Double Black Diamond

By far the craziest thing we've done here so far is cross the streets. Picture a high-speed 6-lane highway filled with motorbikes and cars. Then think about stepping off the sidewalk onto that highway and walking across without looking. It's kind of fun once you get the hang of it, until you almost get run over by a dump truck that won't stop.

These motorbikes especially are insane. They're all over the streets. There are cars, too, but far more bikes. I've seen a few with four people on them. I'm not sure how, but I guess they just squeeze each other really tightly and hope they don't fall off. There are also bikes with huge piles of stuff on them, or big crates, or anything you can think of. Yesterday we saw someone with a huge bunch of pink balloons. He couldn't even see around them.

Sunday morning we visited the Presidential Palace, which you can just roam around now, since no president has lived there since the South surrendered in 1975. A lot of the decor looks like it's straight out of the 70s. There's a gambling room with courduroy chairs and yellow carpets. Classic. We almost lost Xuan there, but eventually found her wandering around more slowly through different rooms. The Palace was the historic spot where we first got asked to have our pictures taken with Asian tourists! They were so thrilled to see us. They ran up to Kathy and me and pointed excitedly at their camera. They seemed a little surprised, but really happy, when I wanted a picture on my camera with them, too.

We went to this huge mall that is super upscale and maybe 6 floors tall. It has really nice stores that very few people in Vietnam would be able to afford. Few Americans could afford the high-end stores, with 24K gold iPod covers, etc. I just got the 14K one. (jokes) The one thing we did buy there was food. Mm so good. We got hot pot, where you get a bunch of food and cook it in broth on your table. They brought us all kinds of seafood and meat and veggies and then basically cooked it and served it to us because we had no idea what to do. A little embarrassing, but they seemed entertained, and we were well fed. The weirdest thing I ate there was clam. It tastes good, but it took me a good few minutes to actaully swallow it.