The last week

It's been awhile since we last updated, but it's been a great week! After the last post we spent 4 great days in Dalat. After wrapping up there (we were both sad to leave) we took a 6 hour bus to Nha Trang. We only stayed 2 nights there, party because we couldn't get in the ocean, but mainly because we only have 30 days on our Visa and if we don’t pick up the pace we’ll be cutting it a tad to close for comfort. So, at 7 pm last night, we got on an overnight bus to Hoi An.

An overnight sleeper bus is a thing to behold. They are behemoths on wheels... easily towering over every other vehicle on the road. They fit so many people on that it's unreal… the beds are 2 high (bunks) and are barely wide/long enough for your average Vietnamese person, much less an American (even I was slightly squished). Your feet slip into a small narrowing cubby that slides underneath the person in front of you. This is probably hard to imagine, and I never got a good picture, but you are essentially trapped up to your knees, so extricating yourself from your ‘seat’ is a process of wiggling and fidgeting. The bus sleeps three across, so you are also right next to other people. Two things came to mind as we rocketed down crummy Vietnamese roads packed in that sardine can: 1.) My Mom would absolutly freak out if she ever got into this situation. In fact, there is absolutely no force on this earth that could possibly hold her on this bus once she walked in and saw how cramped it was. 2.) I kept flashing back to the Seinfeld episode where Kramer has a bunch of Asian people sleeping in his chest of drawers (Carl Farbman drawers, I believe?). Michelle and I were both on the top bunks, so the swaying of this massive vehicle did a pretty good job of keeping us awake for the 11 hour drive. We didn’t get sick though, so we’ll call the trip a success.

Anyway, Dalat was fantastic and is our favorite place so far, although that might change for Michelle soon. The cool weather was great, and the look and feel of the city was slightly European but distinctly Vietnamese. We toured some great waterfalls and other sites and basically just bummed around for a couple of days… just like you should on vacation. Our hotel had Discovery channel and we had the good fortune of being there during Asia’s yearly “Shark Week”, so that was cool. Nha Trang was also nice, although it was extremely touristy. We easily saw more westerners there than everywhere else combined (thus far) and consequently the street vendors and salesman were much more aggressive and annoying. We ate more good food, sat on the beach, and walked a few miles to an awesome Buddhist Monastery. Now we’re in Hoi An, which is covered with tailoring shops where you can buy custom fitted clothes at dirt cheap prices. For example, a handmade, custom fit silk dress runs somewhere in the $15-$20 range. As I write this, Michelle is scouring the Jcrew and Athropolgie websites trying to find a picture she can print and show the tailors. You can buy fitted suits as well, which I’ve been considering, but I probably won’t end up getting one.

We’ve had a lot of interaction with locals over the past week, most of which has been great, and a few things come to mind as being particularly interesting (at least to me). First, we were constantly being approached by people who tried their hardest to start up conversations. Sometimes the conversations were just friendly conversations, other times they very abruptly turned into sales pitches. Either way, if there is no where to be the conversations can be a lot of fun, mainly because the locals have a tendency to blurt out everything they know about the U.S.A. right then and there. We’ve had people tell us stories (which may or may not be true) about relatives in the U.S. We’ve had people start randomly naming off U.S. cities and landmarks (New York, California, Sea World) only to smile and walk away when they finished. We’ve had more than a handful of people say something like “Barack Obama, number 1!” or tell us about how much they love him. And among the salesmen, the fact that they once served with the South Vietnamese Army during the war seemed to be a great way to try to get us to buy things. As we move into north Vietnam (we are in the middle right now) Michelle and I are very interested to see if and how the sentiment towards us changes.

The most interesting thing that struck me during all of this was a simple passing comment our hilarious and eccentric tour guide made a few days ago. He was giving us a simplified, broken-English version of Vietnamese history and said “Vietnam was ruled by minorities (the Vietnamese) for many, many years. Then the French ruled for 100 years, then the Americans for 20 years, and now the Vietnamese again.” I found this particularly interesting, because you’d be hard pressed to find an American anywhere who would say that the United States ever actually ‘ruled’ Vietnam as the French or Vietnamese themselves ever did. Even staunch proponents of the war, people who initiated, designed and executed it like LBJ, Nixon, or Kissinger would never say that we ‘ruled’ it: we were there for a purpose and never intended to stay. But it doesn’t seem like people here necessarily view it that way. Regardless of our reasons why, from their viewpoint the Vietnamese were not in control of their land, and so we were viewed as their rulers. This is a decepitivly simple concept and a gross diconnect between how Americans want to be viewed and how they are actually viewed. And sadly, 30 years later, we still do a poor job at representing ourselves correctly, as our two current wars will attest.

Finally, this blog’s layout has been updated a bit, as I’ve added links to our pictures to the right hand side of this page. Each country will eventually have it’s own link and gallery. I will probably update those pictures more frequently than we update the actual blog, so check back occasionally.

That’s all for now.

P.S.- Obama won the Nobel Peace Prize? Seriously? Lol.