my adventures in southeast asia this journal is going to be a documentation of my travels and experiences in se asia this summer. i will be traveling with my university (of which i am a recent alumna), and touring the countries of vietnam, laos, cambodia, and thailand.

the first day started off early... well early for the 5.5 hours of sleep i had. we went to listen to this guy give a speech on vietnamese culture for an hour (he wrote 2 books... one called "wondering through vietnamese culture"). i feel so bad because everyone else found him very interesting... the lady beside me was taking notes even!... but i was so bored and only understood about 10 worlds out of the whole thing! i will try and post a picture of the dry erase board this guy was writing on and hopefully you will understand my boredom. after his speech we went to the ethnic museum. outside they have replica tribal houses that we could actually go into. they were so amazing!!! if i could just put ac in it and running water, i would want to live in it! we then had lunch at a restaurant next to west lake. it was delicious and the brought so much food we could barely fit it all on the table! and it pretty much looked the same when we were done, we didnt even make a dent. we had free time after lunch so tony, jake, and i took the chance to go to the market north of our hotel. it was all inside and stuffed with all sorts of nick-nacks, clothes, fabric, food, and just about anything else you can imagine. we then wondered the streets in the rain until we made it back to the hotel (without getting lost i might add)! by that time i was needing a nap so went up to my room with high hopes. well i did not have a watch and so i was really nervous about missing dinner so after a while i came down to get on the internet and check the time. i was here at 5:30 according to the computer and i needed to leave at 5:45... pretty good timing if you ask me. well no one else was down here so i sat down here for like 40 min. till i finally asked jake what time it was... the computer was an hour fast... so annoying, so i went back to my room to read. we had dinner at a little hole in the wall restaurant (which is how most of them are here). our table was on the third story and we had it all to ourselves. after dinner we came back for about 30 min until we went to the famous water puppet show. it was so fun to watch, but i was so tired. as soon as we got back i crawled into bed for what ended up being a very bad night of sleep.