Good Morning Vietnam!

GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!

Carolina and I decided to spend a few extra dollars to fly out to Vietnam 4 days ahead of our class field trip, so that we could see a different city and the southern portion of Vietnam – Ho Chi Minh.  I was desperate to explore the ghostly mansions, tunnels and military bases of the past, and knew that Ho Chi Minh, known as Saigon to just about every local, was the place.

Ho Chi Minh is a city of about 7 million, with a motorbike population of over 5 million.  But when you are actually in the city – it feels like the population is 7 million, with 10 million bikes.  There are SO MANY motorbikes.  I know people had told me “Oh man- the motorbikes in Vietnam” but I thought it couldn’t be much different than in Bangkok.  I could not have been more wrong.  The country imposes a 200% import tax on all cars, in order to encourage everyone to purchase motorbikes – which reduce the amount of traffic jams (although I wonder what they do to the amount of accidents as we saw several in our short time here).

Delicious Fruit Shakes!

We wandered around zigzagging through motorbikes and traffic to find an amazing hostel with our own private room, air conditioning, bathroom, and TV.  Neither one of us have watched TV since we got to Bangkok six months ago – except when we were dazed and confused trying to interpret information during the time of the floods.  For $8 a night we got breakfast, a great air-conditioned room, amazing hospitality, and helpful information.  The bonus was that there was a fruit shake stand across the street from our hotel that made huge fruit smoothies – any combination you could imagine – for less than $1.  I had mango-strawberry, strawberry-mango, passion fruit-mango, orange-pineapple, sweet-sop-strawberry, and many more.  You may be wondering how we had so many different smoothies in only four days – in order to accomplish this daunting task of sampling as many combinations as possible, we set a minimum order of 2 shakes each per day.  They were delicious.