A Haiku: Please Don't Make Me Leave / I'm Not Getting On That Plane / I Need More Time Here

Friday. The last day. I woke up knowing that in about 24 hours I would be on a Boeing 737 en route to Hong Kong. I didn't like that thought.

We started the day with a friendly basketball game against the UEF basketball team. If you know me at all, you know that I am the least athletic person on the planet. I can run, but that's it. I have less coordination than a two-year-old with bad coordination. So I pretty much just ran around and sweated a lot and eventually we lost the basketball game. Then we played soccer against them, I did the same thing and we won that game (your welcome).

We then exchanged gifts with all our Vietnamese friends and that was really pretty sad because that was the last time we would see most of them. From there we went to lunch at a noodle place and it was so delicious but the hot soup was really not what I was feeling after spending three hours in a blazing hot basketball gym...it was the same soup I had had the night before so that was cool because I was like a soup master.

After lunch we finally got back to the hotel and showered (god I was gross after sweating so much) And we had some free time before we went to dinner on a boat on the Saigon river. I spent that time in the pool and packing which was even sadder.

Dinner was really fun though. We ate a lot of really good food, most of which we had had before but it was still delicious. and really cool to eat on a boat in suits. Mine fit really well. After dinner the boat left the dock for a little cruise along the river which was spectacular. Seeing the city by night was amazing. But also very emotional because by the time the cruise was over (about 11:00) we knew we had to be in the lobby ready to go to the airport in about 4 hours. 4 hours left in Saigon. That was it. We finished up our packing and went to Turtle Lake, which is a little man-made pond in the middle of a roundabout near the hotel.

Turtle Lake by day

This was a very nice was to end the trip, everyone sitting atop that little platform looking over the city we had all grown to love so much. Some of us took some time to walk around those little paths and enjoy the street food that was being served around the edges of the pond. Eventually we decided it was time to head back. We had to finish packing and get our stuff together before it was time to leave. I had finished packing so I hung around our room with a few other people while Kohler packed. Meanwhile my good buddy Evan was in the bathroom throwing a green sticky rice cake in the bathtub and enjoying the noise it made. (Evan's blog can be found here: http://evanozaroffvietnamplus3.blogspot.com/ ) and in between packing items, Kohler spent his time throwing coconut candies across the room at poor Kristen who had done nothing to deserve the sort of treatment she was getting. (Kristen's blog can be found here: http://brucespringsteen.net/ )

Before we knew it, it was time to leave. We gathered in the hotel lobby, checked out of the hotel and boarded the bus.

"The Penultimate Day" or "The Beginning of the Sad Times and the End of my Money"

Thursday. Thursday I woke up with the thought already in my head that we would be leaving the next day. I didn't like that. We got up and headed to class. We had our last culture class discussing art and some final notes on the Vietnamese culture in general. Then we had our last language class. The day we all realized that we actually knew a lot more Vietnamese that we realized. We took a picture with the teacher and oh boy that was sad. She was great.

In between classes we went to our favorite cafe for the last time...That was when it hit me. Sitting there at that cafe, looking out on the streets of Saigon, not a very busy part, and by no means a touristy part. But just your average cafe on an average street. I felt so comfortable there. I felt like I belonged. It had taken two weeks but I finally got there. I ordered my coffee (in Vietnamese) with no problem, I said "thank you" without an issue and now we were leaving. But soon enough it was time to head back for language class.

The last coffee at our favorite cafe

After class we headed to our regular lunch spot for the last time. And then we were off to the Xa Loi Pagoda. The Xa Loi Pagoda is the Buddhist Pagoda where Thich Quang Duc started his march through the streets of Saigon and finally ended by setting himself on fire in protest of the government. We spent a while at the Pagoda and then walked the same route he did back in 1963 ending at the site at which he performed his act of protest. This was a very cool cultural experience, That incident is so famous and we got the opportunity to walk the route he did and see his memorial. It was incredible. 

