Jetlagged and awake @ 6:40am local time. Waking up after my first overnight in Vietnam.
A lot of friends back home asked me what it would be like to fly overseas and to cross the international dateline, while Chicago celebrated New Year's Eve. I am disappointed to say that United Airlines didn't say a peep to mark the stroke of Midnight anywhere in the world during our flight. Whereas other airlines flying to Saigon passed out beers and did a countdown over the intercom. No thanks to United Airlines -- I probably slept through the moment it became 2011.
After taking different outbound flights from Chicago, my roommate, Allison Perkins (she was on the "fun airline") and I met up in the lobby of the Bong Sen Hotel Saigon. We threw our bags down once inside our room, and immediately walked outside to explore the few block radius surrounding our hotel. A few necessities were on our minds ... picking up bottled water to brush our teeth and to have in the room, as well as, finding an ATM to convert American Dollars to the local currency (Dong). First things first though, we wandered into the Sheraton Saigon http://bit.ly/ZoWRP for a celebratory cocktail.
The lounge on the 23rd floor of the Sheraton featured a live band playing American music. If you're a people-watcher like me, then you would have loved the hilarity of witnessing an odd assortment of middle-aged white men with bad comb-over haircuts wearing 80's Wrangler jeans and grinding on the dance floor with young Asian ladies, while you are perched above sipping a champagne cocktail, toasting the start of 2011 and our arrival into Vietnam. I snapped a picture of the scene and was then told photography was not permitted. :(
Love the title. You just have to read this in a Robin Williams voice!
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