Train, train, train!

    

    We spent three days after Hanoi with our friend Viet in his home village.  It was a great experience to be thrown into the ‘real’ Vietnam, Viet said that he cannot remember having any foreigner’s in his village.  You could tell we were a spectacle.  People were stopping and staring at us with no shame.  It is pretty funny how blunt everyone is here, one time a woman stopped her motorbike and took her helmet off to stare at me.  “Hello” is usually enough to scare them away – even though people learn English they are often too nervous to try to use any.

    After hanging out with Viet and his crazy friends and family we jumped on a train.  The train left at 5:30 pm and arrived in Danang, where we are now, at 10:30 am.  We bought tickets for a ‘sleeper train’ not knowing what that entitled.  Our tickets were 4k VND and titled ‘foreigner ticket’.  Once we jumped on the train we found out what we were in for.

    There was a small room, maybe eight feet long and five feet wide.  On each side of the room were three bunk beds that could fold up against the wall.  Grandma ( probably 80 yr old Vietnamese woman ) slept on the bottom bunk opposite another middle aged woman.  Two people slept on the middle bunk on the left side, and a man slept on the middle rack on the right.  That leaves me and Chelsea, the biggest people by far on the entire train, sleeping on the top bunks.  It was super hard to get into the bed, the ceiling was maybe only a foot and a half above the bed – it was kind of claustrophobic. 

    So me and Chelsea climbed in and just hung out in our bed’s for the trip.  Let me tell you, it was kind of boring, but it sure beats sitting in an uncomfortable chair for fourteen hours or so.

    Last night Chelsea had to get up to use the bathroom.  She had to climb down everybody's bed to get out of the room, then wasn’t allowed to use the restroom because we were stopped at a station and you could only use the toilet when the train was moving.  She came back into the room to wake me up and shook my leg several times to find out that she came back to the wrong room!  She was in a different room filled with six different Vietnamese people and was shaking some strangers leg trying to wake him!  Somehow, he stayed asleep though, and Chelsea made it back to our room.  The Vietnamese people sleep so hard here, nothing can wake them up!

    At 6 am we woke up – the sleeping men in our room had transformed into a bunch of girls that were coming home from selling cosmetics in the city for several days, that was a surprise.  So this morning we hung out with them, they could speak a little English.  At one point grandma farted on Chelsea, although she couldn’t speak any English we definitely knew what that meant!