Chapel Hill to Saigon to Hoi An

Dear everyone - Sorry that we've been here for a week and are just getting around to writing something. Kelly had what might have been strep for the first couple days, so I had to spend the time lying in the hotel room watching TV and keeping her awake.

We don't want to bore you with the play-by-play from the week, so we'll just give you some highlights:

1. A security officer set our hand sanitizer on fire in Beijing. Our connection in the Beijing airport was fairly narrow, and the airline wouldn't check our bags. They suggested that we take them through security even though they contained six months worth of liquids. Anyway, it didn't go well, and we got a free one-night vacation in the Airport Garden Hotel.

2. Starbucks in Beijing and Hong Kong. No such luck so far in Vietnam, though the hotel coffee is really good.

3. Four nights in Saigon (Ho Chi Minh City), the city of 9 million people and 6 million motorbikes. And no traffic laws.

4. The breakfast buffet in our hotel. It put the Hampton Inn to shame. Sorry for the blaspheme, Dad (Dagger).

5. Would you eat more or less shrimp if you knew it had been grown in the median of a Vietnamese highway? We saw a shrimp farm on our trip from Saigon to the Mekong delta area in southern Vietnam.

6. Jacob took Dramamine for the first and second times in his life. It worked. We made it through a couple of long bus rides and several boat rides.

7. Tourism checklist: War Remnants Museum, Reunification Palace, plenty of pagodas, the outside of one mosque. More to come.

We flew from Saigon to Danang this morning, and we took a taxi to Hoi An, which is a coastal in central Vietnam. We met a German couple at the airport and split the taxi with them, and we have a dinner date with them in a few hours. They are, like all Europeans, impossibly cool and will probably impress us by drinking beer and smoking at dinner. Ick.