...My Own Final Fantasy

and guess what? i didn't get a thing made! i think i'm the 1st person in history to not have a thing made in hoi an. when we got off our bus, we took a few looks around at hotels until we found the perfect one. and by perfect, i mean it had a swimming pool and an awesome room. vietnam wins for best accomodation, aside from the odd thief here and there. we could also rent a dvd player at our hotel so we could watch our pirated copies of 'deadwood' and 'trueblood' in our rooms. johan also arrived on a different bus and it turns out he lost his iphone somewhere along the way...... oops! so this is this precise moment i kissed my phone goodbye for the duration of our vietnam trip. figured, with landon and i sharing a room and johan wherever he was..... why would we have 2 phones when he could borrow mine? damn, i'm such a thoughtful guy... onto hoi an! well, it's a blur. this is one in particular i wished i covered in this blog right after i left. i'll cover it the best i can. bia hoi was prevalent in hoi an, but the price went up a whopping 1000 dong from hanoi's 3000 dong. a difference of 8 cents maybe? no big deal. and there are tailor shops EVERYWHERE. i think if i were to name the tourist spot of vietnam (at least at this time of year) it would be hoi an. in the evening, the 3 of us went out to a restaurant by the river that was highly touted by the book. i guess alot of people figured this because it was packed with people, despite it's nasty appearance. it looked like a dungeon and there were cockroaches crawling around openly. there was on table left with no chairs, so we went to this table where there was a party of fat americans and took their 3 free chairs, and they got upset, saying there were more people coming. we ended up getting these crappy stools and it turns out those fat bastards that were being waited for (and they WERE fat) didn't show up until we were just about done. thee fatties proabably would have preferred the stools because the chair's backing would have just been an obstacle for their large asses. anyways, the food was sub par and i think we found ourselves in a bar later on called then and now. behind the bar was a pictured of bono from U2 wearing a superman outfit. the place was alright, we met a pair of german girls playing table soccer and drank with them for the evening until we were joined by the three german guys we met in hue! it was a german mix mash with the dutch and canadians! the girls were unbeatable at table soccer until a pair of the german dudes dethroned them. lando and i teamed up to challenge the champs and actually defeated them while johan taunted the germans by singing o cananda..... good times in hoi an. (which is an anagram of hanoi. vietnam needs to get more clever with naming their cities...) homeways is bestways as the night grows drunker, and a dark walk home on streets littered with rats and cockroaches made for a pleasant one. hoi an wins most cockroaches award. (luckily not in the hotel) the next day my facebook told me that some friends i made while traveling in laos were staying at the EXACT SAME HOTEL as me. what odds.... we rented bikes and met them down on the beach, which was a good 20 minute bike ride out of town. the waves were amazing, but it was way too windy to truly enjoy yourself, what with the sand always blowing everywhere. in the water, all the girls and johan were stung by jellyfish except for me... all the girls were stalked by creepy mcbaseballhat, who actually grabbed a cheap feel on one of the british girls we met there. aside from these unfortunate events for them, everything else was fine. i loved the waves. i was never actually much into beaches and shit like that before, but i also suppose that canada kind of sucks for that. i mean, we're in the tropics here! different beaches. i was bobbing up with the uncoming waves, or diving into them head first. so fun... the beach day didn't last long on account of it being windy and all so we venturted back into town and all reconvened at this place called the mango room. landon really wanted to go and talked everyone into it. holy hell, was it expensive.... everything was priced as though we were in north america. even a bottle of water rung up a nasty 50,000 dong. forget it! i refused to order anything, but everyone else ordered but kept it as cheap as possible. i waited it out until we went out for drinks later on and ordered a tasty pizza. apparently, all i eat is dough.... i said goodnight to lando who was tired and partially walked her home when it started to pour. excellent! johan, the british girls and i ventured back to the bar we played table soccer at the night before and it was like a laos reunion! we bumped into a pile of people that we all met in laos.... weird times in hoi an. the night ended sour unfortuantely, as there was a misunderstanding with the bill. the staff overcharged us for 2 beers and the americans we were with made a huge deal about it. the beers cost a little over a dollar.... next day.... oh right, the walking tour. what a bust! you buy a ticket and gain access to a few places, but it's a bit of a choose your own adventure. you can choose one museum of 2 or 3, 1 heritage home of a few etc etc. everything we saw was mostly ho hum material. at this point, i am through with museums! it's always same same but different! most of the rest of the day was spent playing cards, drinking bia hoi, saying goodbye to the british girls and anticipating our upcoming trip to nha trang. i also forgot to mention, we were walking down a street at one point and landon was wearing her vietnam hat previously purchased at the market. there were some locals working on a bike on the sidewalk and were like, "ahhh vietnam" and we were like, "yeaaa"... then out of nowhere one of the guys face twisted and he said "FUCK YOU!". what the hell?