These are taken on the plane~her first airplane ride! She's very excited:
We were picked up at the airport by a van from the Somerset Grand for the approximately 1 hour drive to our hotel. The Somerset Grand is an apartment hotel. We had to get a 3-bedroom unit to accommodate our family size. This was a little "welcome" on our dining table when we arrived (plate of fresh fruit, rose petals floating in bowl of water, personalized welcome card):
We got a phone call from Martin (Martin and Kenny are the "Kim and Ellie" of the north) soon after we checked in. They were coming to meet us and get some papers from us at 2pm, so we relaxed in the room for awhile and then went to lunch at Jaspas, the restaurant on the 4th floor of the hotel. We ran into another World Child couple (Sarah A.) with their baby from Lang Son in the elevator on our way down to lunch. We had emailed a few times before we left, so she recognized our large clan right away and introduced herself. Hopefully we'll get together with them sometime here. We all got the lunch buffet at Jaspas--I wasn't very impressed with the food at all. Fairly expensive and the kids didn't like much. Maybe off the menu would be better, but with this many people, I felt it was way too expensive for us. We met with Martin and Kenny briefly after lunch, and then went out for a walk to find Hoan Kiem lake. We were pointed in the right direction by the doorman, and off we went, map in hand. It was a nice 20 minute or so walk to the lake (probably faster without kids) and then we took a stroll all around the lake. The weather was much cooler than HCMC, and breezy. Probably in the upper 70's. Here are some pictures we took during our circumnavigation of the lake:
Bottle break:
This woman spoke English very well, and gave me a big story about how she has 6 kids too (and she's only 34). Lots of small talk about kids, and *then* she mentions that she's selling these Vietnam postcards. I ended up buying 3 packages from her. Ok, so Don and Lauren were teasing me that I just got taken, and she probably only has the one kid she was holding, but oh well, her sales technique was much more pleasant than the shove-it-in-your-face sales method.
Famous red bridge in the background: 
On the red bridge that goes out to the pagoda:
Pagoda (I can't remember its name):
There's an incredibly fascinating turtle in there (roll eyes):
This man REALLY loved my boys. The sentiments were NOT mutual:
This mummified turtle has some important significance, but I can't tell you what that is:
Religious icons inside the pagoda. There were some people praying to them:
Outside the pagoda:
We stopped to take a rest on the other side of the lake, and this young guy brings a little white mouse over to us, and tried to sell it. I said no way, but he kept letting the kids pet it, and then it pooped on the baby's head! I cleaned her up with a baby wipe as best I could, and he wandered away, but then the kids noticed he had put the mouse on the ground and was kicking at it. I ran over to him and yelled "No, no, no!" But he continued to abuse the poor mouse. He went farther away, and the kids watched him and they think he killed it and threw it in the grass. Asshole. I don't know if it was all part of a ruse to distract us so the other 2 people he was with could try to pick our pockets or what, but we guarded our bags very carefully. 
After that, we walked around until we finally found Al Fresco's, a restaurant that I'd heard was good. It was ok, still more expensive than we would have liked for our family size. William and Anna had burgers and didn't like them. My nachos were pretty good. Don had a Hawaiian pizza and thought it was very good. Lauren didn't like her chicken sandwich very much either.
Ok, I'm finally caught up. We're heading out to dinner now; I'll try to post about today when we get back.
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