Happy New Year!

Happy New Year, Mom! Hope you and the Snow Birds are doing well! We arrived safe-and-sound in Bangkok on New Year’s Day. We’re still working on the questions everyone submitted for the Q&A (we’ll post very soon, I promise) so I thought I’d do a quick update.

I know the epic train ride was post-Christmas, but I did want to tell you about the awesome food tour we went on on Christmas day. I read about this guy, Mark, in the NY Times who does a food blog in Hanoi (StickyRice) and also does food tours. We managed to get on a tour last-minute for Christmas morning. Here was Christmas breakfast at 9:00am:

This was a delectable fish soup in a tomato broth. You could add your own chills, etc. to spice it up. This is where we ate it:

Christmas Eve dinner at the Metropole is a distant memory…

Here’s a quick gallery of what we ate and where we ate it with our lovely host Mark and Per & Christina from Hong Kong by way of Sweden:

(I have about 200 other photos for those who are interested. John and I will be hosting a week-long slide show when we get home in November.)

Christmas night, we had drinks over-looking the beautiful Hoan Kiem lake before heading to a local place for a traditional Vietnamese dinner.

The next day was our last in Hanoi before the overnight train ride to Hoi An. We just strolled around the city and hung in the park for a bit. And that was where John bought this bird whistle for $1 dollar. The man he bought it from gave him a quick lesson. It sounds nice at first but after the three hundredth time, not so much.

Then it was the dreaded train ride (see previous post).

We sort of glossed over Hoi An in the last post, but it is a really lovely little town. We rode our bikes all over, had some great meals, and got dangerously close to cattle. It was an adventure.

From Hoi An, we FLEW to Ho Chi Minh City (praised be to Baby Jesus) to see the cousins again and pick up our giant bags. But who did we run into at the airport? Our neighbors from NYC! Drew and Samantha lived on our floor in the building! How crazy is that? It’s a small, small world.

Back in Ho Chi Minh, we did lots of laundry, re-packed our giant bags, and had a wonderful time with Missy and her family. We also squeezed in another food tour on New Year’s Eve, this one on the back of Vespa scooters. It was pretty hilarious.

We got back to Missy’s just around 11pm. We watched the end of “Paul Blart: Mall Cop” with the fam, grabbed some champers, and headed over to their neighbor’s house. The wife is from Ecuador and it’s a tradition to write your wishes for the New Year down on a little piece of paper and put it in the pocket of a doll. Then you set the doll on fire. Being a pyromaniac, John loved this.

After watching the doll burn and ringing in the new year, it was off to bed. We flew from HCMC to Bangkok on New Year’s Day.

So here we are in Bangkok. We’ll be here until Monday when we head to one of the Thai islands (Koh Samet, I think). We’ll post the Q&A blog entry soon, but we just wanted to wish you, and everyone, a Happy, healthy 2014!