Vietnam

Not going to lie, only being on the ship for two days at a time may force my blog posts to diminish drastically. I never bring my computer off the ship and two days at sea is barely enough time to catch up on all of my school papers, let alone record my adventures. I will try to post a picture here and there if nothing else though. And once we leave Japan and spend a couple weeks sailing across the Pacific, I will have no end of time to catch everyone up on everything that has happened.

Vietnam was insane! I absolutely loved it, and would go back in a heartbeat. It was completely different than I expected: more modernized, and yet not completely developed to the point that it loses all of those little cultural aspects that make it Vietnam. On the first day a group of us hung out with our friend's dad, who actually lives in Vietnam. He took us out for Pho (so delicious) and then to the Cu Chi Tunnels. Crawling through those endless claustrophobic mazes while listening to gunshots in the background (they had a shooting range with war-period firearms that you could fire) was extremely eerie to say the least. After the tunnels we were dropped off at the airport and headed out to Nha Trang. Two of us spent the second day diving, which was incredible. The visibility was not the best, but the amount of marine life we identified was endless. The massages in Vietnam were superb. You can go get a professional 90-minute massage for like $15. I can't even tell you how many massages I got; I lost track. We spent a lot of time in the backpacker districts, staying in hostels with other travelers from all over the world. It was so inspiring hanging out with people who have been doing exactly what they love, traveling for months on end. On our last night, back in Ho Chi Minh City, we had dinner with a guy from Bolivia, a guy from England, a guy from Italy, and a girl from Argentina who has been living in Japan for the past two years. Such cool people. Also our dive master the second day was an English lady who was now living in Vietnam, and had spent the previous year in Thailand. I asked her what her story was and she said that she knew that all she really wanted to do was travel. And so she got her teaching certification from PADI, and now can travel all over the world teaching dive courses. How is such a life not too good to be true?? I think I finally know what I want to do after school.