From there we went to the War Remnants Museum. I could talk about the museum for hours but I'll try to keep it relatively short. The museum is run by the Vietnamese and it contains artifacts and stories of the war which we call the Vietnam war but they call the American war. It was unbelievable to see the war through their eyes. I'm not going to lie, it was really hard to see a lot of the photographs in that museum and at first I wanted to leave, but then I realized that I had to see their point of view on such a controversial conflict. I was really taken aback by the whole thing and left feeling really weird, but much like the Thich Quang Duc memorial, it was a very important cultural experience and probably one of the most memorable parts of the trip.

When we were done at the museum, we headed back to the hotel, hit the pool for a little while then went to dinner at a little noodle house, 'm not entirely sure what I ate but I think it was a very comprehensive beef soup that contained pretty much every part of the animal. It was really neat. 

That night was our last night experiencing Saigon night life. We went to a night club called "Apocalypse Now" (I know, Ironic right?) and we all danced the night away. We came back to the hotel exhausted but not wanting to sleep because we wanted to be awake for as much as possible before we left, but eventually fell asleep against our own will. 

This was also the day I ran out of money and had to rely on my good guy roommate Kohler for money. Kohler if you are reading this, I'm going to buy you dinner in Pittsburgh in August. 

Kohler's blog can be found here: http://kohlerinvietnam.blogspot.com/  Enjoy. 

Day Ten

I had been looking forward to Wednesday morning the whole trip. I love food and cooking and all of that stuff. Wednesday morning we headed out to a huge five-star hotel for a cooking class (nice). We learned how to make two types of Vietnamese spring rolls. The fresh ones which are rolled in rice paper and the fried ones which are rolled in a bean casing.

The fresh ones were really hard to make, first we took two circular rice papers which, at this step, were very hard and felt almost exactly like plastic. We then got those wet so they would loosen up a bit. After that we put lettuce, bean sprouts, herbs, rice noodles, and placed some shrimp on the paper so that when it would be rolled they could be seen through the rice papers. That was the easy part. The hard part was rolling the wet, sticky rice paper around all this. The rice paper really liked to stick to everything, especially itself. Needless to say, our spring rolls were not quite as beautiful as the ones made by the chef...

Wow, when did Jiro get here?

Okay so my fresh spring roll doesn't look all that great, but i promise it tasted great, and I promise that my fried spring roll came out looking much better, it was also much easier. The chef had prepared a mixture of raw pork, mushrooms, taro, and some herbs that we just put inside the bean casing and rolled that up, it was preposterously easy compared to the fresh ones.

After we learned how to cook, we were cut loose on the lunch buffet at the restaurant...trust me, it was as chaotic as it sounds. Twenty college students let loose on a five-star buffet. but wow was that delicious. 

some super fresh dragon fruit...nice

I bit into this little fish and it was filled with eggs...apparently that is a "delicacy"

some fruit and cheese

those fish, some nigiri, some sushi, a steamed pork bun, and a steamed shrimp bun.

Yeah, needless to say it was a very nice lunch. 

After lunch we went back to the hotel to change and the "shipped out" to the Saigon Newport Corporation (SNP). Basically what SNP does is they handle all the logistics of the ports in Vietnam and some in Cambodia. They are backed by the navy so they are government monitored, and because of that there is no real local competition. The visit to SNP was really interesting because I had never thought about how complex of an environment a port really is, and managine it is extremely complicated. 

After our briefing we walked over to the control tower which was really cool to see. 

The SNP control tower

From the control tower, we could see almost the entire port of Saigon and we could see all the control tower workers dealing with all the different logistics of the port. There were also live feeds of all the different shipments and everything displayed on the wall, I didn't know what any of it meant but it was still really cool. 

We then did a short driving tour of the docks which was super cool because we were driving around with all the container trucks and cranes and everything. 

For dinner that night we had banh mi again (the banh mi was really good) and headed back to the Ben Thanh market for more shopping. We left pretty early and then I fell asleep because I was exhausted.