Day 16 - A Room with a View

We took it pretty easy the next day. The first thing we wanted to do was to try a local restaurant that the guide book said server snake. In America we tend to only eat a pretty small number of animals, pigs, cows, and chickens mostly. Even other western countries eat a wider variety of animals. In France they still eat horse for example. The restaurant was really big but crowded. The first level was full, so was the second, one but we were the only people up on the third floor. We thought that they forgot us up their for a while as we sat without a waiter or menu. When we finally got the menu it was pretty hard to find the snake since it was listed under seafood in some sections and vegetables in another. Dave ordered the "Head of Snake" soup while I tried for the grilled snake. Unfortunately it seems that they were out of all the snake options besides the soup and I was pretty tired of soup. Dave got his soup which definitly contained the head of a big snake, minus skin and fangs, as well as a lot of other unknown meats and vegetables. The snake tasted sort of like a cross between a white fish and chicken, which might have been why it was under the sea food section, though I'm still not sure how it was a vegetable. The snake was actually pretty disappointing since I had heard it was one of those odd foods that was actually good tasting, and it was just sort of mediocre in the end.

After we finished lunch Dave and Ken decided to head down to the beach while I stayed in the room to write. I opened a big window sitting right in front of the desk so I had a beautiful breeze and view. I didn't even get that much done since I spent all my time looking out the window. The view wasn't even of anything special, it was just the whole environment that was so amazing. Our budget for this trip had never been exactly big. After buying all the tickets and taking out about $500 in cash I still had more than $1,000 in Chinese money, and $600 in travelers checks. Now I didn't want to spend exactly all of that, but even if I did it wouldn't matter much since I still had money in my US accounts. Even not counting the money in my Chinese account I was still on something like a $60 a day budget, which was more than Ken and Dave wanted to spend, and more than we needed to spend. At about $35 a day we stayed in some pretty nice accommodations. Our budget allowed us to eat in some of the best restaurants in the country and do all the traveling we wanted to do. Our Chinese salaries made us not only upper middle class in China, but on vacation as well.

For time constraints I had to buy a ticket from Vientiene in Laos to Hanoi, which was actually sort of annoying since i had to use my US credit card. Ken and Dave came back to the room after spending some time on the beach and I had gotten tired of writing so we turned on the TV. It must have been satellite TV or something since we had more channels in English than we had in China. We started watching some crazy 80's movie about a car that kills people in which all the characters are supposed to be in high school but look 45. After a while Ken and I went to get some dinner at a local Pho shop. Even though I was sort of sick of Pho that's what was around. On the way there we passed a place that had its doors open so that I could clearly see them inside slaughtering pigs. They were dragging them around on the floor and hanging them for butchering. I'm sure the same thing goes on in many places in the US, but you would just never leave the door open to let people see, we have more distance from our food than that. The restaurant actually had the same crappy movie on for a while but the patrons kept switching back and forth to other, soap opera, type programs that the people seemed to like. We watched some other British satellite TV stations for a while until it got pretty late.

I was just flipping around the when I came on CNN. I had actually forgotten that it was the inauguration, since I didn't think I'd be able to see it, and had just decided to watch it the next day on Youtube. It was very odd and hard to describe watching the inauguration ceremony on TV in Vietnam. In one way I was sad I wasn't in DC to take part in the whole carnival like atmosphere. I had followed all the primaries incredibly closely but had missed the actual election and now was only watching the inauguration from very far away. Also watching it in Vietnam brought very odd emotions especially as he mentioned Kha San, which was about 100 km from where we were. Mostly I just didn't know what to feel. It was actually sort of uplifting though to see how interested everyone was for at least a day before and after everyone we met had something nice to say about Obama. It was pretty funny when Roberts messed up the actual swearing in and it was even funnier when I learned later that they had to do the whole swearing in again. His speech was OK it was much more somber than most people expected. I thought he might do something like that.

The expectations were so high giving a somber, this is what we have to do, speech instead of a more uplifting speech was a way that no one would really be able to call the speech flat, but I was let down a little by such a conservative choice and how little he referenced the civil rights movements. I know he doesn't just want to be seen as the black president but the civil rights movement wasn't just a victory for black Americans. The fact that the US has come far enough to elect a black president is inspiring for all Americans. As much as some people like his policies that's not why people were crying during the ceremony. I thought the best speech was at the end where that preacher invoked old civil rights slogans. It showed just how far we have come and was still a little funny.