Goooood Morning Vietnam!

Goodbye third world cambodia, hello two-and-a-half world Vietnam. Great to be here. Now I can not only eat the food without being ripped off, but enjoy it too. breath of fresh air for us.

Saigon, which is actually called Ho Chi Minh City these days, is a lovely, busy, dirty rat trap full of motorbikes, noodles and people yelling at the tops of their lungs. It's fair to say that people who live in Saigon are a lot louder than most, probably because they have to yell to be heard over the constant symphony of car horns and engines. The people in Saigon are friendly enough, but all seem to look at kate and I with more distaste rather than interest, the opposite of Cambodia. Oh well, at least we are usually paying the same amount for a meal as the locals do.

The food around the city was varied and creative. Even a noodle soup came with a huge extra bowl of fascinating green leafy vegetables to use as garnish. The pork buns here are amazing, and have little eggs in them (pidgeon eggs? i dunno) in addition to the usual sausage-roll-esque dubious meat filling. Lastly, we found a lady making noodle-salad-in-a-bag, which was so savoury and crunchy it reminded me of burger ring chips. very very nice stuff. cheap too.

enough about food, im making myself hungry. did i mention that the beer here is the cheapest in the world? im not kidding. where else do you order beer by the litre? i could get about 2.5 litres worth for 20,000 dong (which is a bit under 2 bucks aussie). i found a cheaper version (4500 per litre), but the beer was served out of plastic petrol drums, by siphoning it into a small plastic container and serving it with a glass of ice. yeah, i only had one of those before moving onto greener pastures.

and yes, the currency over here is called the Dong. no end of entertainment for childish fools such as myself. Needless to say, it's a lot less risky to take your dong out at a bar here compared to Australia. However, pickpocketing is a problem over here, so the best advice i can give you is always keep one hand on your dong.

Enough of that. While in Saigon, we visited the War Remnants Museum, which was not bad at all. the outside area of the museum had real tanks, fighter planes, bombs and choppers from the war. amazing to see this equipment up close and see just how mean it looks. Inside the museum, they had heaps of photos from the war, weapons used by both sides, and some photos showing the birth defects caused by the chemical warfare that went on. shocking stuff, but kate and i found it felt more like an exhibition without much information. There wasnt much timelining or actual data on the war, so we couldnt relate very well to what we were seeing. Still worth a visit though.

We bought open bus tickets in Saigon so that we can hop on and off buses all the way up the coast. Great idea, and the company we bought them from told us we could take 5 us dollars off each ticket if we agreed to teach english for a day at a local free school for children. we did it, and we enjoyed it, so we did it again the next day. The kids were fun to converse with, and playing hangman with them at the end of class was a heap of fun. We were taken to and from the school on motorbike taxis, and wow, the traffic in the city is crazy. people dont usually stop for lights. in fact, they dont often stop at all. terrifying at first, and crossing the road means walking slowly into the traffic, making eye contact with the people on bikes rushing by you.

Anyway, saigon was some fun, but now we are off to Nha Trang, a beachside suburb known for it's beautiful beaches.

till then!
//Brendan