Vacation in Vietnam Continued

We're setting in the Ho Chi Minh City airport waiting for our plane back home and I'm trying to finish up our Vietnam trip. We're all ready to be home again but had a very nice holiday in Vietnam. The second day of our stay in Ho Chi Minh City we visited a water amusement park. It looked very small and dreary compared to our US comparisons but was similar to the streets of Vietnam, extremely crowded. It grossed me out to even think about getting in that water will all those little bladders swimming and floating around. The boys weren't bothered at all and enjoyed their time on the water slides. Mark got in long enough to show the boys he could still do a backward flip off the zip-line! The best part of the day for me was the interaction with the Vietnamese children. It felt like being back in Africa, I don't think most of these children had ever seen a 'white' person and especially one with curly hair. At one point Mark and I were inundated with small, school, children who wanted to try out all their English speaking skills on us. Each one had to say, "Hello, how are you? I am fine, thank you. What is your name? My name is ___." They loved playing games with us, I played eye-spy with them, asking them to find certain colors, objects...teaching them new items. They wanted to share their gum and small toys with us, ask us lots of questions and touch my hair!! When we left one of the little girls said, "Thanks teacher." This made my day!! We were quite the attraction at the park, one lady asked to take her picture with us and another shared her fruit and an interesting type of homemade candy that was a little like peanut brittle between rice paper.

The next day we took a tour of the Mekong River by boat. As part of the tour we went to several islands along the river. On one of the stops we watched as they made coconut taffy, another one taught us how to make rice paper-I was amazed that it is still made by hand, the process reminds me of crepes. I think about all those spring rolls I rolled earlier in the week and how many pieces of rice paper we used and to think they were all made by hand. The boys had the opportunity to learn how to play a Vietnamese violin-you'll see shots of all of this in the slideshow.

We shopped a lot in the markets of HCMC, the vendors were very overwhelming, grabbing you, calling out, "Madam, you buy from me? Where you come from?" I didn't like the crowded, hot, stalls but we did find some amazing deals. We bought Tommy Hilfiger shirts with the price tag of $69 still on from the US for $5. We had been told to always offer 50% of the asking price and work from there, I let Mark do all the bargaining for sure.

We ate some interesting things in Vietnam, not knowingly dog but some interesting things nonetheless. I'll put a picture of the elephant ear fish we ate that had been cooked whole with the scales still on, they just curled up during the frying process. We tried sea-slug soup-not my favorite. The boys mostly ate their old stand-by of beef and noodle soup, Vietnam's version is called Pho soup. We all agree that we like the spicy food of Thailand better.

One other note, it's funny that you can be half way around the world and see something that brings someone in particular to mind. While walking the streets one night we saw my Dad's cattle brand up in lights. Mark noticed it and we all laughed and took a picture of it, I'll put it in the slide show too. We may be far away but you all are never far from our thoughts-we love you!