At 6:30am, to the Vietnamese version of "I am your Lady and You are My Man..." we were awoken. It was Saturday and this incident hadn't happened this early to us before. We had walked the streets in various towns listening to classical, elevator music as well as Asian Pop but never as our alarm bell. We would have been grumpy if the choice of music hadn't been so funny. Next was a guitar piece by The Shadows - their most famous one and after that I recognised " I Believe in Yesterday" (The Beatles) and "Don't Cry for Me Argentina". In between songs there was a bit of chattering which may have been propoganda? And before an hour was up it all stopped. We ate and dressed to venture out to a couple of tourist sites that were on the outskirts of the city and were going to need a few taxi rides to save time. Our first stop was the HCM Masoleum which houses the embalmed corpse of the country’s favourite leader - Ho Chi Minh. In a moment of mathematical dyslexia I multiplied our cab fare by 10000 instead of 1000 and handed over $17 instead of $1.70 – he took off very quickly before my brain went into gear and realised what I had done. Adrian had me in tears for 20 minutes (over $15 – how ridiculous) as anyone who knows him would realise that this wasn’t something to have a laugh over or even accept! We continued in the line of 1000’s to see the body of HCM – it was interesting to witness the seriousness of it all especially with the Security surrounding and inside the complex. After this we hailed another taxi to get to The Museum of Ethnology. It was fabulous- modern, large, and informative with English translations. Unfortunately we didn’t have a great amount of time here as we had to return for our hotel’s check out by noon. Our favourite part was the life size replicas of the minority peoples’ houses from various regions which could climb into and wander around. A group of female students hounded Asher and each one had to have their photo taken with him. I’m sure a lot of people think he’s older than he is here because of his height – which is often taller than some adults-hence the interest from girls. After a quick ride back to our hotel, just in time, we put our packs on our backs once more to waste some time before our train departure that night. First, we went to some shoe shops as Ash and Nim both wanted to send home a pair of shoes each. Ash chose, for $9, some red hi-cut converse and Nim bought some yellow leather converse sandals (Birkenstock style) for the same price. Again, if they weren’t real, they were great fakes. We stopped at a street corner shop with a couple of plastic chairs for Adrian to have a few glasses of local brew. We then spent a lot of time at the International Post Office filling out forms and packing our 10kg box of purchases as well as the gear we decided we didn’t need. After this, with a few hours to spare, we found a bench at Hoam Kiem Lake to people-watch but ended up busy in conversation with locals. Adrian was approached by a local Uni lecturer and his friend who wanted to practise their English. Asher joined in with them as did Nim later. I ended up doing a Tourist survey for some students and then had sporadic conversations with a 1-legged woman who had great English. She was selling fruit and because I didn’t buy any she would try and sell to passers by as the opportunity arose and then return to me. She wanted to know about my family and didn’t say much about herself except that she didn’t have a family and while studying English at Uni she was attacked and ended up losing her leg. We continued our slow trip to the train by stopping for dinner. We hoped to find somewhere nice for Ni'mah to eat as it was her Birthday but didn’t have much luck. We did, however, buy donuts in place of a Birthday cake to consume on the train. At the station, as the time for departure got closer, we realised they weren’t announcing boarding of trains. We had been told we were at the right gate and luckily I went and checked where we should be- well, it was at the right gate but we were on platform 1 and had to walk across the train tracks (no bridges-and trains using the tracks) to platform 9. We were only seated for 10 minutes before the train left 5 minutes early without warning – phew! In our soft seated carriage with air conditioning (sometimes) we were the only foreigners seated with 4 other locals in our area. On the trip they constantly offered us food including green (unripe) chewy, sour mango which the kids loved snacking on as well as thick slices of compressed rice with chilli and dried shredded pork – it was alright! Following that it was quite embarassing to take out our colourful donuts to quietly sing Ni'mah her Birthday song. Nim also got a lot of attention from rows and rows of teenagers behind us. They were quite rowdy until the lights were turned out. We had a better sleep this time as we were less paranoid about our bags . As our trip was all in darkness, we didn’t get to see any of the scenery.
