Day 54

It’s 5 am and it’s Fool’s Day but this is not a lie! I wake up at 5 am, go for the shower very slowly and my brain is really not functioning very well. I get dressed and as soon as I‘m ready I go downstairs to get yoghurt so I’m not going to the airport with an empty stomach. Carlos and Xuan are coming down too and the taxi is already at the door.

We take maximum 30 minutes to arrive to the airport because there’s no traffic. There we check-in and pass by the police and then go for a fast-food cà phê sữa đá that tastes more to water than anything else. Our flight is delayed 10 minutes but we don’t even notice it. As soon as we board, we seat at our places and after departing, the three of us quickly fall asleep.

I wake up a couple of minutes before we start to prepare for landing and I’m able to make a couple of pictures and the landscape is just beautiful: mountains and lakes and little houses.

The plane lands and it’s time to go leave our things at the hotel and then go for breakfast. I have a room for my self with a big bed and big bathtub. =) I just have time to leave my stuff and then we go down for breakfast.

We walk around the neighborhood and we find a place with phò bó. It comes with lot of beef and it tastes really good but once more my exterior frightens people around here and every time they see my arm they open very much their eyes, shake their heads and do weird noises. Guess in HCMC they were getting used to me and here I’m the new “animal in the zoo”…

Anyway, we finish and we get a taxi to go see the marble statues Carlos has ordered for the temple. When we arrive everyone is smiles and very nice to us, they start showing us what they’ve made and Carlos starts realizing that something is wrong. The statues are too shiny and the stone is not exactly what he had ordered. After a long argument, the guy confesses he used a paint to make the statues shine like if they’ve been watered and that ruins the statues if they’re outside as they’re going to be in Portugal. Long story short, the statue guy takes to see other statues Carlos has bought, we come back to where the first statues were and the statue guy tells Carlos he is going to take the shine out and that we can show up tomorrow and see how it is.

After leaving the statue problem behind, we head to see how is the temple’s bell doing. The bell guy shows us his under construction factory and then take us to his home so we can see the bell. There’s a couple of guys around a cement thing and inside there’s the drawings that are going to be imprinted in the bronze. This is all done by hand and takes a long time to be done. I’m lucky to be able to testify this ‘cause there are not many people who know how a Buddhist bell is done…

It’s already late and we need to have lunch so the bell guy takes us to a place where they serve roast beef with vegetables and very nice bread that I eat like there’s no tomorrow.

After lunch we go on our way, stopping by a couple of shops to see what more is possible to be bought for the temple. When we arrive to the hotel, as soon as I fall in bed, I fall asleep just to be awake by Xuan’s call around 6.30 pm. It’s time for dinner so we get the taxi and go to a seafood barbecue place and the food is really good, the beef is really good and they even go to the shop next to the restaurant to get me the Dr. THanh’s tea.

It’s too soon to go back to the hotel so we go for a walk and stop at a fresh fruit juice shop and Xuan and me get a avocado and papaya juice which is really taste. Then it’s time to go rest as the day is going really long already.

At the hotel I take a shower, copy the daily photos to the computer, and watch a TV show and go to sleep…

Night night everyone, don’t let the bedbugs bite!

P.S. – cover time again and why not have Biffy Clyro singing one of my favorite Mormon music bands…