Not for the faint of heart

Greetings directly from Vietnam!

I borrowed a friend's laptop to be able to blog to you directly. There were too many things to tell you about to try to do it through Doug.

We left this morning from our hotel at 8:00. We got in the minibus, then a few minutes later, were told to get off as that bus was going to the airport (wishful thinking on our part, I guess!). So after getting on the right minibus, we went to the furniture making village. We saw some of the shops and watched a man who was hand carving a design on a table leg. (They said it takes 3 months to make a table.) We saw this beautiful dining room table set that they said was $10,600. Two men in our group were unable to lift the bench seat because it was so large and made of thick pieces of solid wood. I bet the shipping costs are astronomical. (Doug~ just sign for anything that comes to our house UPS no questions asked, OK? =) )

After the furniture village came the snake village. Here they provide snake meat for the restaurants in Hanoi and make bottles of wine with different snakes inside for fermenting "flavor". We went to a man's house "the snake garden" and saw all of his bottles of wine. Some have many snakes inside them, some just one, some with a cobra in them in striking position, etc. If we each paid him 10,000 dong (about 60 cents) he would show us his live snakes. He had 3 cobras and other snakes that he brought out for us. This was about as close to a cobra as I want to get!

After that, we headed to the snake restaurant. This place also had walls full of snake wine, lizard wine, bird wine, etc. As we entered, the owner was getting out a snake (a flower snake) from his cage. Turns out that this was going to be our lunch. He killed it in front of us, drained the snakes blood into a glass, put the snake's heart in a dish and took out some other organ (we think it was the liver or pancreas.) Then it was time to go upstairs for our meal. He put the glass full of blood on the table along with the heart (still beating although separate from the snake) and another glass of rice wine. He took the liver/pancreas, sliced it open and emptied its contents into the glass of rice wine. This was our drink. Now, if you read Doug's blog, he was right about the odds. I didn't drink the snake blood or eat snake meat, but in the spirit of the day, I did try the rice wine/bile drink. I will not try it again. Four people in the group did try the blood. After about 10 - 15 minutes, they took the heart away(still beating - seriously). We aren't sure what happened to that. Some people ate the snake meat and said it didn't really have a bad taste, just a different texture. I stuck with the beef. Towards the end of the meal, they brought out snake soup. Again, in the spirit of things, I tried this. It was kind of like cream of chicken, but not quite so good. Julia wasn't a big fan of it either. So there was my snake village experience. I decided to have cheese pizza for supper. (I took pictures of the snake things for the rest of you - I am not planning on ever looking at them again!)

We finished up the day by visiting ancient citadel remains. It was pretty. All in all, a good and interesting day.

As far as my mental state, I am doing fairly well. It was hard finding out that things will probably take longer than we hoped on Friday. If I were given a choice, I would come home in a heartbeat, but as long as I am here, I am trying to make the best of it. The time that I have with just Julia is probably a benefit for her, so I am trying to make good use of that. And I keep trying to find new things to explore here. Sometimes it is hard, and I am hoping to get good news soon, but am doing my best to make the most of this unique time while I am here.

Hope you are doing well and that I can tell you my stories in person soon!

Thanks for checking in,

Barbie