Toi No (tu-oi naw); I'm Full

Trying to eat here has been, well, interesting. I am glad there arent any McDonalds and stuff like that, because it makes it much easier to know if I dont eat, im going to starve.

Its now Friday 23, Febuary and I am completely use to the food. Every morning I wake up and go with the guys (Anh Nam (#5), Anh Bay(#7) and Anh Chin(#9) to the local cafe or resturant. I start my day with a nice cup of ice coffee with condensed milk(mot le cafe sau dat) and some eggs with french bread or soup with fish, chicken liver, squid and noodle. Lunch we usually have like a meat and rice dish along with beer or cold tea. As crazy as it may sound I have not found 1 dish that I dont really like and the coffee in the morning is SOOOO good! Dinner we useually are looking at fish or a meat and veggie rice plate.

I eat like 3-4 times a day and stuff myself and keep getting hungry as the day goes on, but I am seriously loosing so much weight. ALL of my close are getting loose and some of it I cant even ware because they are too big now.

Hope things are going well in the states, and talk to you all soon.

Chao Anh Muoi (my name here in vietnam it means #10).

Here I Am

So I finally made it to Viet Nam. Its been an interesting trip so far. The plane ride, which I thought was 12hrs or less to Taipei, was a horrible 14.25 hrs. We had a delay on takeoff which took us about 15 extra minutes, strong head winds for most of the flight and to top it off Taipei's visibility was, from what I could speculate, about 1/2mi visibility and cloud cover at about 100ft off the runway.

We get to the first airport and we needed to switch planes, but we first had to go to a "special" ticket booth for transfers and get new boarding passes for a code-share airline of EVA. After that was settled we got lost on our way to the gate, kinda, but we got there just in time before they closed the door. That led to another 3.5 hr flight into Viet Nam.

I stepped off the plane at about 9:45 am local time and was greeted with 90ish degrees of heat and a bucket of water running off of my body from the humidity. It was almost unbarable to get off the plane, I almost did a 180 and asked them to take me back! I got through imigration ok but Vicki's mom had slipped a $5 bill in her Passport to I guess try and get by faster or something. HAHA. They started to question here about everything! I was afraid she was never going to leave. It was so funny.

When we got through everything I was thinking to myself "where is Gia Tuyet going to pick us up?". We got to the pickup area of the airport and it was like this huge wall of people waiting for their families to get off the plane. Like when you watch those movies of famous people getting off the plane and all the fans are there. Take that and times it by 1000. We find our family that was picking us up and we were quicky taken away, all of Vicki's family memebers were there to take our bags and through them into the xe om oto (car taxi).

So far it had been very interesting.

Countdown Begins!

Basically once I am on my trip I will be posting pictures entries of whats going on while I am in "The Social Republic of Viet Nam". The links that I provide on this site are some good reads of things that should be expected of while traveling through Viet Nam as well as facts, data and pictures of the country.

Please feel free to leave any comments that you have or suggestions of places to go. This will be my first visit to the country so any insider information would be great! To my family, keep in mind I am in another country and the crazy things I do may or may not reflect my personality back in the States.

And the Countdown BEGINS! 4 days remaining before "take-off".