Avoiding white slavery…

I only have a couple minutes, so I will have to make this short. Here’ s the summary…

The Journey:

Dad, you were right, I already became a white slave. Traveling with 3 vietnamese laden with gifts automatically makes you a mule, and who knows what was in the packages I carried. At least I didn’t have to swallow anything, full of grace.

The Arrival:

Vietnam is hot, humid, rainy… traffic is INSANE… no one speaks english… It’s like I never left Miami! I hope I will do a more in-depth entry about my family in Saigon and how meeting them changed me as a person and blah blah blah, but right now I only want to talk about the traffic. I can’t even describe how scared I was, and I was in a nice air-conditioned car driven by my cousin. Entire families on scooters, constant horn blaring (they use horns like turn signals here, nothing rude about it, just “hi, I’m here, don’t hit me”).

Slept my first night in Saigon on a wooden board. I was so jet-lagged I didnt care. Happy to see that my Uncle had a flush toilet, but as with nearly everywhere, no TP, just a pail of water and a pan. I still havent mastered that, and I’m very glad I brought some Charmin to-go packs.

First family meal in HCMC

Mom washing up after lunch on the road to Nha Trang 

Okay, mom is over my shoulder. She says hi. I will have to do an entire entry about the food. Up until yesterday it was business as usual: pan fried fish, seafood hot pot, lots of tentacles, but then yesterday for dinner I got to watch them scoop out an eel and later on it was served up in an amazing curry. Lauren, you would have died. Denise and Mariela, you would have LOVED it.

Eduardo, I got you sand!

Bye for now, hopefully I will get on later and get some pictures up. I think I’m going snorkeling today!

Tags: Travel

This entry was posted on Saturday, September 10th, 2005 at 9:25 pm and is filed under Travel. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can skip to the end and leave a response. Pinging is currently not allowed.