Han Oi Vei these puppets are freaky:

When we got back to Hanoi we got to our hotel and then went to a water puppet show. You go into a little theater, where instead of a stage there’s a pool of water with a screen behind it. The puppeteers are behind the screen controlling the puppets with long sticks that sit under the surface of the water. If you don’t speak Vietnamese the story of this show is completely lost on you, but the puppets are kind of cool in a freaky sort of way. But after five minutes I got all I was going to get from this, and sadly I fell asleep. I was so so tired and sick. I didn’t mean to disrespect this cultural phenomenon but I didn’t think that Vietnam would mind. I mean, if Vietnam came to America and fell asleep at a baseball game, I’d just take off my jacket and tuck the tired little fella in, then carry him out to the car and drive him home after the seventh inning.

After the puppet show we went to get ice cream and then walk around in the old quarter. The thing about the old quarter is that it’s streets are named for what they are. I like that and do the same thing (my hammer is named Hammy, and I had two turtles growing up named Greeney and Swimmy). So one street translated to English would be Candy Street, and there’s Paper Street, and Kitchen Street, etc. One other thing about the old quarter that freaked Angelica out is their use of vermin. They dump all their garbage in the street so that rats and cockroaches can eat what they want of it, according to Kaelin our tour leader, they do this on purpose to get rid of all the biodegradable stuff. Then all the garbage that’s left over they simply burn. It smelled like, well, burning garbage. It made me so hungry. And by “hungry” I mean “not hungry.” And this was just in time to meet the rest of our group for our last dinner as a family.

It was subdued as both I and Alice (the token Italian) were sick. But it was still fun. Dan ordered roast “farm bird” off the menu out of curiosity for what a “farm bird” would mean to the Vietnamese people. We think it was quail.

After dinner we walked back to the hotel and I went right to sleep. I felt bad because I was so sick that I couldn’t get up the next morning to say goodbye to people. I could barely get out of bed until later in the morning. But I knew that Angelica still wanted to see the French Quarter, so I sucked it up, took some Sudafed and a much needed shower and we went. As nasty as the Old Quarter was, the French Quarter was nice. Big wide streets, lots of trees, pretty buildings. We went to the post office and sent some post cards (sorry if you’re reading this and didn’t get one, we lost our address list, so we were operating from memory. Chances are we tried to send you one and got your address wrong). Then I had to sit down. We sat until it was nearly time to leave for the airport, then took a cab back to our hotel, then split another cab with Jayson and Colleen as their flights were at the same time.

At the airport Jayson invented a game called Dong Asshole. The idea was to get rid of as many Dongs as you could. The person closest to zero wins. I had one caveat, that I could hold on to two five Dong coins for my nephews. Jayson and Colleen got down to almost absolute zero, they were left with one coin, but was less than one Dong so they had to be paid in what I think was a Cambodian penny. And then they got on their plane before Angelica and I were done. We had exactly 67 Dongs remaining. We went to a little stand and bought a water, it was 17 dongs. Then we noticed that Oreos and Ritz crackers were exactly 26 Dongs each. We used Angelica’s awesome haggling skills to get her to take 67 Dongs for the whole shebang. (Wow, shebang doesn’t register as a spelling error. Who knew?) We achieved absolute zero besting our Canadian friends. Ok, we’re away from the Cu Chi Tunnels…I think it’s ok…Here goes… U-S-A….U-S-A….U-S-A….