4 Lessons from Vietnam

So we realize that it's been more than forever and a day since we've written on our blog. It's mostly because we have had visitors basically non-stop since the end of September. It's been great, but just insanely busy between Chris working and me now being the President of the American Women's Association. Blaha started the trend off at the end of September/beginning of October, then Dani & Alex, then The Semraus stopped by on their 8 month trip around the world and finally my parents & aunt and uncle just left on Wednesday after 11 days.

I haven't been all that interested in posting on our blog lately. In all honesty, it's a lot of work and I'm not sure that there is a whole lot of value behind it. Nevertheless, when I mentioned to Chris that I was thinking about being done with this whole thing, he wasn't all that excited. So here we are, 12 hours in to our trip to northern Vietnam and we've had enough lessons to write about.

1. Always confirm your flight48 hours before you leave...even if you have a travel agent - this will help when the airlines fails to contact you or your travel agent to let you know that your flight is leaving 12 hours earlier. I, however, never even thought about it utnil I got an email from our Vietnam travel agent asking us when we were going to be at the airport since we weren't there when our flight arrived on Thursday morning (note, we were supposed to leave Thursday night). Complete nightmare. Let's just say that I completely freaked out but thanks to Chris being completely calm in these kind of situations and a really nice Hong Kong travel agent, we were booked on a different flight out at 6 p.m. and made it to Hanoi earlier than we originally thought.
2. Don't fly Hong Kong Airlines - they changed our flights, cancelled them and anything else you can imagine, including not telling us about the changes. The good news is, we ended up actually flying on Dragon Air/Cathay Pacific so we get frequent flier miles and get to fly on a nice airline
3. Be careful what you sit on - even if the toilet paper is covering the toilet seat in a public toilet. You might just find a small bug crawling on it after you get up.
4. When the local tells you food is spicey, it probably is. - Chris's satays that he had for dinner last night weren't exactly satays. They were more like fajita style meat with the spiciest sauce ever. Erin Bilot would have loved it but Chris hasn't sweat that much since the middle of the summer.

That's all for now. Probably won't post anything until we get back and after Jay & Paula leave. Our hotel happens to have a computer in our room so I'm writing now. We would have preferred hot water but I guess that wasn't at this place.