Pho for the president!

December means it's time for another trip! Richerd and I(but mainly just me) decided on Vietnam and Cambodia this year! Before our adventure began however, we had to get there first. That in itself was quite a hassle. I had to bus to Fukuoka and then transfer in Taipei before arriving in Ho Chi Minh.

There was a moment of panic before we managed to meet up in Fukuoka. I somehow had an epic time management fail and thought my flight was a day later than it actually was! Good thing I realized in time, but it left me feeling like I lost a whole day. I was still taking my time, thinking I would be able to take a night bus and meet Richerd at the central train station on Saturday morning. I got to the the bus depot after work however and realized that the night bus was completely full, meaning I would have to spend the night in Fukuoka instead! Worse yet, the next and last bus for the night(besides the full night bus) was in one hour! I had one hour to rush home from the bus depot on my bike(took 25 minutes), pack and taxi it back to the bus depot! I must have packed in 10 minutes, it was insane!

I didn't even have time to charge anything, so there I was on a bus heading to Fukuoka with a dying phone. No booked accommodations, full hostels(it was a long weekend) and with Richerd still thinking I was going to arrive in the morning. In my desperation I sent him a tweet explaining everything and then my phone died completely. I didn't know whether I was going to have to be homeless for the night! When I got to Fukuoka however, Richerd greeted me at the bus station and had already booked a bed for me! Saved by twitter! :P

The rest of the commute was smooth sailing, we flew with China Airlines and I must say I was impressed! Their meals were much better than normal airplane food and they had cute christmas decorations on the plane too! We got to Ho Chi Minh at night and ate very stereotypical Vietnamese food, pho noodles for our first meal! Look at all the basil they gave us, you'd think basil was free! We were very tired from a whole day of commuting, so it was a quick bed time after some wandering around the backpacker's area.

The next morning we decide to head to the market, the traffic was very busy and we soon learned how to walk onto incoming traffic.... just do it. There are no traffic lights anywhere and you just have to walk slowly so that cars and scooters can try to avoid you.... yes, try. We walked by a restaurant that said Pho for the President... I later read that a Clinton had eaten there before?

The market was very busy with vendors grabbing our arms and stopping us in our tracks to sell us things. Most of the merchandise was "same same" and low quality however, so we headed over to the food section. We got some cheap salad rolls for 30 cents each and learned the REAL way to make them! No wonder our rolls always fall apart! You fold the sides in and then add more ingredients instead of folding at the very end. What an epiphany.

I leave you with some delicious salad rolls.

P.s Trying to merge posterous and blogger and failing has reminded me of why I blog so little... I hate the platforms! Richerd is way ahead of me in blogging about our trip, please check out his posts at www.richerd.com :)

P.p.s We just got back from a 5 day trip in Tokyo yesterday... my blog just can't keep up with my travels! Too many photos, too many events, too many people... and very user-unfriendly platforms = outdated readers.