Made it to Vietnam... Arrived unexpectedly late and wound up walking for a while and meeting Dylan and his wonderful girlfriend Grace for dinner in District 1. It was a very strange feeling to be walking through such a chaotic and foreign place, and then to see a familiar person standing there in the scene! Saigon seems unique against some of the other Asian cities I have been to...not sure exactly why yet, maybe the pictures will show it...give me a couple more days. I have been borrowing an extra motorbike from Dylan and riding around the city with him. INSANITY...no road rules, hundreds of thousands of people on motorbikes, on foot, in buses beeping and merging through each other at intersections in a way that makes you want to live for today...there will be photos and possible some video! One of the first things we did was go and visit some local fruit markets...being in a tropical rainforest this place has cheap access to loads of amazing fruit....more than half of which I have never laid buds on before...very exciting. I discovered the best fruit ever...not a great fruit or an amazing fruit mind you, but the best fruit. Now, you might say to yourself, "well that's a bit subjective"...but you would be wrong. It's called a mangosteen, and it's right up there at the top of the page, and it's the best fruit ever...passion fruit is pretty tasty too.
Dylan then discovered that he has a pretty serious allergy to Mango sap...this photo is actually from the early stages...those blisters continued to grow over the next day or so and are now about three times as big with several new arrivals as well. At first he thought it was the very serious flesh eating bacterial skin condition "necrotizing fasciitis" which wouldn't be out of the question here in the jungle...but after I got a touch of it as well we put our heads together and narrowed it down to mango sap from the fruit market...apparently it can have effects similar to poison ivy, and in some people (like Dylan) cause severe skin reactions! He seems to be recovering somewhat, but it is still pretty gross. Getting used to the currency here takes a little time...I have gotten used to doing the conversions in my head, but this is the first time I have had to deal with being a millionaire...in Dongs anyway. The other night we went out and got about half a millions' worth of sushi...I was responsible for about 300,000.00 worth of the damage personally...
I am looking forward to getting to try all of the things that you can sometimes miss when you are just traveling and passing through a place. Dylan has been here for over a year, and that is a pretty cool perspective. I am also keeping my fingers crossed that my blisters don't grow to the size of his, and that I didn't scratch my backside during the critical spreading time window!
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