48) Vietnam

Chip and I are on a short Vietnam trip. We are basically just taking a 4 day tour of the Mekong Delta. We spent our first night in Saigon- we stayed in a room for $5 a night (that was for both of us). In the downstairs when you walk into the house the family was carrying on as usual- as if strangers were not walking through to get to their upstairs rooms. When we left early the next morning two of the people who lived there were sleeping downstairs- one on the floor and one on the couch.

Last night and today we had the day to ourselves, so last night we wandered around the town a bit. The first of the notable events of that night was when a group of nine boys spotted us on the street. They were 12 years old. They were asking us questions and wanted to slap our hands and things of that nature. Then one of them asked us if we could "hip hop"- they wanted us to do some brake dancing. We asked them to show us and one of the kids showed us in the street (mind you this is a pretty busy street, and we are standing on the median, so heavy traffic is flowing on both sides, and this is at night). Then Chip decides to join in and does a hand-stand in the street. This urged one of the boys to try again. He does the handstand then tries to do some sort of move on just one hand- that is when he fell on his head! We all started to crack up laughing- and so did the boy who fell on his head in the street.

After that we figured out we were a pretty big hit in this area of town. People were giving us some pretty good looks while we walked along side the road. A little later we spotted some sort of mall and decided to go in. Once in the mall we really felt like celebrities. Teenage girls would follow us around giggling, both men and woman would give us full body check-outs, and girls our age would stop and pretend to look at stuff in order to keep the distance between us very short. A saw a mom pointing us out to her children as we were on the escalator. The best part about the mall was when we stopped to check out some cameras. First a couple people followed us into the electronics area to see what we would look at. Then when Chip started to do long devision to figure out the conversion and the price of a camera the crowd started to form. By the time Chip figure out the camera was not a good price a crowd of about 20 people had gathered around us. We both walked away from that scene with big smiles on our faces.

Today we took a trip up one of the rivers to a floating market. There are a lot of people offering all sorts of tours to the market- but they seemed extremely over priced. So Chip and I went down to the riverside to check things out for ourselves. After about one minute we found an old lady who was willing to take us both to the market and back for $4. The market is pretty cool because people pull up to your boat in a boat and offer you whatever their specialty is- drinks, fruit, etc. After we turned down some pineapple the old lady who was driving us around bought it for us anyway! Then later she bought us some fresh watermelon! She was very sweet, and showed us pictures of her friends and family along the way too. After the market she offered to take us down a side river- and having nothing better to do we accepted her offer. It was a pretty cool trip. Giant Sago Palms grew on the rivers edge, people were fishing, and we just got to see a very interesting side of the country that I have wanted to see.

I cannot put any pictures on just yet, but once I get back to Cambodia in a couple of days I may be able to start posting pics again.