Vietnam OEP 2006 Part II: Whose Line?

[Quote of the post] "There are some times silence is golden. Other times it is just plain yellow."
[Song of the post] Irish Drinking Song - Whose Line is it Anyway?

13 January 2006
Ooh, Friday the 13th. I didn't notice until KW pointed it out in our hotel room. Oh well. Nothing very unlucky happened that day. I think.

Anyway, that morning I changed some of my money to Vietnamese Dong. And I should have listened to Isaac about the Dong coming up. Acutally, I did listen to him, but when I went in the early morning the rate was the same as the day before, so I thought it wasn't going to change. Unfortunately, it went up after breakfast. Gaah.

After breakfast we left for DaLat. It's this city in the mountainous regions of Vietnam, about 7 hours journey in total. We stopped for lunch halfway at the restaraunt owned by the Tea Factory. Will get to that later.

Anyways, so the day was quite uneventful, because of the long journeys, but on the bus a bunch of us got together and started playing Whose Line is it Anyway games. It was so fun! And we somehow got Mr Ng to play as well. And he has this laugh which is so infectious that it's quite impossible to keep a straight face when he laughs. It was just great. And I think we infurated the driver because Vietnamese traffic is very dangerous and he couldn't concentrate. So we had to stop after awhile.

At about 1600 we reached the tea factory. It's not so much of a factory, more of a plantation. It's 90 hectares big with a 12 hectare lake and about 1 hectare of buildings. The factory block didn't even look very... factory-like. It was quite empty; the machines were few and not very numerous. But it takes about 36 hours for the tea to go through the entire process.

Oh, and the hotel was quite quaint. It was quite small, only four floors, and it had this old ornate lift with those manual-open doors. And they didn't even have air-conditioning; not like they needed it: there was just a small vent to allow air circulation with the outside and KW and I were freezing the whole night.

And a word about Vietnamese food. In a typical 7 course meal, there would be about 3 plates of vetables, 2 of seafood, and the rice only comes after the 4th or 5th dish. Quite unique.

And after dinner that night Mr Quek made us practise the dance we were going to perform later on in the trip. It was like, so fun and everyone else was being so unenthusiastic. And we actually had a crowd watching us! Well, three's a crowd, isn't it?

Well, I had KW for a roommate for the rest of the trip. He's probably like the most interesting roommate, what with mirror writing, rushing to answer the phone and door, and overall being a great guy... what more can I say? Oh, yeah, I can say some more stuff: there was a mini Eiffel Tower right outside out bedroom window.

And end day 2!