Windowless hotel rooms. Icky bathrooms. The bus. Lousy air quality, including second hand smoke. All those zeroes on the currency. Unpredictable coffee. Very Hard Beds. No, I mean VERY hard. Noise pollution. Aggressive shopkeepers. Being on someone else’s schedule. That’s it for the complaining. Everyone gets to do a little bit, it’s only fair. But …
At the Cu Chi tunnels, you can see where the Viet Cong forces, working with the local people (or not, it’s not clear) dug out an extensive underground complex that reaches from the outskirts of Saigon all the way to Cambodia. You can see examples of the terrifying traps the VC built to snag the …
There’s a big mural on the back wall of one of the expat cafes in Hoi An town that’s got Bruce Lee with a big can of Coke in one hand, and on the other side, there’s a Mona Lisa wearing an iPod. In the middle, it says in big letters, “I shop, therefore I …
You know that paint you used in grade school? The chalky stuff, tempera, that when it dried, rubbed off on your clothes and your hands and your backpack and your homework? Remember those dry colors, dusty and dirty but oh so bright? Those are the colors of Hoi An. And because the entire country is …
A: Our internet connections, while plentiful, have been sooooo slow that I’m quite sure that if I uploaded even one photo, no one in Vietnam would be able to use the Internet until I’m done.
The noise in the market is unbelievable – there’s the beep of scooter horns with drivers who seem to think that they have the same right of way as the pedestrians, the constant chatter of voices, the calls in English to buy buy buy. It’s all under the shadow of a complicated network of tarps …