End OF HCMC/Hanoi

Hello faithful followers and not so faithful followers we love you both equally well not really we obviously love the faithful more. We have arrived in Hanoi, but I will get to that later...

Here is a little recap of the end of Ho Chi Minh City..

So after and entire day of not crossing the street we finally got up the courage to cross the street the next day... the trick is to just walk; the cars, millions of scooters, bikes ect.. will merelyjust go around you. Its simple, just COMPLETELY TERRIFIYING. It's so difficult to convey to an American who says, "crossing the street, come on chris how hard can it be." No one obeys any kind of order, they think that 6 inches of clearence is more than enough to pass by your foot. As children we are all taught to look both ways when crossing the street, but yesterday I saw a kid literally get a full running start and leap (as in both feet off the ground) into 4 lanes of incoming traffic, he proceded to dance across the remaining two, without looking or even flinching. He danced in bare feet and all on the oppsing side walk, by the way, his family was just watching this all occur on the other side of the street without missing a beat of the Pho they were cooking up using "borrowed" power.

Moving on..

We went on a tour yesterday which included the Cao Dai Temple: a temple where all different religions worship together and the Cu Chi tunnels(yes Evan like "coochie") which are extremely small and made me feel extremely clostrophobic.

Our tour started out on a small bus with 9 other young people all of whom were English or Austrailian, very vulgar but nice enough. The Cao Dai Temple was exteremly meditative with the chanting and singing monks , so meditative Natalie and I looked around and realized we were some of the last of about (100 tourists) in the temple, the rest left because it's just too damn humid in there. After, we pressed on for another 3 hours of horrifying car ride with our group spewing Aussie and British slang I could not understand. We reached the Cu Chi Tunnels which reminded me greatly of Normandy, to me at least. However being the only Americans in over a 50 mile radius I can see why I was the only one who found it disrespectful to cheer at the death of Americans and climb all over, smile and have pictures on an actual blown out tank (which young Americans died in). This goes with my belief on history though, the victor always writes history. The tunnels were a bit surreal, I felt just an ounce of what it would be like to be crawling though the jungle, the humdity and bugs in 3 hours were enough for me, let alone the live fire range that you could shoot, M16s, AK47, Carbines, ect.. for a price. I enjoyed the tunnels from a historical standpoint for sure.

Our ride home was fun listening to the Aussies and English say random things like... WARNING THIS IS NOT FROM ME THIS IS JUST A QUOTE...(**proper British accent) "you know when your having sex with a girl and you get sand on your dick, and she is like, 'AHH' and you say 'CAWWW'" not sure what that means but it was one of the funnier things I have ever heard and I just had to add it in here.

We left HCMC (Ho Chi Minh City) this morning, and were sad to see it go but I suppose that's going to happen a lot on this trip. We then got on an hour and 40 min flight to Hanoi on Vietnam Airlines. I found it to be a very nice airline that beats any short domestic flight I have taken on Alaska. We just arrived in our hotel, which is only costing 22 dollars a night included in the price is.. TV, king size bed, the computer I am writing this post on, A/C, hot water, hot pot and a fridge. Crazy how much you can get for so little. I think thats all I know, now i need to go convince the budget Queen we need some food. I am also pretty impressed if you read this entire post. Leave us commets!!

Sign fail of the day:

"Constuction in progress, please excuses for the inconvient cause."

hmmm...

Love,

Chris (author) & Nat (editor)