Safe Arrival!!!

Greetings everyone from Ho Chi Minh City! I'm happy to report the trip out here was seamless, no surprise overnights in Chicago or Alaska like last time. The whole trip took 27 hours. All of our transfers worked out perfectly and have nothing noteworthy to report except we both arrived in one piece and all of our luggage made it here as well. Pam and I are getting by just fine. I think we are running off of pure adreniline at this point.

Getting out of the airport was crazy. There was such a mob of people waiting for other people. Luckily we spotted our driver holding a sign with our names and soon we were off.

By the time we left the airport and checked into our apartment it was after midnight. Of course we both wanted to get somewhat settled and managed to unpack everything. We like our apartment, it's a two bedroom, two and a half bathroom, decent sized living area, balcony, kitchen, and has a washer/dryer unit. There's also a great pool, gym, and resturaunt. I don't think we'll be spending much time in it though, we plan on seeing and doing as much as possible while we're here. Once we started planning where we wanted to go, we realized how fast these next two months will really pass us by.

I passed out sometime arond 1:30 AM and woke up at 5ish to get in a morning workout before our first day of work here. Both of us were ready by 8AM as instructed to be in the lobby for our pick up. It's 8:30 and no one has shown up so I called my contact...Come to find out, they changed the itnerary for us and were giving us the day as a rest day to get settled. So nice, we just wish we had known before we woke up.

We ventured out into the streets and suddenly felt very overwhelmed. I'm not even joking we were the only American's walking around. Everyone drives a moped with at least two people on a seat made for one, some have bath tubs on the moped, some have people carrying parcels, it's insane! And the traffic is absolute chaos. I'm amazed there aren't more accidnets. Everyone seemed nice though. After about an hour of walking around, we decided to head back home and set up an action plan. Luckily we both brought a lot of tour guides and soon came up with some solid plans and places to go. One of the guides had some great reccomendations for lunch spots. We took a taxi over there and it was great.

After lunch we had to make our way back home again because we were being picked up at 2 to go into the Liason Office to meet the HR team there. The location of the LO is awesome, lots of great shops, resuraunts, and cafes. It's really not that far from our apt but seems like a whole other world. After we met some of the staff there we walked around a bit and made our way back home to relax. We're both still a bit jet-lagged and tired from not that much sleep. I'm making myself stay up for at least two more hours - which will be around 8PM so I can hopefully sleep through the night.

That's all for now! Hopefully the weather has stayed somewhat decent back home!