Report from Vietnam

Fishing on the Perfume River, which runs through Hue.


I know you're not supposed to eat the street food, but it was so cheap and delicious. Soup is the preferred breakfast each morning so we typically ate at least two bowls. (Small-ish bowls and only a dollar!)


Steering the boat through Ha Long Bay! Ahoy!


Living the high life at the Metropole Hanoi.


Drop lizard soup. This lizard was the loser in a little battle with another lizard on the ceiling above our dining table and dropped right into my soup bowl.

Why do tourists insist on humiliating themselves in this fashion?


Relatives who still live in the family village called Tan Hung. The woman on the left is my great-aunt. I don't know how the other two are related to me. They are hearty women.


Yum!


More street food eating. Didn't get sick at all during the trip. Yay!

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Coming back from Vietnam was a 53 hour ordeal on United Airlines. If you have the choice, please do not choose United. They won't even answer the phone so I can complain!

We arrived at the airport at 4:30 AM on Sunday morning to find out that our flight had been canceled. So we spent another unplanned day in Saigon before flying to Incheon, Korea where we had an eight hour layover. The one bright spot was that the layover allowed enough time to leave the airport for lunch, which meant getting another stamp in my passport! When we returned to the airport, we learned that our flight to San Francisco from Korea had been delayed by another three hours, which meant we would miss our connection in SF. So they had to rebook everything AGAIN! We were about 45 additional minutes late taking off from Incheon and then had to sit on the airplane another 40 minutes on the SF end waiting for a gate to open, which meant only about 45 minutes to get through immigration, reclaim our bags, go through U.S. customs, recheck our bags, slog through security, and race to our gate. They were boarding the plane when we arrived at the counter out of breath. The final insult: one of our bags didn't arrive with us at Dulles; it got put on a later flight for no reason at all. Grrrrrrr.