Chiang Mai finally!

Finally in Chiang Mai. We landed at the airport at 5pm, picked up our bags and had a taxi drive us to our hotel by 5:30pm. Dinner and orientation with the Habitat group was at 6pm. The construction team seems to be a good mix of ages and more girls than guys as expected. I look forward to building with the team. We all seem to click well together over dinner so hopefully we'll work well with one another on the build site. Dinner was good.We all got a flower necklace. I think it was Jasmine flowers. It smelled so nice!

I took a picture of this in the front lobby. It's for Susan's blog called Traveling with a Porpoise..hehe....ooops a porpoise is a dolphin/whale like animal. I thought it was a tortoise.

Bangkok Airport

I've been up since 6:15am. Was at the airport by 7:30 this morning to catch our flight to bangkok. Our layover here has turned out to be a bit longer than expected, but we'll be boarding our flight to Chiang Mai in about 10 minutes now. Looking forward to getting to our hotel and relaxing a bit. We'll be meeting the Habitat team tonight for dinner and orientation. We had burger king at the airport here and it's the most expensive food we've had in SE asia so far. Susan had a burger combo and I had just a burger and it cost us over $10. Can't wait to get out of the airport and see Thailand. It's been about 8hrs in the airport/flight so far today.

Ho Chi Minh City

So it's our last day in Vietnam today. Our flight is early in the morning tomorrow to bangkok then to Chiang Mai. Really excited about the Habitat construction. It feels like it's been something I've been planning for so long now and it's finally happening.

I saw this shirt and I had to get it. It's for you Henry!
Susan got sick of eating Vietnamese food so we ate Indian food instead. It actually tasted pretty good. Still not as good as Sandeep's mom's butter chicken though.

We decided to fully immerse ourselves in the Vietnamese fashion. I think we'll be sporting this new look in Chiang Mai...haha

Vung Tau Day 2 continued

So we walked around the beach in Vung Tau and then we walked to the hydrofoil station. The boat ride went by fast because I had a gravol and fell asleep the whole way back to Ho Chi Minh. We had plans of going out to the market here and getting foot massages, but I felt so sick. I got dehydrated and it was super hot and sunny today when we were walking around. Just woke up and I feel much better now. No more aches/pains and no more nausea. I'm ready for massage day tomorrow =)

Vung Tau Day 2

I must be getting old. Didn't set my alarm so I could wake up at whatever time today. I got up at 6am again. I just don't know how to sleep in anymore.

I forgot to post pics of the snake wine I had the other day. It's really strong stuff. So there's a cobra in there holding a scorpion. The label says it's good for rheumatism, libido (haha..it's viagara for men) and sweat of limbs (whatever that means?...it's so hot here my limbs sweat..is that what it means?)

Vung Tau Day 1

So today we decided to take it easy and just take things at our own pace. We decided to sleep in. We both ended up waking up at 6:45am still...hahha. Headed out to catch the hydrofoil to Vung Tau, a beach town, an hour and a half boat ride from Ho Chi Minh City. Wow, how crazy it is to try to cross the street. I'm starting to get a hang of it. Slow and steady pace and remember that buses/cars don't stop and motorbikes weave around the pedestrians. Oh yah and most intersections don't have traffic lights at all. So we made it in one piece to the hydrofoil station...phew!

Vung Tau is beautiful. We ended up taking a look at the beach first then we did a trek up to the huge Jesus statue.
It's so crazy! I just calculated with Susan how much we spent today. The most expensive item today was the boat ticket which was $10 US. Our hotel is $5 each. I had 2 buns for breakfast and lunch was $1.25, dinner was chicken pho for $1, some water and a pop was 50 cents. Wow, that's only $17.75 of spending today!

Mekong Delta Day 3

Wow, 2 star hotel breakfast too. Very very yummy. Was on the 8th floor with a nice view of Can Tho. We took a boat out early in the morning to Cai Rang to check out the floating market, the biggest floating market in Vietnam. Bought a pineapple off a boat in the market. The sweetest pineapple I've ever eaten. Then we went to the street market. Bought a papaya (delicious!) and a pomelo for snack later. Oh my goodness...so much fruit! So yummy! I've already eaten more fruit on this trip then I normally do in a year. We also got to see a rice paper and noodle making factory. The process is pretty cool. Nothing's wasted. The rice husk is used to fuel the fire and the ashes are sold to people who use ashes as fertilizer.


So we were walking in the park and noticed some kids eating some fried food and I was looking to try to figure out what they had. They saw me looking and gave us each a piece to eat. So nice of the kids. Anyways, we found the stand the kids got the fried goodies from and we ordered a fried spicy ball of something and fried banana. Then we found the dessert store that we had stumbled upon the night before and ordered fruit cocktail again. I've never had anything like it before. There's durian in there and makes the fruit cocktail taste like a milkshake.

After our food adventures in Can Tho it was a 4 hours car ride back to Ho Chi Minh City. Got back into the city and we decided to get a massage at a hotel near our hostel. They were all so busty. What's with the low cut shirts and short skirts? Let's just say I'm almost 100% sure that this place was not legit. Ewwww....gross! Anyways, next time I'm not going to get a massage at a hotel.