2 days of Nha Trang fun

I finally felt functional so we went on the long anticipated cable car ride from Nha Trang to Vinpearl island. It's like a Disneyland. Or so I'm told, I've never been there. This was one cool island. Their water park looked pretty extensive in an impressive kind of way. It's so horribly hot during the day, we avoided most of it by heading over around 4pm. The cable car ride was pretty amazing. The water was such a pretty color. A tall ride over the South China Sea on a fun adventure. The ride was 12 minutes long. That's about quadruple the time it took us to stand in line in the evening just to get into one. There were no lines on the way there, and we had a romantic ride by ourselves. On the way back there were 8 of us hovering over the dark water on our way back.
We did one ride that went all over the property in a kind of bumper car on a track. The first half of the ride was about going up and around and it was all automated. It went from where the cable cars landed on the island, up over the Vinpearl sign on hill, and then back downhill again. The ride down was interesting, you could only go as fast as the guy in front of you. The instructions were: stay 25 meters behind the car in front of you, here's the brake handle. I remember thinking "what is 25 meters??" I was watching the person in front who had no need for speed whatsover and obsessing over this algebra word problem in my head. I finally gave up needing to know the math conversion to feet measurements and I didn't crash, so I call it was a win-win situation.
The next day we did my most favorite thing, which is a meal with some new local friends. Our landlord was very gracious and invited us over to have some beer. We were happy to accept, and a date was set. I told Ron we should mention that we don't actually drink beer, but he didn't agree. He should have. We arrived and the lunch was fabulous. The only thing they had to drink was beer. No juice, not even water. No one drinks the tap water. Hopefully they don't feel too bad that they had no drinks for us, like good hosts tend to do. We walked in the door and the table was set with several plates of delicious looking food. I dodged the plates with squid on it, and all was well. It was obvious the wife Margareta went to a lot of effort for us. That's her name for foreigners to try and pronounce.
Quy (sounds like keh-wee) did the talking for both of them, his English got a boost from a language translating app. They were both very kind and smiled a lot.
They grew up where we went on our day trip north from Hanoi. Where the old capital of Vietnam used be 1,000 years ago, where we went on our boat ride. He said he had a very peaceful childhood even though he remembers bullets flying through the sky towards the American planes. He told the story like it was just another childhood story. He served in the military for 13 years, starting with the last year of what US calls the Vietnam War, and over here it's called the American War. After that there was a war with China. He became a lieutenant training on information and morse code kind of things. We talked about the tragedy of war and Quy was still quick to smile. He said that was then, and this is now. He said he understood that it was a war brought upon by political powers and not us average citizens. Quy is 61 years old. He talked of how he loved to read books, and how he learned English on his own. He said he studied the histories of many countries, and their wars. Like China and Russia and the US. It was all so interesting.
Favorite fish ever. I saw one of the most amazing fish in a beautiful pond in their small well landscaped yard. It looked like a miniature mermaid. The head half of the guppy was a beautiful shiny metallic light green and the back half was an amazing turquoise color with a very long fan tail. I was completely mesmerized. The rest of the fish were pretty enough guppies, but this one was outstanding in color. The hidden treasures are all around, if I take the time to stare into a pond.
Even seeing what I have written about this visit can't convey how precious and wonderful it all was. These kinds of connections are the highlights of my travels.