The Road To Vietnam

Over the period between Christmas and New Years, I spent an action packed week in Vietnam with my sister. Somehow, one of the most action packed nights was on the way to the airport in Korea.

It started with poor planning. I booked tickets through a travel agent and I thought that our flight was leaving from Busan, in the South of Korea, and flying back into Incheon, closer to our town. Instead both flights were to Busan airport, and I did not forsee how hectic of a travel time Christmas Eve would be. Kelsey and I tried to book a bus ticket to Daejeon so that we could take the train to Busan, but the tickets were sold out for that night. Even worse, all the train tickets going to Busan from Seoul were sold out as well. Oops.

So we were in a pretty big jam with no way to get to Busan and a flight leaving at 10:30 the next morning. Luckily, our friend Michael had told us that his girlfriends car was being kept at his place while she was out of the country, and that we could borrow it for a short trip. I told him about my predicament, and he told me that the car may not be reliable enough to make it 5 hour trip to Busan, but that we were welcome to try if we wanted. Lacking any better options, we were on our way by about 9:30 that night.

We finally got to the airport at 3 in the morning after being lost for a while and almost running out of gas. With nothing to do until the flight, we spent a pleasant night of sleeping in the car while periodically running the heater to warm ourselves. We finally went to the airport at about 6 in the morning, and we were once again on our way.

We did have a nice stop at a rest area. Korean rest areas are top notch. They have restaurants, convenience and coffee shops, and sometimes batting cages. We were lucky enough to find one with a Santa, and took this photo just as midnight and Christmas day were upon us:

So from there the flight was comparatively uneventful, and we made it to Hanoi, Vietnam. Another weird speedbump was when we tried to change our money at the airport, and it turned out that the banks did not take Korean Won. I took some money out of an ATM to have enough for a minibus to a hotel where we could change over some Won into Vietnamese Dong. Somehow, I managed to leave my card inside of the ATM so that it sucked it back in and I lost my American ATM card within a half hour of being in Vietnam. Nice going.

It turned out we found a giftshop that would buy some Won at a semi-reasonable rate so we had enough money to pay for two nights of hotel and two plane tickets. From there we didn't really have any money problems because we could just change over money at the hotels.

The minibus ride was nice into Hanoi, and then I took a few photos of our first time walking around:

Some kids playing ball

An awesome church

The top-notch electrical infrastructure of Vietnam

I thought the money was really cool. It's called Dong and it has a tiny clear window on it

The rest of the first day was relaxing. We spent some time exploring and made some friends who were graffiti artists from Ho Chi Minh City while drinking at an outside cafe.

We were walking and this lady was aggressively trying to sell us fruit. She put her hat and carrying stick on us for a photo without even asking. So we got some nice photos:

Kelsey

Me

After she pretty much forced us to buy some bananas, so I picked up four bananas for a dollar. Not really a great deal, but the photos were nice I guess. It was a nice end to a long day.