Hello from Ho Chi Minh!

We arrived here in Saigon really late last night! When we stepped out of the airport, we were quite taken aback. We walked out into a roped off area and on all sides was a HUGE mass of people. The weird thing was that they were all standing/sitting quite quietly. We walked to the other side of the courtyard/roped off area and all they all silently watched us. It was a little disconcerting. We tried to ask the taxi driver if some royalty was coming on the plane or something but either he didn't speak English or he was otherwise occupied trying to dodge the hoards of Motorbikes that take over the roads. We asked the guy at our hotel and he said it was just everyone waiting for their families because it is the biggest holiday of the year, Tet. Unfortunately we got here to late to see all the cool dancing in the streets and such but there are still lots of decorations up!

Anyway, we got in the taxi and immediately Jason and I gave each other a "look" because our seatbelts were missing. Great. Off we went. Here in Vietnam, the drivers use their horns as warnings. Warnings that they are about to run a red light, warnings that they are about to hit you so move, or warnings that they are about to cut you off. You know, normal stuff like that. There was only one stop light that our taxi driver actually stopped at and then it was only a bit of a pause before he was off again, swerving between mopeds, honking as he swerved into the other lane around a bus. I grabbed my arm rest more than once. We finally made it to our hotel.
Here is the view from our window:

The tall orange building is a hotel. Our hotel looks the same way, as many hotels around here do. I guess it is because they have to pay taxes according to how much street front they take up. Our hotel is the An An Hotel and we are quite pleased with it! We got a luxury room since we figured $32 ain't too much to ask for such a nice a clean establishment. We think we might be changing to a different hotel soon. Not because we don't like ours but because we can get a better room than the one we had in Gaum for $10. Yes, that's right.
There are plenty of places to eat here. Even for us vegetarians! Down the alley next to our hotel is a nice restaurant called the Asian Kitchen. We ate there for breakfast. I got the vegetarian mixed noodles. When they brought it out, I was dissapointed because it had tons of meat in it! I told them I asked for vegetarian and they said it was. I looked closer and sure enough, the meat had the decided look of gluten. It was an excellent meal. Here I am holding up some real looking gluten:

Jason got the vegetable curry. We ate all of that for less than $4. And man, was I full afterward. In fact, we were so full that we didn't eat lunch.
After that, we took a cyclo ride. Cyclos are backwards tricycles where you sit in the front and the driver pedals from the back. Here is me with my driver, Phom:

When we started, we had agreed on 15,000 dong per hour for Jason and I each. That is about $1/hour. Not bad eh? So, first they took us to the War Museum. Wow. What a depressing place. It was horrible seeing the pictures of what agent orange did to people. There was much to see there but most of it was depressing, as war is, so I won't go into detail.
We rode around the city for awhile and let me tell you, we are definitely traveling. Everything is so different. But we really love it here! There are children walking around laughing and babies are riding on mopeds with their parents and cyclos are haggling you and the conical hats are everywhere and people are playing cards in alleyways and people are vending books and mopeds swerving around you and it is all glorious choas that neither Jason or I mind at all.
Our next stop on the cyclos was the zoo. It was less than a dollar for an entrance fee. When was the last time you can remember it being that cheap? In this zoo, there were no signs saying "don't feed the animals". Apparently these are a very important signs as the bottom of the monkey cage was littered with snackfood wrappers that people had thrown in for the monkeys to dine on. In fact, they even sell sugar cane for you to feed to the elephants. One elephant was so tired of eating sugar cane all the time that when the people reached out to feed him the sugar cane he just grabbed it with his trunk and then dropped it into the moat.

Next we visited a pagoda. There were tons of worshippers inside waving insence about and bowing in front of idols. We felt a little like we were intruding. The pagoda was very beautiful. It had bright reds and yellows and deep blacks. The idols that the worshippers were bowing down to were different "heros"(as our driver told us). You offer insence to one if you want to have kids. You offer insence to another if you want to have a successful business.

We decided three hours was long enough to pay the guys so we had them drop us off at a large market. That is when they told us that they charge 50,000 dong per hour per person not 15,000. We said "but I thought you said 15,000!" He said "yes right, 50,000!" Oh boy. Well, we paid up but learned our lesson that we should follow our guidebooks adivce and have the price written down as we prearranged it.

After coming home from grocery shopping, Jason realized he didn't have his ATM card anymore. He hadn't used it since early this morning. It was then about 6:30 at night. We rushed back to the ATM we used because we thought that maybe it got sucked back into the machine like it does sometimes. Then we realized that we didn't know where the ATM was that we had used. It was the first thing we did this morning when we still had no idea what roads we were wondering down and we couldn't find the darn thing even though we tried to retrace our steps. We found the reciept and had people call the bank to ask it's location. Everyone kept trying to send us to the wrong bank. Finally, someone got it right and we found our ATM on a road that we had canvassed many times but hadn't walked quite far enough on. We asked a guard that was standing there what we should do since we left our ATM card in the machine. He said, "oh yes" and reaches into this wallet to pull out our ATM card!!!! Oh thank you Jesus! Of course, we still don't know if he used its credit card abilities during the day or not. We are optimistic that he didn't.

We had a wonderful dinner at a vegetarian restaurant called Zen. We ate smoothies, apitizers, entree's and a big bottle of water and it still only cost us just about $4. We like this place.

Here is another picture of me in a cute store with lots of tempting things to buy.

I will try to convince Jason to let me put more pictures of him in here. Of course it would help if I took some good ones. Every one should come to Vietnam.