Eating at the Yum Dung...

Our whole team has arrived safely in Tam Ky, Vietnam! After a hotel change (to be across the street from the town supermarket), we're getting settled at the Anh Huy Hotel, where only the woman who works the graveyard shift speaks English. Today, I successfully communicated, "refrigerator, milk, no electricity, smell" to the woman at the front desk by pointint to a series of words in our Vietnamese dictionary so I could get the electricity turned on in my room once I left (otherwise power goes out when you take the key). Perhaps we'll have another Vietnamese lesson tomorrow...

So.. the title - which narrowly won over "And for the lady, she'll have squid." On our first night as a team in Tam Ky, we collectively had 5, make that 4, words/phrases in Vietnamese. I knew 'thank you' and Supriya & Vijay knew some variation of 'chicken' ' veggies' and 'no fish' (Supriya's allergic.) We all got chicken, and Vijay ordered veggies for Kelly... he was quite proud of himself and his mastery of Vietnamese, until the waiter came out with 3 plates of chicken and a GIANT plate of squid for Kelly. All this took place at one of our favorite restaurants, the "Dung" (pronounced "Yum", hence the Yum Dung.)

Today we drank sugar cane juice off the street... with ice! The ice barrier was broken today, and since no one got sick, we can now have cold beer, cold sodas, and, thankfully, cold sugar cane juice. We were rushing back to work from our lunch break so had to have it in the "to go" variety, which means a little baggie with a rubber band/straw seal at the top. The rubber band/straw created a bit of a vacuum in the baggie, but after a few rookie sips, we've added another option to our ever-growing list of streetside treats.

G'night from Vietnam (salutations are on tomorrow's vocab list),
Julls