This was an email update I sent out Jan 26, 2007. I forgot to update this in xanga as well...

"Scrumptuous seafood lunch" was a scam. "Scrumptuous" meant a table of 5 people received 3 veggie dishes, 1 fish, and 1 squid/mixed veggies dish. We ate 3 meals through this company, and after every meal, everyone was still hungry. At one point I was shoving a chopstick into the fish's eye sockets trying to get some more, um, edible stuff. Probably yet another reason why I don't have a girlfriend. Complaining was useless though, as every tour boat is owned by the same company, and judging by the cattle herds of foreign tourists, nothing's gonna change anytime soon. Halong Bay was a lot like Sapa in terms of beautiful scenery marred by massive amounts of fog. Imagine the limestone rock formations in Guilin/Yangshuo, China, but in the open water. Pretty cool, but woulda been better if we could have seen a little more of the horizon. All was not loss, as we met some pretty cool people on board; a Columbian couple studying in Japan, and a brit gal who owns a bar and is an amazing Ultimate frisbee player. As in, World Championships amazing. She also was a professional horse jumper for a while.

Since Halong Bay however, the food and scenery have been getting better and better. Hanoi was awesome, the only downer being that we were only there for a night. Jon had been in Hanoi for already, so he  totally took over and was our guide and did a great job at it. And might I say, Hanoi has some great food. Jinju's classmate at Nankai is Vietnamese, so I met up with her before coming to Vietnam and asked for some food advice. So we went to the place where she said was the best pho in Hanoi, and... it was stinking good. BFF also busted out some Vietnamese "What time do you close". Its awesome, if you see him you gotta ask him to show it to you. Suffice to say, the person that he asked just turned around and ignored him. I also got to get rid of a bunch of my old books and picked up some more second-hand ones; a book by Douglas Copeland and a collection of stories from McSweeny's. We also had some awesome fruit juice and street food, with a walk around the lake and the Old Quarter.

BFF on Tintin, the cartoon that everyone that's not American knows about: "So is it like, interesting?" [said in a typically arrogant American style, you know, as in when an American shows surprise that something can be good and interesting without having originated from America]

10 minutes later, BFF's looking to buy some pretty sweet Tintin book covers. I found some sweet old Air France posters, but I didn't get 'em. I almost left some money with Samara, a.k.a. Scarfgirl to go back to the place to get them for me since she has an extra day in Hanoi, but Jo (Horse-jumping-frisbee-bar owner) said that they have 'em cheaper in Saigon. So there. Meh, so I was given/stuck with the same nickname that I had in Mongolia; Tintin. Something to do with my hair, and how it sticks up I think. I'm noticing people pointing at my hair here.

We left Hanoi at the buttcrack of dawn to go to Nha Trang via the worst taxi driver listening to the worst music.

Tintin (yours truly) on Vietnamese music: From what we've heard so far; it sucks. Our driver this morning busted out some Vietnamese techno-muzak. It was bad. Ask BFF for an imitation sometime.

Tintin, BFF and Momma Hen on Nha Trang: This place rocks. We spent a few hours lying on the beach, with somehow 100% of the sun rays hitting BFF's pasty white skin reflecting straight to Momma Hen. Seriously, I'm on my way to looking like a Filipino again, Momma Hen's red, and BFF's still looking like an anorexic hairy Casper. If that's not a testament to our awesome uniqueness as created beings, I don't know what is.

Our biggest difficulty here has been deciding which seafood place to check out for meals; however this problem has been solved. 100 feet away from our hostel, there are people selling grilled lobster on the street for 150,000 VND per kilo. That's just under 10 bucks per kilo of lobster. PER KILO OF LOBSTER. LOBSTER. LOBSTER. We had to see for ourselves, so we asked to weigh one of the SMALLER lobsters, and it was around .8 kilos. There are lobsters that looked at least 1.5 times bigger too. We talked to a couple eating there, and they said in restaurants its 700,000 VND. Suffice to say, BFF and I are gonna get our lobster on.

Edit: At this point my computer froze and we went off to get the lobster. We've just finished and I came back to finish this.] Here's why...

We had 6 big tiger prawns and a 1.1 kilo lobster on the grill, with drinks, and the total came to 5 dollars per person for the 3 of us. Let me repeat, 6 tiger prawns, 1.1 kilo lobster, drinks, all for a grand total of 15 dollars. As BFF so eloquently stated, "Nha Trang, where have you been all my life?" Oh yeah, in addition to being
grilled, the lobster also came out with this kick-ass sauce. To describe it, y'all TO folks know the black bean and lobster place in downtown? I can't remember the name of it, but its like that sauce. But a whole lot better. Suffice to say, we're going back tomorrow for crabs and squid. I'm pretty sure every night we'll be eating there for dinner.