Finally Here!

Wow! Can't believe I am finally here!

We first flew 13 hours to Seoul, Korea from Los Angeles!  I was actually pretty scared about flying into Korea, but the airports are EXTREMELY nice and have a bunch of fancy stores in them- Louis Vuitton, Gucci!

Then it was another 6 hours to Vietnam!

It ended up being a total of 21 hours of flying time alone! It was pretty painful, but the Asian airliner was really fancy and GINORMOUS!

We got to our "guest house" pretty late at night.  Not exactly sure what a guest house really is....we do have a receptionist but the actual building it only one, open hallway with a few rooms inside.

We had some funny encounters in our new room.  Devyn and I's bathroom is kinda strange.  There is just a shower head on the wall, no curtain, and it drains out the floor.  There's also large, plastic buckets for doing laundry.  Also, we had our first power outage last night while we were unpacking.  Someone was even taking a shower when it turned pitch black...guess it's going to happen a lot.  We also have a new friend...."Kim" the lizard.  He likes to hang out on the window right net to my bed......YES!

Anyways, woke up early today for orientation.  The streets here are super busy with tons of small shops and people everywhere.  It is super, super hot; yet, all the locals wear long clothing and sometimes face-masks to cover themselves.  Many of them cannot afford sunscreen (the avg. Vietnamese person makes around  a 1,000 US dollars a year) and also, being "whiter" is viewed as being prettier, so they really try to cover up.  There are TONS of people on little mopeds and the streets are absolutely chaotic.  We actually had to have a lesson on how to cross the street.  It's all about aggressive J-walking.  You just gotta keep walking and don't look back (extremely scary when hundreds of motorcycles are zipping past you, yelling, and honking their horns!)

We ate in this really cool restaurant where the ladies were making noodles outside.  We ate a traditional Vietnamese breakfast called Pho ("faah").  Noodles for breakfast....these people are on to something! :)  It was DELICIOUS!

Then it was on to our walking tour!  It was all we could do just to keep up with our little, speed-walking adviser Alice.  Of course, I managed to get myself COMPLETELY lost from the group in the first hour!  We were in this super busy market and I was too in awe of all the super STINKY smells, piles of candy and clothing, raw meat, dried fish heads, and strange noodle dishes to really watch what was going on. As soon as I looked up, the group had magically, yes magically, disappeared.  It was really scary.  I had no map, no phone, and couldn't speak the language.  Luckily, I found another girl in my group (panic attack averted), and we, of course, assumed that we had been in the front of the group and everyone else had gotten lost too; but really, it was just us. We ended up having to walk for over an hour, trying to find our way back.

But all is good now!  We finally found our way, although it was definitely an adventure!  Tonight, a local student is taking us to his favorite restaurant and is then he is going to help us buy cell phones (a much needed device now that we know I can get a little distracted haha!)

Really, I didn't know what to expect of Vietnam, but is definitely a very busy and exciting city that is actually pretty modernized.  We get starred at a lot, but I guess we do look like a lot of confused giants.  This whole week we will have Vietnamese language training as well as Vietnamese culture and history teachings!

More to come!

Miss and love you all
xo