Sunday, July 15th

After an okay night on Friday, Logan woke up about three times last night and then at 4:00 AM we were all up and then we laid back down for another hour or so. Then we got up and played and had breakfast. We tried to give Logan some cereal (baby cereal) but he is still not interested at all, he becomes very fussy when I try to feed it to him. I swear that we are buying stock in Huggies, before 11:00 AM we had changed like six or seven of them, the cleaning people hate us!

We finally got ourselves together and decide to walk down to the Reunification Palace where the end of the Vietnam War occurred on April 30th, 1975. Scott wanted to get a picture of him in front of the Palace for his Pitt Alumni Magazine. We didn’t go into the Palace but we would like to maybe next week if we can. Scott was getting positioned in front of the gates to the palace when these young Vietnamese guys asked to be photographed with him in front of the gates. The young guy put his arm around Scott and held his thumbs up for what we thought was that he was happy to have his photo taken with an American. It was very cool to see that the Vietnamese still like Americans. I was able to get the photo of Scott in front of the Palace and then we became hungry.

I think that we are home sick now. We went to the Diamond Plaza which is an upscale mall in HCMC. It was packed with people, mostly young kids and teenagers, who by all looked very American. They had cell phones, Abercrombie & Fitch clothing and magazines. We had decided that we wanted to eat at Kentucky Fried Chicken, can you imagine? It had begun to rain while we were in KFC so we were glad that we had stopped in to get a bite. We had decided to do a little shopping at the grocery store in the mall; we needed more baby wipes and floss. While Scott was looking for wipes I had decided to look for floss. I asked a female clerk if they had floss and she was rather rude and said “No” and waved me away, I was a bit miffed. I told Scott I didn’t like this store and that we should go, besides we were out of Dong and would need to exchange more dollars later. I wanted to leave the mall. On our way home it began to downpour!! I hate getting wet. We were soaked, head to toe almost. Logan loved it and giggled with delight but Scott and I were not happy at all. We arrived at the Apartment and in the lounge were two of the other families. When they saw us they laughed out loud, we must have been a sight; Logan was still giggling, he loves water. We were exhausted, so we all napped until it was time to go to dinner.

We went to the Rex Hotel – a Ho Chi Minh City landmark. They have a rooftop restaurant but it was raining so hard that we couldn’t eat there. We went to their indoor restaurant instead. It was beautiful inside with a beamed ceiling and ornate wall decorations. Logan was pretty good most of the time. We had him in his stroller, which he loves and he only got a little fussy towards the end. He ended up falling asleep and slept until we got him back to the apartment. This ended a rainy, very low-key day. Tomorrow we have our meeting with US Immigration. Sleep is a necessity tonight…