Adventures By Design

In which the travelers communicate telepathically

Today the plan was to take care of some errands in the morning, and then visit the National Museum in the afternoon. We had two errands to take care of: first, we needed to find a place to do our laundry, and second we needed to apply for our visa to Vietnam. While we browsed a map of the city to find the Vietnamese embassy, one of the hotel’s desk employees approached us and told us that he had a photocopied map with the embassy’s location marked on it. We were happy as this would make directing a tuk-tuk much easier. But our hotel wasn’t finished helping us yet: for $2 the hotel could arrange to have our visas completed in two days time. We wouldn’t have to do anything! We paid up, and handed over our passports and a photo each. Our visas should be ready the day after tomorrow.

Next was laundry, which we found right next door to the hotel. The shop could do it in one day for $1.50/Kg which sounded great to us. In an attempt to avoid stinky clothes Ric asked for ‘no perfume,’ and received a blank look in reply. We tried ‘no aroma’ and ‘no smell’ without anymore understanding. We decided it wasn’t that big of a deal and confirmed that our clothes would be ready tomorrow. “Yes, 6 o’clock,” the man replied, “no perfume, right?” Uh, sure… apparently we managed to get the message across somehow. Now we’re just hoping that they’ll still use soap.

After this we decided to skip the National Museum. There are only so many museums that one can visit and we hadn’t heard anything remarkable about this one. The four of us discussed it and figured that we didn’t feel like spending the afternoon wandering around random exhibits that we probably wouldn’t understand anyway. So Jesse and Janelle headed out to the internet cafe; and we stayed in our room and worked on photos and writing for the blog. In the evening we met up again for dinner and a few card games before bed.