Da Nang; a day in the coffee shop

We woke up early, still not really speaking.  We had arranged to meet the Irish guys back at the bar at noon, so they could take us to Hoi An.  I said I wasnt happy about this, I didnt want to ride through Vietnam on the back of a moped.. I wanted to get back to Thailand.  The others agreed we shouldn't go to Hoi An.  We checked out and walked into the town once again, we walked for ages with our backpacks until we found a shopping mall.   Before we went into the mall we stopped at a store to buy a sim card as neither of the phones we had with us would work in Vietnam.  We took a seat in a coffee shop which had free wifi.  We had flights booked from Hanoi to Bangkok for the following week, and we knew that if we could change them to tomorrow we could get back to Thailand and spend the last few days of our trip there, in the sun, with the nice people!  After some googling and a couple of phone calls we managed to change our flights.  It meant we had to be in Hanoi the next day, the only way to get there was an over night train... so that was the plan...get the train, get the flight, get back to Thailand!

We spend most of the day in the coffee shop.  We decided that, once back in Thailand, we'd spend the last few days in Pattaya.  An English family that we met on Koh Samui had recommended Pattaya, they said it was good for shopping, that sounded good to us!

The train was due to leave at round 11pm, we got a cab to the train station as we had no idea how far away it was.  The taxi driver couldnt understand us and we had to draw a picture of a train to get him to understand where we wanted to go! It drew quite a crowd!  Once at the train station we tried to book tickets for the sleep carrage, it was full.  We had to settle for 2nd class seats.  There would be no sleep for me tonight!

While waiting for the train I somehow got talking to a local man, he didnt speak allot of english but enough to strike up a conversation.  he asked where we were from... I ask why they eat dogs... Then I asked why all the locals kept starring at us everywhere we went, why does no one like us?  he told me ''they think you American, Vietnam hate America''.  That made sense, and explained a few things.  He went on to tell me that he had killed lots of Americans, ''BANG, BANG'', he said.  Soon a train arrived and we went to get on it, only to find out that it was the train to HCMC, good job we noticed in time!  We finally got on the right train, and after a mix up with the seats and some policemen, (dont ask!),we settled down for the night.

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