HO CHI MINH CITY

Today I am considering to be our first real day here. Yesterday..due to all of the traveling was a blur to us all. We started the day by getting in our Toyota mini van with our driver Hao . I will never attempt to drive on these streets! As soon as I get my pictures downloaded you will know just what I am talking about. We got to see Natalie and Greys school first and Grey still insist that he is not going to school. Then we went to our house. The gardener was there and he seems to be very nice. (We do not know his name) The flowers and plants look amazing so I guess we will keep him. In the garage there was this huge blue box with a bunch of Vietnamese writing except for the all caps bold word : DIESEL...When I asked what this was for...well it is a generator for when the electricity goes out. Apparently this is a common thing here. I mean, there are only 10 million people here soaking up every ounce of electricity offered. The lights even went out at the hotel for a minute today...and so did the street lights but no one seemed to care...everyone just kept driving in 1 million directions...next was our grocery store visit. Nothing was in English!!!! we had to guess at things and we recognized a few brands so that helped. The bill was $1,676,872.00 The exchange rate is $1 = 16,580.00 dong. So it was around $100.00 We needed some basic things and also got some new things to try. It was hot in there so we tried to hurry. We did manage to get some Tiger Beer and some wine!!! We picked up Pizza Hut on the way home! The pizza was the same but they also have some shrimp things wrapped in potato strings...I can't explain it but they were very good. We took the kids for a walk and there are so many places to eat it is hard to choose one. We had our first experience with a vendor. She was an older lady with some kind of fruit (looked like a brown potato on a branch) and the kids stopped to look at what she had. Well she peeled one and Natalie was the first to try it..(Danny tried them on his last visit here in July) Of course she liked them very much and we had to buy the bundle from her. It was $2 for the whole bundle. I took a picture and will post it later when I locate my cord for my camera. Oh we also met a guy from California who loved the LSU shirt I had on! He is retired and has been here for 6 years... (he must have had some voodoo put on him) SO...I guess we have survived our first real day here in Vietnam. I cant wait to show pictures so you can see all of these things I speak of. Signing off for now!