The good news is Brett appears to be on the road to recovery. The bad news is the rest of us have to listen to him as he recovers. But since he was really quite sick I guess we will try to forgive the "woe is me" recovery process for now.
We started the day with a bit of a sleep in and tried skyping with Craig & Heather but the connection wasn't great. Will try again tomorrow with my dad too. After breakfast we decided Brett was mobile enough to take care of the kids, so mom and I decided to head out to do some shopping. As seems to be the case with us, we had an adventure or two along the way and never quite made it to our destination, but had a great 4 hours out anyway!
We started by stopping at a place to exchange money for mom. We didn't realize this was part of the adventure until tonight however. She was changing $89 U.S. to Vietnamese dong, and I hadn't done the calculation in my head beforehand. The girl counted the U.S. $ out, but seemed to keep the 9 $1 bills separate. Anyway, we seemed to get across that yes, we wanted $89 changed, and we double-checked the dong when we received it. I suggested she keep some smaller amounts out and put the larger amount away so she didn't have to pull it out all at once. I was trying to be discrete with the money I was holding for her and joked to mom that if we thought about it, we were "hiding"what amounted to about $5 Canadian - but seems like a lot more when it's $100 000 dong! We got organized and went on our way.
What we didn't realize, and hence the title of the post, was that there had been a slight error in the calculations. Before we went out for supper tonight, mom came into the room and was trying to figure out how much money she had. We are using $500 000 dong as a $25 Canadian approximation. She kept pulling out $500 000 dong bills and saying it wasn't adding up. I started counting and realized she had a lot more money than I thought, but couldn't figure out where it came from. I grabbed the receipt from the exchange place - and realized that we had been so focused on counting out the dong at the counter that we hadn't thought about how much it was. The receipt was for $809 dollars, rather than $89! So mom had a little roll around in her $16 million dong, and then being the good-hearted girl that she is, wrapped the extra $14 million dong back up to return to the exchange place next week when it is open again! If only the exchange rate was really that good!
We visited the post office, which is a huge colonial-style building and had beautiful architecture inside and out. After looking around at some of the little shops, we headed over to the Coffee Bean to cool off and have a drink, just in time to miss the daily downpour outside. By the time we finished it had cleared up so we decided to keep walking towards our shopping destination. We walked past the "art alley" where we had bought the 3 pictures for Maiya of the Vietnamese girls in their ao dai's (we wrote about it on her blog - where the woman wanted to give us money back towards to the cost of them because she was happy for us adopting Maiya). Much of the area has changed and many of the little art shops are shut down, waiting to be torn down for yet another big fancy building to go up. The little alley is still there though, and we bought some pictures for Lucas's room and a few for mom too.
We found a bookstore with some Vietnamese-English books (and a large cockroach that scurried out from under the shelves - I didn't tell mom about that one!) and picked up a few to add to the ones we got when we were here with Maiya last time.
We starting heading to the Tax Centre to do some more shopping but ended up taking a wrong turn and by the time we realized we were heading the wrong way we decided to just keep walking and go back to the hotel.
We found Brett and the kids down by the pool, and since Brett was looking a little on the white side (yes, more than his usual albino self) we took over and enjoyed the weekend "popcorn and ice cream party"by the pool that our hotel serves for free. Dinner at the food court at the VinCom Centre finished the day off (Maiya got to pick so she picked the Carl's Jr. so she could have "chicken stars"and a toy with her kids meal!).
Today's pics have some of the sights out and about in HMC today, mom with her millions, and Lucas with his new Canadian passport (white) and Vietnamese passport (green). The one with the cheesy grin shows the funny face he's been making lately when he's being goofy. He had a good day although the rash is back on his face after it seemed to be finally clearing up. Wondering if maybe it is a reaction to the detergent the hotel uses for the bedding or something, but hard to tell.
Maiya has been in the pool at least once a day since we've been here and is swimming like a fish. The pool in Vung Tau had a shallow end and she taught herself how to do a flip in the water so thought I'd include a video of that too.
National holiday tomorrow so will be interesting to see what happens out and around the city. It is kind of neat to be here for it since we are told that Lucas's Vietnamese name is tied to the Independence Day holiday - Quoc Khanh.
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