Day 11- May 23, 2013

Today we had a Vietnamese language test.  We had to go to the front of the class with a partner and say some numbers, ways to say hello depending on age, ask each other 3 questions, and recite a short paragraph about yourself and your experience in Vietnam.  In my opinion, that's a lot considering we've been learning the language for two weeks.  After class a few of us went to the Ben Thanh Market.  I had never been there before and I thought it was a lot better than the market we went to in Chinatown.  It was less crowded, but the vendors tried harder to sell you things.  I don't like the whole market atmosphere because I'd rather shop in peace on my own and I don't particularly enjoy having people touch and grab me when I'm looking around.  At night, we went to a nice dinner at the Rex Hotel with Dr. Berman.  We had a table on the roof with a nice view of the city.  This place was expensive and made me feel like we were all high rollers.  It was an awesome way to spend one of our last nights.  After dinner we met up the Dennis, the presentor from II VI, and his son and he took us bar hopping.  This was quite an experience seeing as I've never been bar hopping before.  We probably ended going to between 5-10 bars total.  It was cool seeing all these bars for like a half hour at a time and then going to the next one.  I wish we could have done this earlier in the trip because then we would have known about more places to go out to!  The coolest bar we went to was probably the Emergency Room.  It was a themed bar where all the waitresses and bartenders were dressed up as nurses.  I'd never seen a themed bar like this before.  After I got back to the hotel, I was in the hallway and I saw a bat fly up the stairs.  It was so freaky, how does a bat even get in a hotel?  That was pretty much my cue that it was time to go to sleep at that point.