Soupergenius

This has been a tough winter. Electric heat is a bummer when there appears to be something wrong with either the unit or the insulation. We have some people scheduled to come look at our house and help to determine which is our major issue. We are also planning on starting to install our fence soon. The dogs need a place to run during the day. I have been pretty unmotivated around the house so far, but Christy has done a good job of getting small things finished. We are almost back to two bathrooms on the main floor. Yay!

Only six more hours or so until we show up at the airport.  Today has been a pretty easy day.  Copying software, having meeting, etc.  I was very careful about what I ate for lunch, don’t want any issues on the plane.  We are bringing back almost as much stuff as we brought here.  Cheaper and faster than Fedex.  LOL.

After being out of commission, it was time to get back to work.  I woke up feeling about 60 percent of normal, but could not just lay around another day.  Went down and had a simple breakfast and headed to work.  (Yea!  It stayed down!).  I actually was able to get most of the work that I missed done, but I have not had a chance to do any personal shopping since this weekend when I was just window shopping.  I had a decent lunch and a better dinner, hopefully I can get back to 100 percent by tomorrow.  I really don’t want to be worn down with such a long flight ahead of me.  It will probably be an early night so that I get plenty of rest.  Our flight is almost at midnight tomorrow.  I don’t know what our final day holds for us.  This may be my last post until I get back home.  Then I will upload pictures to share.

Thomas Jefferson was rated the best school in the country 3 years in a row.

http://www.usnews.com/articles/education/high-schools/2009/12/09/virginia-high-school-is-best-in-the-nation.html

Well, it is already Thursday and I have pretty much just lost a day and a half.   I started feeling a little bad on Tuesday morning, but made it into work.  By lunch time, it was time to go back to the hotel.  Lucky that I did.  I was not able to move for the next 24 hours or so.  I even went to the doctor to see if there was anything they could do.  They gave me some anti-nasuea medicine to help keep food down and that probably is helping to get me rehydrated.  Otherwise the only thing I can say is that the hotel bed is comfortable and the tv programming sucks really bad.  At all hours of the day.  I hope that I am feeling a lot better by tomorrow, since that is our travel home day.

I get to say that 12 hours before you do.  Ha ha ha.  Well today was pretty uneventful.  It was like a regular day at work, except I had a meeting to attend in the afternoon.  I worked on trying to make our servers work better in the morning, and then had a meeting in the afternoon to prepare for.  I spent a few hours researching things so I would have answers in the meeting.  It went fairly smoothly, but sometimes it is a little hard to communicate/understand the issue, but I think it is getting easier.  Now I have some action items to try to resolve or at least try to come up with a plan to resolve before we leave.

Today was packed with adventure.  To get the day started off, I woke up a little early and ate breakfast.  My friend said he was interested in exploring the city with me, so I gave him a call after I was all ready.  I found out that he slept in and was not ready yet.  Well that was not a problem, so I killed about 45 minutes waiting for him to get moving.  We jumped in a cab and took off to go on a tour of the old Presidential Palace.  We wandered around the grounds and he gave me insight into different things that happened back in 75.  He still remembers where he was and what he was doing during major points of the war.  It is a great benefit to be able to talk to someone about history when they lived through it.  We went through all the rooms that we could and some we probably should not have (oops).  Then we headed out into the town.  We walked around Notre Dame Cathedral and then visited the Post Office.  Both buildings are really old.  We continued walking around and I almost got in trouble for trying to take a picture of the American Consulate (later I was told not to take a picture of city hall either).  We continued walking around and he continued to tell me about events that happened here and there.  He showed me where he used to play soccer and ride his bike.  We headed back over to the chinese restraunt we ate at a few days ago.  This time a bunch of people from our office over here showed up.  They also brought a fish back from the island and had the restraunt cook it for us.  I finally found something that I really don’t like to eat over here…..chicken feet.  Other than that, we had our second peking duck of the trip, the mackeral from the island and some dim sum.  Everyone wanted to continue to hang out, so they took us to a tourist park in a different section of the city.  It was fun and I got to see lots of people getting wedding pictures taken there.  Then I asked people I was with if they had their pictures taken there and they had as well.  After a few hours walking around they decided it was time for dinner again.  There is a restraunt that was close by that I have been to before that we went too.  Pretty much the only thing on the menu is duck.  All sorts of different ways.  Duck is ok, but by now, this was the third meal of duck I have had in just a few days.  The good thing was this was not peking duck, it was roasted, spicy, in a soup, grilled and one other way that I didn’t recognize.  Everyone needed to get home, so we headed back to the hotel.  We tried to get to the market in time to do some shopping, but it closed right before we got there.  There were some vendors on the street, but it was mostly food or clothing.  We made the trek back to the hotel and I went to the gym and the sauna.  I tried out the steam room, but it smelled like rice and I could not breath.  Now I am listening to the city go crazy.  Apparently Vietnam won a football game in the SEA Games 2009.  Kind of like a mini olympics/world cup.  I hope this doesn’t make it hard to sleep, but with 50000 scooters revving their motors, beeping their horns, and their riders screaming, it is pretty loud.

