November Adventure Day 3 (Vietnam) 3-11-2015 Wandering the Streets, Ice-cream and interesting things I saw

Hello and welcome back for another exciting day exploring Vietnam for me and my family. Today was very exciting (sometimes in a bad way) and very, very hot. We wandered the streets of Vietnam, ate more delicious food and tried our best to avoid melting into puddles of sweat.
So here is the recount of day 3!

My day began with a lovely and much needed sleep in, in the lovely air-conditioned room. Although sleeping in did mean I missed breakfast, which was a price I was willing to pay. Especially since my friendly family smuggled food out from the buffet for me. Slowly I got ready for the day.

Something I have been enjoying a lot about this trip is having my mother to do my hair everyday because brushing my hair is one of my least favorite things to do. So if any of my friends back home are reading this, feel free to take up this job once I get back. With the humidity high, my only choice was to wear my hair up and off my skin as much as possible. So today I rocked the milkmaid braids. I would just like us all to take a moment to appreciate the natural blonde streak in my hair, it's the only but of my hair that stayed blonde from when I was young.


After the slow morning of getting ready we endeavored out onto the hot and slightly dangerous streets of Vietnam. Here are some of my favorite photos that I took of the beautiful,very busy and bustling Ho Chi Minh city (Sai Gon).

 On our first stop we made our way into a marketplace in search for umbrellas, sunscreen and sunglasses. This is where I had my first bartering experience. I think it went rather swimmingly, especially since no one spoke very much English. After we had successfully found the things we were looking for. Or so we thought. This is where we learned our next lesson in Vietnam. We opened the sunscreen to find that not only was it opened, but it also wasn't really sunscreen. We were slightly annoyed but realistically worse things have happened.

So we continued on our journey.

Now as you can probably deduce from the photographs, there are hundreds of motorcycles all parked on the side walks, outside shops and inside building entryways. These obstacles paired with the uneven footpaths means that walking the street can be a very challenging and dangerous experience. My grandmother Betty definitely discovered this fact when she knocked her arm on a motorcycle and tore a cut in her skin.

Being the (nearly) nurse of the group. I was given some hands on experience and patched up her arm. But we did have a hard time finding a band-aid that was large enough for the wound. So with my highly developed band-aid engineering skills. I fashioned a band-aid that would fit the wound.

Little did we know that this isn't the only bit if (Not so nice) excitement we were going to encounter on our wander around today. Now, this is the most traffic I have ever seen all in one place with hundreds of motorcycles racing around the roads and even on the foot paths. Seemingly abiding by no road rules it seems like complete (not so organised) organised chaos. I'm sure many of you have heard and even experienced the adverse traffic situation in countries such as Vietnam, just as we had, but it still didn't really prepare us. My mother and I were crossing the road and I wasn't looking because I feel like that just makes it worse. As crossing the road with traffic coming towards you at full speed it against many of our natural survival instincts. So I was holding my mum'd hand and following her lead and she walked us out in front of a motorbike that was a VERY near miss. I suspect if we had have been leaning slightly forwards we would have been hit. After recovering from this near death experience we sat in a park and ate some ice cream and waited a little while for our nerves to recover.

 Even the ice cream here is really different. The flavors were strange and unidentifiable. But it was still nice and refreshing in the harsh Vietnam heat. The cone also doesn't have ice-cream in it. The ice-cream has a cone in it. I wasn't entirely sure how I was supposed to eat it. I just ended up using the cone like a spoon. Which proved to be a little difficult. But still fun all the same.

After a break in the park we made our way to  beautiful cathedral, we didn't end up going inside because it was closed. But we did get a kind man to take a photo of all of us, in exchange for me to take a photo of him and his family. There were a lot of tourists as you can see.

Just across the road from this beautiful cathedral there was the biggest post office I have ever seen in my life. It was filled with hundreds of people and lots of beautiful postcards, albums and stamps.

There was a couple curious things going on outside this post office. One being this awesome man carrying a giant plate of donuts on his head. That is talent if I ever saw it! I was thoroughly impressed. There was also a very beautiful lady standing out the front with lots of people (myself included) taking photos of her just standing there are look pretty.

By this time lunch time had rolled around and we found a traditional looking food store that we ate at. This is where the next incident occurred. I found an centipede looking thing in my drink. I hear that bugs are high in protein so they are pretty good for you. But I wasn't particularly game. Unlike my father who had ordered eel (by accident). I am not sure that I would have been keen to try that and I'm not sure he was either. But he ate it anyway because he is a lot braver with food than I am.

When we arrived back home finally after a long day of walking out in the hot and humid streets we opted for an uneventful evening after all the excitement of the day. We did some washing by hand and it ended up hanging all over the bathroom. Because such is the life of a traveler. We went to one of the closest places we could for dinner and I had noodles yet again. Because in case you haven't noticed I love noodles. After dinner I spent some time playing cards again and fell into another much deserved nights sleep.

As always much love and I hope you enjoyed reading. I'll see you all again tomorrow for another fun filled day of adventure around Vietnam.