Yeah, hi there. This is the furthest I've ever blogged from home. I'm looking out the window of my hotel in Saigon and there's an incessant flow of motorcycles, bikes, cabs, women hawking DVDs and cigarettes and books and glasses and drugs and massages, and it's about 2.5 million degrees, celsius. It sounds horrible, but it isn't. When the sun goes down the vibe of the city changes and roadside tables appear by the thousands and cooks stand over their hotpots and cauldrons and chopping blocks and turn grime and chaos into grime and chaos plus fabulous food and fun and partying. So like a vampire I kind of bide my time during the day doing the "tourist thing" and wait for nightfall.
It's been fun here, although I'm ready to move on, which I'll be doing tomorrow morning as I head into the heart of the Mekong Delta to My Tho, Can Tho, Chau Doc, and finally onto Phenon Penh on Monday afternoon. I've been reading up and planning and strategizing about how to "do the mekong" but at the end of the day we have opted for an organized tour. We all want to be Magellan and discover the the undiscovered, but by doing a tour you kind of just eliminate the uncertainty, the headaches, and the hassle of always planning two steps ahead sans internet and phones. Now I can just sit back, get nice with my camera, and enjoy the ride.
Today we (myself, Kris and Jamil) went to the Chinatown and got lost for a little. It was dirty and crazy and to finally escaped the craziness we ducked into a little shop for lunch and I'm willing to venture that we were the first non-Vietnamese or Chinese to ever venture into this particular place. Probably the last as well. Ordering of course was comical, with us trying to order using the most efficient means possible...moo-ing like a cow for beef, sqwauking like a chicken for chicken, and we ended up getting a noodle dish with squid, tongue, and fishballs, so I'm not quite sure how that came to be, but I assure you we did not pantomime either of those three things. It was a great meal plus 2 beers each and it ran us about $4 each.
Anyway, I doubt there will be an internet cafe at any place we go to in the next few days so I just wanted to log one in before I go out looking for that crazy Admiral Kurtz. Or is he crazy? I'll find out tonight because we're hitting up a bar called Apocalypse Now. Oh and last night I celebrated Phillipene Independence Day...at a country bar, obviously. When we arrived we sat at the bar and they tried to get us to buy 5 bottles of Johnny Walker Black for about $200, which was weird and laughable. Nothing really makes much sense here, but after everything that's gone down in the last 50 or so years here, I'm not surprised.
That is all. Enjoy the weekend.
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