Safely in Vietnam

But I miss Cambodia. It's just different here, and hard to adjust when you fall in love with a country and have to leave it. It's funny here, though. Things are so regimented. As soon as we crossed the border things changed. I paid $4.50 for a bus from Phnom Penh to HCMC (10 hours). It wouldn't have taken that long except that you get delivered to the border and told to spend 40 minutes in a cafe before the crossing. It makes it all sounds like this is planned, right? So after lunch, some guy comes along and ushers us toward the departure and arrival line. We enter Vietnam, and it is the absolute most complicated border crossing I've ever experienced. We start at one window where they check the visa, stamp the passport, and give us our departure card. Then to a table where they look at the passport, fill out some other form, then send you to a third person who looks at the form and demands 1000 riel (25 cents). For what, who knows because the form is ENTIRELY in Vietnamese. Then on to the fourth person who puts our baggage through X-ray, and a 5th person who checks everything again and sends you out the door. So we walk out of this building (a group of about 14 of us), and wander a bit to a short row of cafes that look like the tour bus type. No one has a list with our names on them, and we're the mysterious "yellow ticket" group. One guy says he'll take care of us and call a bus from HCMC to come get us (from 2 hours away, mind you). He seems like he's just some dude being helpful, but then we figure out that he actually works for the company that's responsible for getting us to HCMC in the first place (partnership between the Narin Guesthouse in Phnom Penh and Happy Tours - his company - in HCMC). So he says it's going to be at least an hour, and just as we get settled in and accept the fact that this is going to be a painfully long travel day, he returns to take us to a back parking lot where a bus has *MAGICALLY* appeared - driver sleeping shirtless on spread out newspapers in the luggage compartment. En route, he goes on and on about how Happy Tours is the best, cheapest, and most reliable tour company in Vietnam. HA! Funny too, while we were waiting in the cafe, I moved my chair forward a bit to get closer to the fan, and the lady running she shop rushed over to move me back against the wall. The chairs seemed sort of haphazardly placed around this little room, but apparently they were EXACTLY where she wanted them :) And today in the Reunification Palace, a group of men were arranging chairs for some big military meeting that they're having tomorrow. They tied a bit of string from on chair all the way down the row to the end chair, then lined up all of the back exactly perfectly straight along the string. Welcome to the Socialist Republic of Vietnam!!