Ho Chi Minh City in two days

It's been two weeks since I've come back to Korea after a short trip in Vietnam and Cambodia. There's so much to say about this awesome trip, #1 being that 9 days is not enough time to visit even one of these countries, let alone both. I'm definitely going to be back there in the near future. It's going to take me a few posts to write about this trip, so I'll start at the very beginning (a very good place to start).

We started our trip on a bus. Little did we know that we would accumulate more that 1 full day of bus time over the course of our 9 day trip. The flight from Incheon to Ho Chi Minh City was pretty uneventful. Before leaving I had been checking the weather forecast on a regular basis and it was calling for rain our entire trip. The weather went as scheduled and we walked out of the airport into a downpour. Wanting to get out of the airport and into the city as fast as possible, we took the first available taxi without much hesitation. We later realized how much we got ripped off, but I guess it's bound to happen at one time or another. Our taxi took us to the Gold Hotel where we dropped our bags and went out to explore the city. Our first two stops were to get a taste of the local beer 'Saigon' and to get our first bowl of real 'pho' (vietnamese rice noodle soup) at Pho 24. The soup was amazing!!! and cheap! The rain had mostly stopped, but just in case of another downpour we picked up some rain ponchos. We spent that night at a few bars and headed back to the hotel at a decent hour to get up for our early morning bus ride to the beach (Next post - The Beach).

After three days at the beach we came back to Ho Chi Minh City to do some shopping at the Ben Thanh market and to get some more pho. This time we checked out Pho 2000 where Bill Clinton had gone to eat when he was visiting the city. This was definitely the best pho that I had in Vietnam. That night we checked out a bar called 'Go To' where we ended up running into some people we had met at the beach. It turned into a great night with lots of drinking, dancing and congo lining around the pool table. That night wasn't such an early one and we had to get up for another early bus ride out of Vietnam and into Cambodia.

Here are some of the good pictures from the city (I lost/had my camera stolen at the beach so I'm lacking photos from this part of the trip).

There are hardly any cars in Vietnam. Most people ride motor bikes or bicycles. Crossing the street street was intimidating at first, with no crosswalks and no stop lights. The trick was to begin walking when there was a small opening in bikes and then to move at a steady speed so the motorists could predict where you were going and could weave around you. I think the the best way we figured was to pretend that we were in a video game of 'Frogger'.

Us in our rediculous 50 cent emergency rain ponchos. I think I used mine for a total of 20 minutes. They were ok for the rain but if it stopped raining it was like being in a wearable sauna.

The best 'pho' in Ho Chi Minh city from Pho 2000.

There were always people around selling random things - sunglasses, hammocks, books - and this little baby was selling gum. Our friend Mike asked the woman 'how much for the baby?' and she replied without blinking an eyelash, 'one dollar'!