Day 8- May 20, 2013

Today we went to the Presidential Palace, which is equivalent to the White House in America.  We didn't have an organized tour so we all just wandered around the building.  There were a lot of big, fancy rooms that we could look in.  The view from the top was pretty and looked down a street in Ho Chi Minh City.  Then we went to the post office which did not seem equivalent to an American post office.  The only parts I saw were souvenir shops, so I bought a few things.  Later on today we went to a market in Chinatown.  I have never felt more claustrophobic in my life.  There were vendors cramped together with not even a meter wide aisle in between.  In the aisle there were people walking both directions while other vendors were trying to make their way through with boxes and trying to stock up each of their stands.  We had to bargain in Vietnamese and they spoke very little to no English, so the Vietnamese students had to help.  Safe to say I didn't buy anything here.  This experience was unlike any other I have ever had.  After we got back to the hotel, I walked around shops a few blocks from the hotel and shopped around there.  I went mostly into clothing stores which were more Americanized and a shop with some cool Vietnamese souvenirs.  Tonight we went to a restaurant called Ti Ti, which was a delicious French restaurant.  The menu didn't seem very French at all, but I was very satisfied with my pasta with beef.  The taxi ride to the restaurant was brutal.  We squished 9 people in the cab for a 70,000 dong cab ride, whereas the ride back was only 40,000 dong.  The first driver took us all around thinking we wouldn't notice while I was sitting across three people squeezed in the back.  I'm exhausted now so I'm not sure what I'm going to do the rest of the night.