wheeeeee!

Now that our technical difficulties have been resolved and our competition relocated stateside (safe travels ebs and josh, asia misses you), it seems the responsibility to blog is squarely ours. And blog we shall.

I (amy) am currently horizontal in a 6x5 cube with halliday and jon. Elaborate? Ok. We're in an overnight sleeper train on our way to Sapa, a town in northwestern vietnam we plan to learn about sometime before we arrive. It's supposed to be beautiful and we're hoping the time there warrants the back-to-back overnight sleeper plan. I take that back, we're finding this plan hilarious and it's already worth the trip. For example, when we arrived at the assigned platform, our train had cars 1-7 and 9-11. Which car are we on? 8, obviously. The solution? Wait for an incoming train with a car 8 to arrive, split our train, and add the substitute car 8 to the middle. Inform as few people as possible, insert soundtrack (vietnamese opera, we think, being played from somewhere), and throw in backpackers. Allow to boil.

Actually it was less dramatic, and resolved fairly quickly given the number of moving parts (literally. And pun embarrassingly intended.).

This morning we visited Ho Chi Minh. Having missed Mao in Beijing, this was our last chance to catch an embalmed communist leader, and it was, well, a trip to a masoleum. I'm not sure what adjective to go with. It was interesting to see the number of vietnamese who turned out early on a saturday morning (lots), and also to note the amount of respect and attention he draws even today. And then it was 9:45am and we had a full day ahead of us.

We headed to the temple of literature, followed by some delicious rice pancake snacky things near our hotel (sub 2 dollars for the 3 of us), and lots of other fun. What fun, amy? Well I would love to tell you but I'm afraid I will lose service if I don't post soon, so an update will have to follow.