big hill in the distance. Instead of climbing the hill I stuck around and searched for cowry shells in this shell graveyard that I found and then I sat on this grassy knoll above the ocean and rising tide. Mike and I headed back to our hotel at 8:00 am.

I went back to my bungalow, got dressed, and headed to breakfast at the hotel's pavillion. Sitting with the professor, Donna, Viet, and DiDi, I ate my usual iced coffee and bread with egg. AT 8:45 I stopped eating and reading and went to pack and talk with Jill in the room. We left the hotel at 10:30, stopped once for lunch at 12:45 where they had monkeys and I shook their hands, and I had a Pepsi (!) with fried rice and chicken. We got back on the bus and I continued listen to all of my James Taylor songs and to read my book until our bus grazed a taxi and then arrived at my new guest house which is in the same complex as VLS (Vietnamese Language Studies, where my language courses began way back when). The old one I stayed in Sai Gon that I stayed in during September has been declared unstable and unsafe because a nearby building collapsed and sirupted the underground water table or something. Sad beans. I got to my room in the new guest house and Jill and I attempted to put away some of our larger bags, since DiDi lives with us too and the room's not that large. I then spent from 5-6:30 at the open-air internet cafe a few houses down in our alley. I was able to post four blog entries and answer mad emails, which made me feel awesome.

At 6:30 I walked with Mike and Jill to this good restaurant (but serves weird meat) we frequented in September. It took half an hour to walk there and we arrived to find an empty lot where it used to be. That's Viet Nam for you-it changes so fast. Hardly anything will be the same when I come back in a couple years. So we called our friends and met Bryan, Leah, Jackie, and Sarah at some random bank and then walked to this awesome brewery/restaurant I had been to before. i had a Coke an an awesome plate of my xao bo and by 8:30 we had paid and left.

Bryan and I walked to the old guest house and grabbed some bikes to use for a couple days. We saw Rylan, who heads up the CET program in which we are now currently enrolled, and spoke to him for a bit before walking my bike to get its horribly flat tires filled with air. Bryan and I spotted Viet, our Sai Gon tour guide, and then spoke to him and his little son for a bit before I rode back to my guest house. Jill and I left on a xe om to this rooftop bar in the backpacker's district of the city. There I had a Coke and spoke to Co Trinh (one of my favorite Vietnamese teachers), DiDi, Jill, Sarah, and Charlie Moffat (Hoabrt alum) and then Sarah, Jill, and I had an awesome conversation about Mormons and other organized religion. Everyone else headed down the street to go dancing and I took a xe om back to my room at 12:15 am. I washed up, wrote in my journal, and read until I fell asleep around 1:00.