Nha Trang

Nha Trang is one of the most popular beach towns in Vietnam. I say town, but it's really a small city, though much more relaxing than Saigon. One road lined with palm trees stretches along the coast, with the beach on one side and hotels on the other. It has the standard tropical beach town feel but definitely has the Viet charm too. There is some dispute about the origin of the name, since "nha trang" doesn't mean anything. But, I noticed that it's similar to "nhà trắng", which means white house. Could this be the Vietnamese Casablanca? Well actually, this was the home of Louis Pasteur, and he and Alexandre Yersin did their scientific research here. Apparently Pasteur had the only white house in town, and when he was telling the driver where to go he said in his bad vietnamese "nha trang" without any tones, so the name stuck somehow. That's just a story, one of many possible explanations, but it's my favorite.

Anyway, I had a fun couple of days in Nha Trang. It was just me and Hien, as the other teachers had already gone. Unfortunately, it did rain quite a bit. But it was still a fun, relaxing time.

The first day we got in very early from the night train, about 5:30am. We took a taxi to the little but comfortable hotel and saw many people out exercising as the sun was just preparing to rise. After checking into the hotel we had to wait for the breakfast places to open, then we got breakfast at a nice french place. I had my usual vacation fare, an omelet, along with bread and of course a ca phe sua da. After that we went to the beach, I read Don Quixote for awhile, I went swimming for a bit in the pool, and just relaxed. It started to get cloudy and then rained, which it kept doing most of the time there. Anyway, at least I got some beach time in.

The rest of the time, I ate a lot of food, Vietnamese and Western, I got some very good pizza, billed as the best in Nha Trang and definitely the best I've had in Vietnam. We also went on an island tour, we took a bus and then a boat to check out a few islands. They had lots of animals to see, like ostriches and deer and monkeys. One island was all monkeys, and they were wild but also used to people, so they went right up to you and demanded food. As soon as they got some, they grabbed it and ran away to eat it. They were very competitive with each other. I think there were two different monkey tribes that were at war on the island. They also had a little performance with monkeys and dogs and goats, dressed up funny and doing tricks, some of it was silly and ridiculous. It looked like they mistreated the animals, and I figured that such a show wouldn't go on in the US without a lot of complaints. But here, the presenters were smiling away and the audience was clapping.

Anyway, I took a lot of pictures too, which I'll show. When I came back to HCMC, I drove back from Languagecorps at 5am, 1 hour before the sun rose, and saw lots of people awake on the street, some selling food, others exercising. I can't believe what an early start people have. And my mom complains about waking up at 5:30 hahaha... Actually, I complain if I have to wake up before 11am.

So, not much else is going on. Been slow with work since I got back, since I have a couple days off because of Hung Vuong. He was the first king of Vietnam, like 4,000 years ago. It was his birthday on Saturday. They don't know for sure, because it was so long ago, but they decided to celebrate it then anyway. So I got off from both private and public schools. Then later this week it's time to get back in action. A lot of classes are ending but I should start getting some new classes too.

Here is a smattering of pictures. I realized how easy it is to just upload photos to facebook instead of photobucket, so all my pictures are on there as well. Here are the links to those albums: http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2192334&id=1607549&l=28f012c1ac
http://www.facebook.com/album.php?aid=2192335&id=1607549&l=8fd9477f55