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Published: January 1st 2011
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my attempt
5 in the morning...you get the idea though...lots of pretty lights! Our train arrived around 4:15 am, so we walked to the lake to get a little closer to the Kangaroo Café and that part of town. Kangaroo Café suggests you wait until Jasper’s breakfast at 6:30 (a restaurant near the train station), but we didn’t feel like doing that. There were tons of people there around the lake, stretching, warming up, and exercising. It was sort of strange because they warmed up for like 30 minutes by swinging their arms back and forth. I did see one lady jumping for cardio though, but other than that they didn’t really do much. Maybe it was some sort of Tai Chi. We took some pictures of the lake and the trees around it that were lit up by balls of Christmas lights. The lights went out around 5:45 so we started walking around to find a place where we could wait for the café to open.
Our three goals for the day:
1. Get our bags from the Kangaroo Café
2. Dye Ronald’s hair green at the shop we found before going to Sa Pa
3. Get my laundry back from the woman I left it with
We accomplished 2.5 of
it wants rubbish
so just give it rubbish these goals, but more on that later.
Our first stop was The Little Kitchen, the restaurant that is on the lake. We stayed there for a while (Ronald used their WiFi) and had a sandwich and browsed their magazine selection. We started reading Timeout thinking it was the famous one for certain cities around the world, but this was different. I took down some notes, but then we headed out.
Went to the Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum (open Tues through Thurs, 8-11 am; closed Monday and Friday – so strange!), then went to dye Ronald’s hair. We were at the hair salon (which was completely open, by the way…I think it’s the time of year, but every storefront is completely open save for a few restaurants) for about 4 hours. First they dyed it yellow, then they tried to dye it bright green. This resulted in a snow-cone-like color in his hair. The woman apologized and said it had turned blue instead of green because the others had left it in too long while she was gone for lunch. (By the way, this was communicated through the woman we talked to before Sa Pa, the one who wrote
army museum
not really sure what this is a note in Vietnamese for us saying that Ronald wanted green hair. She works at a beauty store across from this salon and was the one who told us to come there. She and her mother went in the same time we were there for a hair wash and style.) I ran over to where our translator girl was working and she explained the circumstances and we asked to take a tube of dye to go to dye in a couple of days. Ronald’s scalp was burning after the second dye and it even bled a little, so he didn’t want to stay and dye it again. The woman gave us gloves and some tubes of dye to take with us, and we paid 100,000 less than what the woman asked, due to the hair fiasco. Actually, it’s not that bad, I sort of like it. It really does look like a yummy snow-cone.
Our train was the worst we’ve taken so far. This time we shared our cabin with a high-school Danish couple. There were roaches crawling around and that’s all I think I need to say about that train ride.
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