Liberty day cont'd

Before I continue, please send stickers and bubbles!! They are a huge hit on the floor and I have a feeling we will be running out before we even get to Cambodia!!!

 

So back to Liberty…

Kim (nurse), John (pharmacist), Tonya (PT), Christine (Pilot), KMac (also know as Kelly McCarthy the pediatrician J) and myself were liberty buddies. We started out liberty day surrounded by women selling small items (bracelets, postcards etc…). They all paired up with each  of us and walked from the bus all the way to the hotel asking if we want to buy anything. Their English was quite limited but they knew those phrases well..and understood the value of a dollar! It was amazing that later in the day the exact same women found us again in another part of town…KMac said it was his first real stalker. From the Saigon Hotel we walked through town trying to find a restaurant that the Aussies had recommended. We found nothing…well not nothing…but nowhere that looked like they served food. Finally we did find a café. FYI in Vietnam, they only serve beverages at café’s not food. Luckily the one we stopped at had ice J so we were able to have a cold beer and pepsi. I actually had jasmine tea and a Vietnamese coffee…delicious! From there we went to find food…we didn’t find anything near the local “mall” but did find Karaoke row. There were about 10-12 karaoke bars/places in a row!! It’s so popular with the asian culture…

Eventually after wandering through some neighborhoods we hit a jackpot! We stumbled across this little bar with a few gentlemen outside eating a noodle and beef soup. We pointed to this and tried to explain to the proprietor that is what we wanted. Immediately he grabbed the bowl from the man and starting trying to feed KMac the man’s food! We quickly got the point across we wanted our own and within 10min we each had our own bowl of noodles, beef and broth. It was delicious!! Of course us being Americans we were still hungry…they brought an amazing yeast bread that was crispy on the outside and so fluffy on the inside…fabulous! We never found the pagoda we had seen from a distance but this neighborhood ended up being the best turn ever…it led us right into a street with vendors on both sides of the road selling fruits, grains, vegetables, meat, clothing and more. It was pretty dirty and not paved but the sights were incredible. Hopefully I’ll be able to upload the pictures!  

By this time it had started raining. Keep in consideration we didn’t get off the boat till about 1pm and were walking everywhere so it was almost dinner time. We found a cab and tried to direct him to a Pagoda. We tried pagoda, temple, prayer, Buddha…apparently it didn’t work because he drove us straight to the Saigon hotel. There we were able to get a translator and were shortly on our way to the “Biggest Pagoda”. Just a side note…this cab ride was about 37,500 Dong…equivalent to about $2 dollars. So we weren’t that upset about having to drive to a nice bathroom and clear directions.

The Pagoda was beautiful! The worship areas were meticulous although the areas surrounding were not. We met a young lady studying banking mathematics (accounting) there at the temple. She gave us a quick tour and taught us a little about Buddhism. We lit incense and saw all the pictures of relatives framed in memory. We ran into a ton of people from the ship …Quy Nhon really is a small city, although it is one of the larger ones in Vietnam. There wasn’t much on the to-do list but unfortunately we only had a few hours so we didn’t get to do even those few things.

Dinner was at the Queen resort restaurant. Definitely a more touristy location, the items were more expensive but the service was good and food delicious. I imagine during the day it is an amazing view, you can see the coastline lit up at night and hear the waves hit the stone beach…  After dinner we headed back to the hotel. I attempted to find ice cream but they were all out at both the hotel bar and restaurant (even though each said the other has it). Soo we called it a night. Unfortunately from that point till we got back to the ship was way too long! We couldn’t get on the first boat back because the E4 (enlisted) and below had to go first, so we waited for the second boat…I didn’t get to bed till midnight! (Hence the need for ridiculous amounts of mountain dew, spelling and grammatical errors and nonsense in my blog.)