Not a lot happened today.  I woke up and ate breakfast and then did some work.  Went out shopping for a little bit with my boss and picked a few small souveniers.  Nothing spectacular, but also something I have never seen.  I saw my first accident today.  A taxi ran into a motorbike, but it appeared that she was ok.  I am surprised that accidents don’t happen all the time.  I got back to the hotel and waited for my friend to show up so that we could go to the palace.  It turned out he thought that it was open later than it really was, so we decided to try to go tomorrow.  Instead of going out, I ended up in the gym for the first time in way too long.  I worked out for probably longer than I should have for my first time, then got ready for dinner.  We went to a steakhouse that I had been to before.  It was pretty good.  We sat around and drank some Bia (Vietnamese for beer) and then went back to the hotel again.  I am going to try to go to bed early, becuase I want to get out on the town early.

Wow, karaoke night was pretty cool.  We ended up having two meals that night.  The first was a standard meal where I had mackeral, shrimp, and short ribs.  The second meal was centered around wild boar.  Apparently they had caught and killed a 30 kilo boar just for our dinner.  (By the way for lunch I ate an egg fish head, it was very fishy).  The boar was good, but I was just not very hungry because we had eaten about an hour before.  The night consisted of photo taking and a party.  At the party there were games, which were hard for me to understand since I don’t speak the language, but it was still fun to watch.  Then there was the karaoke.  They tried hard to get me to sing, but it was not going to happen.  Especially after I heard them singing.  Some of them could try out for a Vietnamese version of Idol.  It ended up being a good evening with lots of fun.  Afterwards it was time for bed again.

We woke up for breakfast and then checked out of the hotel.  On the trip back to the airport, the views were really cool.  We would be up on the hillside looking down on the beaches and oceans.  I tried to take some pictures of it, but I don’t know if they are any good yet.  We got to the airport and I took some more pictures and then saw a pig wondering accross the street.  I lost sight of it and then saw another one and got some pictures of that one.   It is not every day that you see wild pigs running around an airport.  The airport was tiny as well with a short runway.  They would have a hard time extending the runway as the ocean is on either end of it, I guess we were near the tip of the island.   We flew back to Ho Chi Minh city and hit a little turbulence.  I really hate turbulence.  I also really hate rough landings.  Luckily I only had to deal with one of those.   We dropped our stuff at the hotel and headed out to get a quick bite to eat.  Then Lam and I walked back to the hotel and walked through the market.  It is surprising to me at how many westerners are around.  I don’t know if most are here for work or for pleasure, but it is good either way for the economy.  After getting back to the hotel, I logged in to do some work and fix some things that I was able too.  Then we went to dinner and had frog legs and peking duck.  Both were pretty good, but I was still kind of full from lunch.  Following this we went to a coffee shop on the street to sit, chat, and people watch.  Since this was across from some movie stores, we walked over and looked at all the movies for sale.  I did not get anything, but I could have gotten the new Twilight movie if I wanted it.  Then we walked back to the hotel again and I got back to work again and checked in with home.  I don’t know what is planned for the weekend yet, so hopefully I will have some fun things to share.