Day 4 cont'd

Day 4 cont'd

lost Ryan's photos
broke my UV filter on camera lens
booked a flight for the wrong day, cut short planned mekong river trip
Finally got into city for great food
Ryan passed out
I ate food next to hotel

The rest of day four went something like this...

I tried to upload some of Ryan's photos for the blog and proceeded to delete them all from his memory card... whoops. I sure felt like an idiot, but after you delete photos they don't miraculously come back so I tried to forget that I just deleted many, many good memories and a whole bunch of Ryan's creative masterpeices. Water under the bridge I guess.

But karma caught up and evened things out when Ryan dropped my digital camera in the airport and when we later opened the camera case all we heard was broken glass. We were pretty dang sure that the SLR's lense was shattered. Luckily it turned out that only the UV filter and the lense was merely scratched. That's much better news than knowing you just busted a couple hundred dollar camera lens. So at this point, Ryan and I are even.

Not only all this, but later we went to schedule a tour up the Mekong River Delta and we planned on a two nighter. No problems there; it sounded like another Discovery Channel type of experience especially when the stewardess in our flight over to Hong Kong told us the Mekong was a “must see.” We were excited and decided to continue our trip planning by booking a flight from Saigon/Ho Chi Minh City to Hue, Vietnam. So we went to the Vietnam Airlines counter and booked our flight for what we thought was the appropriate day. We paid for it and left the office to go eat. On our way to the restaurant we realized we had booked it for the wrong day, a day too early. It was going to be quite hard to fly out of Ho Chi Minh City when we were literally “up the creek,” but in this case the creek was the Mekong River Delta in Vietnam. So we cancelled one day on our river delta trip and washed our hands of this whole day of planning. We needed to eat.

Ryan had read about a highly recommended restaurant set up in the city where there were many different kitchens with independent local cooks who all served the same tables. You could basically pick from some of the best dishes in Saigon. After a disaster of a day like this one, the possibility of a great meal sounded amazing.

Of course things didn't go quite as smoothly as we planned. We followed Ryan's Lonely Planet guide book map to the finest detail, yet we still didn't find this Vietnamese food court. So we wandered around, double checked the map, and as chance would have it, wandered through a lawyer's office. You wouldn't know it was a lawyer's office, but apparently a hall way with desks to one side and a walk way on the other constitutes a law office in Vietnam. A friendly lawyer asked us if we needed help in some broken english and we weren't too proud to confess that we were completely lost. He pointed us somewhere that didn't make much sense to us, but we followed his hand gesture directions and walked out the office to our right. As we were leaving, he reassured us that he was a lawyer as if that automatically meant he always gave good directions and we walked out in faith that this man had translated our conversation into actual correct direction. And they were. Once we got in there the food was amazing. We had some of the best food I've ever eaten; either because the previous parts of the day were such a disaster or because the food was actually that good. I think it was the latter. We ate the fresh hand made and do it your self dishes until the plates were spotless and our bellies full to capacity. What an awesome way to redeem the day.

Then we went and played some basketball with the local kids, and I mean kids. Ryan and I, both 26 and 29, whooped up on some 12 or 13 year olds. We did lose one game, which probably means it was my fault, because Ryan played basketball in high school, but we won't talk about that. Ryan and I had a girl on our team and after we lost the first one decided we needed the girl to score against these boys who obviously didn't want the girl to score on them. So we rebounded the heck out of the game and kept passing the ball out to our teammate until she finally banked one in. We won on the next shot and the boys got scored on by a girl.

Then we went home and I started to log onto the computer when I found out that Ryan's pictures had not been lost. That was a relief. Now I suppose I'm up one point on Ryan since he didn't go on to discover that my UV lens had been miraculously unshattered. I'm still waiting for karma to kick in there.