GOOD MORNING VIETNAM!!! Ryan here….

I am enjoying Vietnam. The food is good. The people are very friendly and they smile alot. The country is so green and beautiful….AND…I am finally wearing shorts on daily basis. I am still pale and in need of sun in a desperate way; it has been kind of overcast the whole time here. Also it is very cheap here…so that is nice. However, the currency exchange is crazy and took a while to get used to. About $1 is equal to 19,000 Vietnamese Dongs. When I first got here, I went to the ATM and pulled out 2,000,000 Dongs (you can do the math). Imagine the pain of trying to figure out how many dollars you spent on a 456,000 Dong transaction…

You should see the traffic here…it is nuts. There a billion of mopeds playing ‘dodge the pedestrian’. As a pedestrian you just walk into a sea of mopeds and hope they move around you. You see guys holding a baby with one arm and swerving through traffic with the other…it is insane.

We spent a good chunk of our time here cruising in a ‘Junk Boat’ in the famed Ha Long Bay. For those of you who do not know what a junk boat is…it is a pretty much a glorified replica of an old Chinese fishing boat…turned into a super tourist trap!! Despite being somewhat of a tourist trap, I had a great time in Ha Long Bay and we met some great people (shout out to Adam and Kristen from San Franscisco). My favorite part of Ha Long Bay was our stay in Monkey Island. We spent one night in Monkey Island in a bungalow on the beach (see the photo page for a picture). We had a bonfire on the beach with a bunch of other people from all over the world. After dinner, The Vietnamese host, Snots (it is a long story), wanted us to start singing, dancing and talking…and in the that order…and would not leave us alone until we started doing so. With me, Koye, Curcio, Adam and Kristen…the Americans had the most people from any one country in the group. So, Snots, decided that we should be the ones to start singing. After negotiating some more coconut wine, we stumbled across partial songs of Tom Petty, Lynyrd Skynyrd and several terrible sounding verses of Friends in Low Places. Finally, Jamie starting seeing our National Anthem and we all quickly chimed in with our aweful voices. In the end, we pulled through and made America proud (I think). Don’t worry, we completely redeemed ourselves when we were allowed to put on our IPODs and kept everybody up singing country all night. All-in-all, it has been a good adventure in Vietnam and I am really looking forward to starting our mission work in the Philippines. I am ready to do some work!

That reminds me, we are pretty much going to the end of the earth; well at least it feels like that since it will take us 36 hours to get to the island of Camiguin. For those of you who are praying for us, first and foremost, we really appreciate it and need it…but would you say some extra prayers that we make it down to Camiguin Island safely and that we can positively impact these people’s lives for the better. Our trip down there is brutal and once we get there, I think we will pretty much be out-of-touch for awhile. Stay tuned though…I will be sure to give updates from Malaysia or Thailand.

God Bless.

Ryan

P.S. Oh yeah, Jamie uploaded some new photos and I think Koye has too…so check the group photo link at the bottom of the Photo page. Jamie is really an amazing photographer and his photos are at least 20 times better than mine. Koye has some really good ones too…but he takes a MILLION photos…so uploading them are a bit more of a task for him. Koye is also in the process of writing some posts too…he is working his masterpiece ‘Soup Talk’…which Jamie and I are anxiously anticipating…

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