Tour of duty in Nam almost over...

Greetings from Saigon, or as it is officially known now, Ho Chi Minh City.

Tis I.. Damo writing to you this balmy evening as Beck has retired early after a hard day. Maybe it had more to do with the hard night before we had with the discovery of our new favourite thing, Bier Hoi.

Imagine a little street facing shop, little tiny kid sized plastic chairs and tables low to the ground where you buy 2 litre plastic bottles of home brew called Bier Hoi for 4 to 8000 dong a pop. We are worth around 1 AUD per 14000 dong. Do the simple math and revel in our newfound joy. Thanks for the tipoff El Nickoss. We loveses him the Bier Hoi! :)

We made some wonderful new Vietnamese friends last night at our local Bier Hoi which is just up the road from our hotel, which was also a fabulous find at only 20 USD per night and is clean and quiet but also smack bang in the middle of everything here in Ho Chi Minh.
Anyone travelling this way could do a hell of a lot worse than stay at the Viet Nghi hotel whilst here, and believe me, we checked out many places which ranged from disgusting to downright creepy.

We got ushered in to our Bier Hoi by a guy named Hoa who we suspected at first of trying to pull some sort of "get the foreigners extremely drunk and then stiff them with the bill" kind of scam. We only wanted to quietly drink our two litres of beer then leave but our table kept topping up our drinks and endlessly cheered everyone with a Vietnamese "Yo.." Which is Vietnamese for cheers.

We lost count of the endless litres of beer we consumed, we swapped cultural tales with Hoa and his friends. He insisted we speak with a young girl of 13, accompanied by her father and cousin as he had brought her there with the express purpose of practicing her english with us foreigners. Hoa explained that he had learned english in a similar fashion when he was younger and that it really helps people here get a leg up in the world job wise if they have good english.

I don't know if our drunken babble was much help but she insisted it was, and her father and Hoa were very grateful we took the time to have a conversation with her. Beck made a new best friend of a young Vietnamese lady who didn't speak much english, and she thought Beck was wonderful, so wonderful that we promised we would meet up with her and Hoa tomorrow night to celebrate her 26th birthday at the same Bier Hoi. I think Beck is wonderful too so I understand how she succumbed to her charms so quickly! :)

So many stories, so little time. Crossing the road could be a blog entry unto itself.. so dear friends and family, for now I bid you goodnight. Hope your all happy and well.

FYI, There was no scam pulled on us with the bill which I think we ended up paying 20000 dong for. An obscene amount of beer was drunk for what turned out to be about a buck fifty australian. Crazy! :)

Enjoy!

Damo. :)