The White Aliens

Its been a small gruelling journey into HiaPhong.
We decided on the 'slow boat' instead of the 'hydrofoil' and saved ourselves 60,000 dong. The boat was smelly and full of 'off-their-face' Vietnamese construction workers who continuously stared quite rudely.
After the very uncomfortable boat trip of 3 hours we arrived at HiaPhong. I patiently waited untill all the eel juice was splattered out the door over my feet and while the next set of workers boarded before I could get off. The usual moto rip-offs occured then we found ourselves in a city where we felt like complete aliens.

I have never in my life walked down the street and have everybody look. Not only did they look, but they stared. Not only did they stare but they stared for a very very long time. The children yelled 'hello, hellooo' causing more attention and the young boys pointed and laughed. A lady even picked up her small child so she could see me from a higher view!
Whats wrong with us! Are we ugly? Maybe its our clothes? We asked the taxi driver who spoke english just fine but he avoided the question. Maybe he didn't want to be rude.
So with this constant awkward attention I gradually became very uncomfortable. I tried to make light of it, being overly nice to people, and smiling a lot, poking my tongue out at the kids, most of the time it worked, but as the sun went down we really started to dislike being the oddballs in a strange city.

The supermarket as our safeguard, we dawdled about in hope to find something agreeable so we could go back to our hotel room and hide hideous bodies from the rest of the world.
The supermarket was the best one yet. We spent a total of $12 and that included pate, 4 breadrolls, a small loaf of bread, salami, sweets and a bottle of vodka! Barginatious. Still, we couldnt make our breadrolls without tomato, which the supermarket, inconveniently, did not stock.
Lucky us, we stumbled upon the market street. Sam keenly spotted some sausage from a lady across the road. It was dark now and she was set up under a torch light. She looked like she had been standing there for a week. She held out her arm to offer us some stuffed pork trotter from a grimey rusted up cleaver. It wasnt bad. We opted for the pork belly with cripsy skin and the greasy grisly black sausage which she erratically smached into pieces on her festering chopping board before stuffing it into reused plastic bags for us to take home.
Happy with our purchases we finally headed back to our cheap and musty hotel room, hoping our passport and money was still there. It was. We played canasta, ate sausage sangas and went to sleep.

The morning after.......
I guess your waiting to hear of some horrible food poisioning story, how very shamefull of you sitting on the edge of your seat eagerly waiting to hear how I was bent over the toilet bowl all night and twisting and turning in bed with excruciating pain, well ha HA. Sam and I can survive ANYTHING. We have stomachs of STEEL. We are masters of our of intestines. We have successfully adapted our systems to prolonged feeding of unidentifiable phenomenon. We reign SUPREME.

I am deffinately starting to look like a traveller. Dirty clothes, dirty hair, thong tan. But gosh, I am really starting to smell like a traveller. Phew. My shorts smelt so bad yesterday that I almost threw up! At home, I would have soaked them for a week. I wore them today anyway. I figure everything around me smells much much worse so nobody will know the better.

We managed to catch the bus to Nimh Bimh, so happy not to be staying in HaiPhong another night. It was a local bus, filled with local people. One lady couldnt give me the peace sign enough and of course everybody else was picking their nose. When the lady with the bad teeth boarded we started to worry we would miss our stop but then we saw the driver throw a man off followed by his bike being pegged from the roof. I guess they will tell us when its our stop.
He did, and after all my freaking out from the dirty curtains touching my head and suffocation from grotesque Vietnamese flatulence I was more than glad when we finally arrived into Nimh Bimh.