This weekend was my first sortie out of town. I went with Mr. D and his girlfriend to Vung Tau and Ho Coc. Vung Tau is a resort town about an hour and a half from Ho Chi Minh City. It was briefly famous as the place from which the last U.S. military personnel left Vietnam in 1973. It was much sleepier than I had expected, it's chief attraction being that it is not HCMC. The beaches are nothing to write home about, but it doesn't have the noise or the hustle and bustle of HCMC- and for that I was grateful.

We had crab soup and crabs with tamarind sauce (yum!) for lunch before heading on to Ho Coc, which is a further 80 km or so east. The road there is terrible, with potholes to rival those I experienced in China. Ho Coc is just a small strip of beach with maybe a dozen huts and a couple of restaurants. I saw just the one foreigner couple, so I suppose it is a bit remote by Vietnamese standards. We gorged on loads of seafood: combination steamboat, shrimp, sour fish soup, blackened fish cooked in a clay pot and more. It was all quite nice except for the fact that there were two communist youth groups doing some sort of induction ceremony and they played bad pop music 'til all hours of the night. Damn commies didn't let me get a good night of sleep! 

This is the sort of thing that just a few months ago would have really irritated me. It still bothers me, but I have been remarkably calm since arriving in Vietnam. I just accept things as they come. If I find a hair in my glass of ice tea I remove it and continue drinking. Maybe that sounds disgusting, but little things like that just don't bother me.

A couple of weeks ago I was terrified of riding on the back of motorbikes. Now I do it everyday and it doesn't phase me. You just can't live in HCMC and not ride or drive a motorbike, so I've adapted.

My Vietnamese lessons are going well. Sometimes I feel like I know so little, but my pronunciation seems to be improving and I am starting to acquire some vocabulary. I've had 9 hours of lessons so far (one-to-one) so I am not doing too badly. I probably know more already than some people who have been here for months. It doesn't hurt that my teacher is really cute.

The whole subject of girlfriends has been pretty funny. My Vietnamese staff tease me about finding me a girlfriend, and I think they are only half-joking. They like to say that Vietnamese women make good wives and they just tell me to be careful when it comes to choosing.

I invited some of ladies from the Overseas Study office for lunch yesterday and they were quite flirty. One of them said that there are many different kinds of marriage in Vietnam, such as MBA (married but available), MBAA (married but always available), and so on. One of them also wants me to drop my current teacher and give me Vietnamese lessons in exchange for English lessons. She is very pretty, so I'm afraid I wouldn't be able to concentrate much on teaching or learning. I must admit that I'm enjoying the flirting and the attention, though it would probably be wisest not to hit on my teacher or on co-workers.