Christmas and New Years

We spent Christmas in the south of Vietnam so I actually wore flip-flops, a t-shirt, and shorts on Christmas Day in 85 degree heat!  That was really strange.  It was hard to be away from our families but we still had a great celebration.  We stayed in a really nice hotel and had great, fancy dinners on both Christmas Eve and Christmas.

We spent our last week in Vietnam in an area called the Mekong Delta.  This is where the huge Mekong River empties into the ocean.  Every part of people's lives down there revolve around the water and it was cool to see.  We took a lot of boat trips where we got to see small islands with tiny "roads" (they are only about 6 foot wide dirt paths), lots of people using boats to fish, sell things, and get places, and we saw 3 floating markets.  These are like supermarkets on water.  People sell stuff out of big boats and customers go around to buy stuff in smaller boats.  I've never seen anything like it before.

At the end of our time in Vietnam we relaxed on a beautiful tropical island called Phu Quoc.  It was beautiful and had a huge white sand beach.  This is where we spent New Years Eve.  There are tons of small restaurants along the beach and they had special dinners planned and bonfires on the sand.  Again, it was really strange to be somewhere so warm for this holiday but I'm not complaining!

Finally, we spent a crazy 2 1/2 days in Cambodia.  We saw two cities: Phnom Penh, the capital, and Siem Reap.  In Phnom Penh we visited some places that have a sad history.  Many people were killed during a war here in 1975.  Now the people and the government of the country have made museums so that you can learn about what happened and make sure it doesn't happen again.  In Siem Reap we saw some of the most famous temples in the world.  They're very old and made out of stone so some are really falling apart.  But it was beautiful and cool to see these old buildings.

Now we're in Laos!  This is a country I knew almost nothing about before we came here but we are loving it.  There's a lot less people who live here so everything is much more relaxed and quiet.  That's just what we need right now.  I'll write more when we've spent some time here.