Vietnam Style. . . No Problem!

Our tour guide was a Korean man who was married to a Vietnamese girl and ran Korean tours through northern Vietnam. Because we live in Korea, we got hooked up with this guy. He was funny, what we could understand, and he had this saying he said every five minutes: "It Vietnam Style. . . no problem!" By the second day, anytime anything went wrong or became very strange, everyone on the tour would yell out, "it Vietnam style, no problem!!" However, one time when we almost hit head on with another tour bus on a two lane dirt road which had been turned into a six lane thoroughfare, and our tour guide called out his famous catch-phrase, I yelled back, "Mr. Kim, now I know that 'Vietnam Style' means BIG problem!"

The second day we drove for four hours through rural Vietnam toward HaLong Bay. It was so beautiful (minus the pollution from China) and I can't even begin to describe the feeling of seeing all the people in the rice patties with their conical bamboo hats--it's like stepping into a National Geographic special and having to pinch yourself to see if it's for real. It truly was amazing to see this part of the world that I had read so much about. I am always humbled to see how other people live and how a simple life can actually lead to happiness. It reminds me of what is really important in life.

Besides the crazy driving (which is pretty typical for third world countries), there was this one bathroom that we had to use that should have been condemned and burned to the ground. . . and yes, I had to use it because I couldn't hold it a minute longer. There was also our lunch on the second day that had been sitting out for hours and there were dead flies in the bowls and the frying fat had congealed on the spring rolls. Fortunately for my tour group, I came prepared with a couple pound bags of M&M's (I don't leave home without them), so we passed them around and ate M&Ms for lunch.

We stopped at a river in a canyon and we were all shooed into canoes. Each canoe had a Vietnamese peasant who would row us up the river through a cave and back for $2. As you can see from the pictures, it was unbelievably beautiful. But, the coolest part was watching the people row the boats with their feet while holding an umbrella over their head.--Now that's skill!

That night half our group went for Korean food. Four of us were pretty annoyed with that. Who goes to Vietnam to eat Korean food, or American food? We wanted to try the local cuisine (that preferably had not been left out for several hours). We went to a fantastic authentic local restaurant. I was the only person that would eat the thing below. It tasted like buttery rubber--not great, but I wasn't fully disgusted by it until I saw it being sold alive at a street seafood market. I don't know what the hell it is, but alive it was slimy and pulsating and it almost made me throw up the cooked version I had eaten an hour earlier.

I have to say that when your food still has it's eyeballs intact, it is sort of like it is asking you not to eat it. I think that maybe leaving eyeballs in all of our food would be a good diet plan, because I could only manage a little of this guy below.

One of the best parts of Vietnam was the fruit. I have no idea what most of these fruits are called, but we tried a whole bunch of different ones. Some were okay, and some were phenomenal! I could have lived on the fruit. . . since the fish with eyeballs weren't cutting it!