Pho For Breakfast And Other Things To Like About Vietnam

See above. Add iced coffee sweetened through the roof with condensed milk, highly under-used and under-appreciated at home, if you ask me.
So, from HCMC, I went to Dalat, a lovely little cool and foggy mountain town known for its zillions of greenhouses and accordingly, the production of vegetables and flowers. There are two main tourist attractions... One is the hilariously tacky Flower Park, featuring tea pot topiaries, and the other is an architectural wonder called the Crazy House, which looks like Gaudi dropped acid and built a treehouse. And because it's an ongoing work-in-progress, there are random bits of exposed rebar and sudden dropoffs. Hilarious. The town is a huge destination for domestic tourists so the "People actually buy this schlock?!" hawking reaches new heights.
From Dalat, I took a late bus to a fishing town called Quy Nyon. The ride was one for the books - curvy enough that people were vomiting right and left, landslides, washed out roads over sheer cliffs, and so on and so forth - all the highlights of a 10 hour ride in a developing country. Sometime around midnight, I was dumped, alone, outside Quy Nyon. A nice motorcycle taxi picked me up strolling the side of the highway. As a result, I got a lovely tour of the local prostitution scene on the way to my hostel. Barbara from New Zealand is putting me up to the tune of a whopping $2.50 a night. Thanks, Barbara.
Today, I explored Quy Nyon on foot. It's supposed to be a beach destination, but the weather is cloudy and cool so I've just been cruising around entertaining the local children with my whiteness. Always a good entre to the spontaneous portrait session. God bless the instant gratification/amusement of digital photography. This morning, I walked out to some ruins at the edge of town. At first glance they were ancient and mystical and quiet, and upon closer inspection, they were the set for a music video! Literally. A lead singer, dancers, a director, video village set up on a park bench... Amazing. They let me cross between takes to actually check out the ruins, but the video crew was way more entertaining.
From there, I made my way back through town to a buddhist pagoda. There was nobody around so I was just wandering and snapping photos of old offerings, when suddenly I was surrounded by 6 girls. One was my age and the other were in their late teens. We chatted in broken English and within moments, I was invited to lunch. We sat on the floor of the small room they share as students at the pagoda and ate rice papers stuffed with eggs and noodles and cucumbers and talked about families and jobs and boys. Now tell me that's not what it's all about. Afterwards, I helped the youngest girl with her ridiculously difficult English homework, which dealt with extremely useful topics like complicated economic principles and American federal trucking regulations.
That's what I call a good day. Tomorrow, on to Hoi An.