So long, Saigon. It’s been fun Time to go already? We try to find the perfect balance between exploring and relaxing. We are still on vacation. Blogging everyday of this trip is worth it, even if time intensive at times. Reading these entries will make residency so much easier. Having a crappy day, doctor? How about reliving Boracay!!! Dying to party? Carnival is a click away. We do the departure jingle. The guy from Holiday Travel and Tours, who picked us up at the airport last week, picks us up today. The extra dong that we have left over needs to [View Full Entry]

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After our attempt to have a night out in Saigon, I swear off hard liquor and the nasty stomach hangovers it brings. Beer and wine will do just fine. Well, really just wine. I’ll be oenophile by necessity. Shouldn’t be too hard, we get to Europe soon enough. Brekkie was same same, and the morning hours are spent watching movies, surfing web, and IMing mom. Wanna see the Reunification Palace? We drove by it a couple of times and it looks kinda boring from the book. How about the Ho Chi Minh City museum? Nah. Jade Emperor Pagoda? I guess. With [View Full Entry]

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Why pay full price, when the bootleg version is just as good I don’t even know where to start. The Museum of American War Crimes, aka the War Remnants Museum, has put my mind in a tizzy. I was less pensive and more disturbed by what I saw. Now let me quickly recap the earlier part of the day, then I’ll give an account of the atrocities committed by the USA that were tantamount, if not paramount, to dropping an atomic bomb on Vietnam. We get up, had breakfast, update the blog—subscribers, sorry for the bombardment—and set out into the sticky, [View Full Entry]

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Moving, again Our package with Holiday Tour and Travel was for four nights, so today we have to get a hotel of our own. We had (mistakenly) pre-booked a hotel when we bought the Vietnam package. Boy, we must really have been feeling lazy in Melbourne. I can’t blame us… after the whirlwind that was Match Day and the Move, I think we just wanted Vietnam handed to us on a platter. Maybe now that we’ve rested and been taken care of in Manila, we’re more apt to do more on our own like we usually do. This morning, someone from [View Full Entry]

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The Fruits of Our Labor I guess one good thing about our hotel room switching is that we got a new fruit basket in each place. The A/C didn’t work in our first room, it was better in the second but the room was tiny, and when we were upgraded to a bigger suite with a bigger fruit basket, the A/C was just as it was in the first room. By then, it was 10pm and we just gave up. Poor Leroy, he fell asleep but would wake up saying, “It’s so hot.” Well, the superior room did get us one [View Full Entry]

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A Different Kind of Embassy Adventure The minute we wake up, Leroy checks the UEFA scores. He had gotten up at 2:30am to watch the Man U game, but it was already half time because there was an error in the schedule he checked. With Man U up 4-0 over Roma, he shut the TV off and hit bed. It turns out they won 7-1, and Chelsea beat Valencia 2-1. Our bags are packed and ready, and we hit the breakfast buffet, which always has meat, sautéed vegetables, fried eggs, and noodles, as well as fruit, bread, and coffee/tea. I opt [View Full Entry]

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MOVED Today is the day we stood face to face with history. Moments like these are so intense that they shake my soul. The most profound of these moments was in the summer of 2000 when I visited Cape Coast Castle in Ghana. My mind was blown away as I toured this one time slave castle, looking out of the “Door of No Return” and envisioning the journey of my ancestors involved in the trans-Atlantic slave trade. Standing in the male dungeon, two levels below the church and wondering to what God those satanic slave drivers prayed to. A similar, but [View Full Entry]

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Morning rush hour The morning was rather chaotic. There were still pictures to be transferred to DVD for the folks in Manila, bags to be zipped and locked, showers to be taken, and a light lunch to be consumed two hours after breakfast was eaten so that we wouldn’t get hungry on the plane. Tita Reena had a fish omelet prepared for us to complement the oatmeal and fruit that became morning ritual since returning from Boracay. In between meals, Meli spent more time working on her presentation. I finished up Talladega Nights and got cracking on the picture transfer. It [View Full Entry]

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Getting Down to Business As expected, our last day is about getting stuff done that must absolutely get done while we’re in Manila. This includes reading hundreds of pages of information and policies from Harbor-UCLA and filling out paperwork that must be received before the end of this month. We have to leave all the signed documents with my mother so she can mail them from L.A. So, unlike all our other breakfasts, this one is spent with plate to the side and mounds of paper in the center. All that legal stuff delays the rest of our day, which we [View Full Entry]

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The ghost tales from last night caused quite a stir. Meli woke me up in the middle of the night…well, more like I woke her up with my floundering and grunting. The dream: I dreamt that there were two indistinct shadows in our room. It was one of those dreams where you can’t separate dream from reality. Melissa asked me who was in the room, but I ignored her at first, and then told her to keep quiet and maybe the shadows would leave. We talked about how weird that was and fell back to sleep. Moments later, the shadows came [View Full Entry]

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