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We get off the train and find a guy to help us with our bags. He carts us to the front and we walk outside looking for our family friend Chu Hai. My uncle calls him and we see him! We say our greetings and he calls 2 cabs for us. My uncle's friend is going to her family's house and our hotel takes us to the hotel. We get to the hotel and they tell us that only one of the rooms are ready for us at that time so we take all our bags to the room and at this point Eric is feeling really bad. All he wanted to do was shower and lay in bed. We were getting a little hungry so me and Anh Viet set out to look for something to eat and let Eric stay in the room to get rest. We walk around and there is nothing that really seems appealing. We walk about a mile and we spot the famous Ben Thanh Market! We go inside and it was around 6:30am so people were still setting up. We make our way to the food court area and it is just a bunch of stands with chairs around them. We just randomly pick a place and sit down and order 2 bowls of soup. We eat and I ordered a rice congee with ginger for Eric since he is not really able to eat anything much. We head back to the hotel to deliver him the soup. He eats it and goes back to rest. At this point I was completely awake and my cousin wanted to walk around and find scooters so I go with him. We ask the hotel employees if they could recommend a place and they call one of their friends and sets an appointment for us to come pick up the scooters and we hop in a cab and go over there. The place is really small with 2 washing machines and 2 dryers. This place is only big enough for 2 people to stand in, we get up and we tell the guy that we need 2 scooters to rent. He goes around the back and gets 2 for us and tells us that it is 170,000 dong to rent a day, that's about $7! Great deal. We get on the scooters and I am even more nervous than I was when I got on the back of Eric's. I told Viet that he needs to go really slow so that I can keep up and we don't get lost. I make my way into the traffic and we're off! We drive down all sorts of streets and then finally he said lets go to the mall. We get to this parking garage area but it's only for scooters! 2 stories of just scooters I have never seen anything like that before. We get our tickets, find a spot and go to the mall. The mall is very small but is 5 stories high! All the expensive stuff sit at the bottom like all the brand name stuff and then as you get to the top the stuff get more and more cheap. We just browse around and decide to leave and head back to the hotel to check up on Eric. He is still feeling bad when we got back so Viet went out to get him some pills that helped him the last time he was in Vietnam. The pills were a quarter size and they were black. Apparently they were coal pills, they make you poop everything out and then clog you up so that you don't have to go anymore. It worked because about 2 hours later Eric was up and ready to go.
Our friend Mike had been in contact with us and was going to meet us at the hotel and stay with us for the rest of the trip to meet up with my cousins and sister that were coming in the next day. He left his hotel and came to meet up with us at our hotel. We decided to go for a ride around town on our scooters. Mike sat on the back of Viet's and I rode on the back of the scooter that I got for Eric. We rode all around town for hours just looking at everything. We stopped by a cell phone store to see if they could unlock my cousin's cell phone and we left it there and kept driving. We stopped by the Saigon River to take a few pictures and then Kevin called. Kevin is a friend that I met in Tampa, he went over to Vietnam a few months before I was there to prepare to get married to his Fiancé. Her family lived in Saigon and so did some of his family so it was more convenient to have their wedding there. We had been in constant contact for a few months since he's been there. He told us that he would meet us at the hotel so that we could follow him to a coffee shop near by. The coffee shop was really small with only 2 tables but then we went upstairs and there were more tables with a nice view. We sat, talked, drank coffee and then him and his fiancé wanted to take us to a popular shellfish place in District 4. It was traffic hour and there were scooters EVERYWHERE, more than double the amount that we saw in Da Nang. We tried our best to keep up with him. We came to the spot and there was someone waiting there to let us know that the people that work there were off for a holiday so a guy led us to the 2nd spot. We parked our cars and walked up to get a table and the place was PACKED. Every where you go in VN people are extremely quick to get you to sit down b/c they know that is money. You never have to wait more than 1 minute for a table. Kevin and his fiancé had been there before so they order a bunch of items. We get 4 different species of clams, scallops, muscles, octopus and chicken feet! It was amazing! I felt like I was in food heaven. Eric ordered just the stir-fry ramen noodles with beef b/c his stomach wasn't ready for all the spicy seafood yet. We ate, got full and were happy. After dinner Kevin wanted to take us to get dessert at a stand on the side of the road that served hot tofu with sweet ginger syrup. That was a treat! After dessert we wanted to check out the night market at Ben Thanh. After 7pm all the shops set up outside next to the market under tents and there are HUNDREDS of vendors, people selling shoes, shirts, watches, knick-knacks, anything you can imagine. Eric was looking for fake Rolex watches but everything was either too fake looking or too expensive for a fake watch. We ended up buying a few face masks to block all the smog that we're breathing in while riding on our scooters. We got 4 black fake Lacoste masks for $1 each. We ask Kevin and his fiancé to take us to the airport on their way home in District 12. They show us where we need to park and take us to a nearby coffee shop where we wait about an hour before going to park and wait for the others. There is a huge crowd at the entrance of the airport but everyone has to wait outside. Uncle Binh shows up and so does Chu Hai. We made a little sign for them to greet them. People started trickling out and in the distance we see Mythy and Trey, following not far behind was Christy and Terry! Mike joined the group in the taxi and Terry hopped on the back of Viet's scooter. We go back to the hotel so that they can check in and drop off their bags and we go get a late night snack at a popular spot. Then head back to the hotel to sleep, it was late and I had been up since 5am so I was pooped.
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