Thành phố Hồ Chí Minh day two!

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After putting in a few hours or work the first full day I met up with the Regional Director for Southeast Asia for a drink at the hotel bar before our other colleague joined us for dinner. Oddly enough we ended up at a Lebanese place complete with belly dancers and blaring music. It was an outdoor-ish restaurant, which was the style of many restaurants here, a semi-enclosed garden/patio-style place. It had fans blowing but it was still above 90 degrees at at 8:30pm so it wasn't exactly comfortable. We had a bottle of red, some assorted meze, and a mixed grill - all really good, but the meat portion took probably 45 minutes to arrive. I was still somewhat jet-lagged and had also been up since 4am, so once dinner was done I was ready for bed.

I slept like shit again, so by 5 I was up and as a result had some time to do some work and hit the gym before meeting the rest of the team for breakfast. I once again gorged myself on Asian breakfast food - also managed to scope out the smoked salmon - and sat with work colleagues from Indonesia. At 8:15 we were all to meet in the lobby to walk over to the office, which was only 5 or 10 minute around the corner by foot. Similar in size to the Shanghai office, the HCMC office was located in a large office building and one of many on the floor it was on. It was basically a miniature version of the Boston HQ but with a fun wall map showcasing all of our university partners that we don't have in Boston. After meeting new colleagues from Thailand, Malaysia, and Vietnam, I spent the first several hours training the new admissions team member who was to be based in that office. Before I knew it it was lunch time and the whole team headed out via taxi to a place called Hum Vegetarian Restaurant and Lounge. While I initially thought WTF when I saw it was vegetarian, the food was actually outstanding and I was completely satisfied without any meat. After starting out with coconut water served in a giant coconut we started with fried lotus sticks and a pomelo salad with fried shallots and almonds. Curried tofu served out of a coconut, dragon's blood rice with gingko served out of a mysterious fruit, braised mushrooms, and deep-fried taro nests were among the other things we ate, but I honestly had no idea what was what for most of it. The presentation was also amazing. What wasn't amazing is that the second I started to eat hot food a waterfall began to erupt from my forehead. The restaurant was indoors but the a/c was shitty, and when I went to the bathroom to literally dry myself off it ended up being like a sauna in there and only made things worse. I guess I should count my blessings because at least there wasn't a circle of sweat on my butt, which is what I was expecting.

After lunch was another hour or so of training before our group team-building activity, which was a two-hour city tour via cyclo, a three-wheeled bicycle taxi that Vietnam is known for. Apparently they appeared during the French colonial period after a failed attempt at introducing rickshaws, but today they are primarily a tourist attraction. The next two hours were one of the coolest and exciting experiences I've ever had. The traffic in Ho Chi Minh City is insane with all of the motorbikes, and we were in the thick of it, literally dodging cars and bikes left and right. Only ran into one motorbike once, a mother and daughter! With maybe a dozen of us each with our own cyclo driver pedaling behind us it was quite a site, and I don't know how these tiny Vietnamese guys managed to haul our fat assess for literally two hours around the city, with only two brief stops. The first stop was Thien Hau Temple, a Chinese-style temple in District 5 dedicated to the "Lady of The Sea", a deity worshiped by seafaring communities both in China and in Southeast Asia, The most impressive part of temple was the porcelain figurines adorning the rooftop, depicting scenes from 19th century China, which is also when the temple was built. The temple itself was a partially-covered courtyard culminating in a giant altar dedicated to Thien Hau - pretty impressive. The second stop, at the very, end, was the re-unification palace, which I had already been to the day before. All in all it could not have been cooler - they even gave us each a non la, one of the traditional Vietnamese rice paddy hats, to keep the the blazing sun out of our faces.

Shockingly in the course of those two hours I had sweat through my second outfit of the day, so in the hour before dinner I ended up showering and changing yet again. Dinner took us to SH Garden, a rooftop terrace Vietnamese restaurant overlooking the City Hall and Ho Chi Minh Statue - stunning. Like at lunch, the Vietnam team did all the ordering, and soon enough plate after plate of amazing Vietnamese food began to appear - braised pork belly, fried pancake filled with shrimp wrapped in lettuce and herbs, stir-fried pumpkin flower with beef, and stir-friend freshwater claims with fried rice paper. All of that was washed down with a lemongrass iced tea - everything could not have been better! Truly exhausted, by 9pm I was back to the hotel and in bed, hoping that I'd finally get a good night's sleep.

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