Saturday March 19, 2011-When I was in Nam

After only a few days at sea we are already here in Vietnam.  I woke up to the Mekong Delta which reminds me a lot of the Amazon River.  Not very clean and little towns on either side.  This is the port where the parents were visiting the students, and Semester at Sea chose a great port to do so.  Matt was going off with Kim on a tour, Drew was going to Cambodia, and Charlie was going off with his parents for that first day so it was just Aaron and I.  First thing we did was hop on motorcycles and head to Ben Thanh Market.  It was a huge marketplace where you could buy all sorts of clothing, food, essentials, souvenirs or pretty much anything else you could think of.  The thing was is that everything did not seem as cheap as I thought it would be.  Although the prices were some of the lowest which I have seen on the trip, they were still not as low as I pictured them in my mind.  Aaron and I hopped back on a motorcycle and had them drive us to a place to get custom suits made.  We got measured up and paid $100 apiece for a jacket and pants custom made… not too bad.  Ohhh yeah and the currency exchange is $1=20,000 dong.  Really stupid I know but my suit cost me 2,000,000… how baller is that.  After that Aaron and I paid our motorcycle drivers to simply ride around…The best way to see any city is to rent a rickshaw or motorcycle and just drive around until you see something you want to stop at.  We ate so much the first day.  Over the course of the week I ate ridiculous amounts of pho which is a popular noodle soup with beef, pork, chicken or any other meat you wanted.  You could go to any road side stand and order it for just a dollar or even under, and was amazing. 
Not really that much happened the first day except for buying a bunch of crap and seeing the whole city.  Towards nighttime, I saw a restaurant which was very busy and Aaron and I decided to stop and eat there.  It was an outdoor type deal with over a hundred people sitting and eating.  We received the menu to find it all in Vietnamese and no idea what items were.  Not only that but this was the longest menu I had ever seen so we had no idea what to order.  I had a list of notes that I had taken from preport the night before with simple food words so I could know basically if it were a seafood or beef meal.  A lot of dog is even served in Vietnam and although we looked for some over the course of the week, we did not have luck finding any.  I thought it might be a cool thing to say I have tried before…maybe in China.  Anyways we ate some sketchy little hard boiled eggs that had more of a fetus inside than a cooked egg.  Something was not right about it but we had a few beers and did not care.  The rest of the meal besides the eggs was great and after that we headed back to the ship. 
After a quick change, we headed off to the wedding of Adam on the ship.  He legitimately had a wedding and a reception that people were invited to.  All you can drink on the top floor of some hotel.  It was pretty awesome but the weird thing was that no one even thought twice about the fact that he and a girl he had just met on the ship got married.  Oh well not my problem.  I had a bunch of drinks with Charlie’s parents who also attended.  Mrs. Demar brought me a bottle of Frank’s hot sauce which I requested and I thanked her so much for it.  Mr. Demar asked me if I like Tobasco and I told him how I did not like it at all.  He called me a pussy and asked if I also did not like girls.  I put my head down and walked away in shame.
After that we went to this Apocalypse now place.  It was kinda stupid and I was looking forward too much to Cambodia in the morning.  Drunk moto ride back to the ship.