January 12th travel time!

12 January 2020

Hello readers of the blog! I’m Abby and I got to blog for our travel day to Vietnam!  My day started at around 8am when I threw on some clothes and walked across the street from our hotel to grab my laundry from a laundromat. I unfortunately did not realize that said laundromat was closed on Sundays so I was unable to get any of my laundry. In a panic I was forced to corroborate with the hotel manager to somehow have them mail my laundry back to the United States. I’m hoping there are no issues with customs! 

I had about an hour at that point to go out and buy new clothes as it was now around 10am and we were leaving for the airport at 11:30. With the help of Melissa Jones I walked around and bought some clothes. Most of the places were closed until 11 so we didn’t have too many options and the options we did have lacked dressing rooms. I ended up with a couple pairs of pants, a few shirts, and some child sized socks. All in all it was not the worst clothing haul and it should tide me over for the time being. 



(Pictured: child socks)

Once back at the hotel I shoved absolutely everything in my suitcase very haphazardly and made my way downstairs to head to the airport. One thing travel guides fail to mention is that suitcases in the MTR (the Hong Kong subway system) are very cumbersome — turnstiles are not meant for large, wheeled bags. It took about an hour ride to get to the airport and we got all checked in and then walked around to get some food. The Hong Kong airport was very nice and there was a plethora of designer stores. It seems that anywhere you go in Hong Kong you can at least find a Gucci. 



(Pictured: Hong Kong airport food court)

The flight was about 2.5 hours and surprisingly they served us some food. I think it was good for all of us to be forced to sit and relax for a little bit because the strain from travel can be difficult at times. Once in Vietnam we had to wait a bit to get our visas, but when those were acquired we made our way out into the humid air of Vietnam for the first time. By this point it was 5pm (there was an hour time change) so we met with our Vietnamese tour guide named Hai and our lovely air conditioned bus and set off to dinner. Our dinner was 8 courses and consisted of a fair amount of fish. We also leaned that Vietnamese coffee is quite possibly the best coffee on the planet (the secret ingredient is the sweet and condensed milk — super healthy ;)). We also all happen to be millionaires now as one US dollar is 23,121.40 Vietnamese dong.



(Pictured: Vietnam from above)

(Pictured: the restaurant)

(Pictured: dinner (& take a special note of Keenan’s face))



(Pictured: 500,000 Vietnamese dong)

After dinner we went to our hotel. It’s called the Sun Land hotel and it’s very close to downtown Ho Chi Minh City. The drive to the hotel was quite lovely because everything was lit up and there were a lot of decorations for the Chinese New Year, however the traffic in Ho Chi Minh is insane. There are motorbikes everywhere and traffic laws are not followed very strictly. It’s quite impressive to watch the maneuverability of the motorbike drivers. We all turned in for an early night on our rock hard beds after managing to turn on the air conditioning units. (I must admit that while the beds are far from soft I have gotten quite used to it and am enjoying it now.) 



(Pictured: poor quality photo of the motorbikes)



(Pictured: woman riding motorbike with suitcase)

Thanks for making it this far on my blog post! I hope y’all enjoyed reading and learned from my laundry mistake! Always check the hours of operation!

-Abby Tingstad