Vietnam Day 5

We're on day 5 here in Nha Trang and today it just poured all day. We left our hotel only once to cross the street and buy lots of junk food at the supermarket. We rented a dvd player from the hotel and some movies and tried to watch movies all afternoon. Unfortunately the only movies the hotel has to watch are bootleg DVDs. First we watched Van Hellsing and enjoyed it, but we decided to have a Harry Potter marathon because one of the bootleg DVDs (somehow) had all 5 movies on it. We discovered when we put it into the DVD player that it was dubbed into Vietnamese. But... really, I hate to call it dubbing, because they didn't take off the original voices, just loudly talked over them. There were no voice actors, but just a woman reading the script over the actors speaking. Oh, and the icing on the cake was that there were also subtitles in Vietnamese. So why did they bother "dubbing" anyway? The hotel didn't have any other movies that we could all agree on so we just channel surfed for a while. We watched the Simpsons, Mythbusters and bits and pieces of plenty of other shows and movies. While today kind of sucked, it was relaxing and we ate lots of food we can't find in Korea. Like Cheeseits, Orangina and Dortitos.

The past few days haven't been all bad though. Yesterday, since it was raining again, we decided to go on a "city tour". What this actually was was a taxi ride to all the things worth seeing in this city. First stop was Long Son Pagoda. This temple had some gigantic statues of Buddha. Very cool. Next stop was the Po Nagar towers which were constructed by the Champa durring thier reign in Vietnam about a thousand years ago. I don't know much about the Champa, but they were Hindu and worshiped Shiva and Vishnu. It is sort of amazing to think that those towers have been there for 1000 years. While we were there it appeared that they were undergoing some sort of restoration project. Also amazing is the fact that it is also an active shrine. We saw many worshipers (but probably more tourists) making offerings in front of the statues inside the towers.

We made a few more stops on our city tour, though nothing really noteworthy, especially in the rain. Our last stop was Thap Ba Hot Spring. Here you could soak in a mud bath, then in hot mineral water outdoor tubs, then float around in hot and cold swimming pools full of mineral water. We didn't really realize how intense this place was going to be and our tour only left us an hour and a half here. This gave us plenty of time to mud bathe and sit in our mineral water hot tub, but we were wishing for a lot more time to swim in the giant swimming pools and take advanatage of all the other amenities available there. We were going to go back again today, but since the pools are all outside and it was pouring, we just couldn't bring ourselves to go.

Anyway, we came back to the tourist area where our hotel is and found some "lunch" (not sure if you can call it lunch when you eat it at 4 o'clock). After we went to the beach because the weather had finally cleared (eg it stoped raining) and had a drink on the beach. Yea, it was overpriced for Vietnam, but when else are you going to get a coctail for 4.50.... on the beach? We headed back to our rooms, read our books for a while then met up at 9 or so, ate again and went to a bar for a little while. We still had and early night, we were back at our hotel by 12:30. The nightlife here just can't compete with Seoul. We're too spoiled.