So unfortunately today was the day our trip came to an end. Or not exactly, as it takes a whole night of flying so you arrive home the day after. Doesn’t matter though, today we only had half a day to spend in Ho Chi Minh City before we had to leave for our flight.

As we had seen so many things the past few days, we had decided we would spend this day to find a mask. We have all these wall masks from our travels at home, and we really needed a Vietnamese one. However, the whole holiday we could not really decide on any masks, so this was our last chance. There were a few masks that were pretty nice, but they were either too expensive or not colorful enough. In the end we did not buy any masks, which was a pity, but eventually we did buy a lot of other things to make the walls in our house prettier.

For the guy that was watching our cats we decided to bring some awesome coasters that had artwork of famous movies on them. We are quite the movie buffs as you might know by now, so we had a lot of fun (and a pretty hard time) figuring out which one they had, which ones were the coolest and which movies our friend actually likes. While at the store, we came across this poster section that had all these awesome movie posters and art on rough paper. We searched through the all boxes, to find a few that we both liked. If we could not get a mask, we might as well get something else to think back of our great holiday, right?

So first we ended up with 20, but soon we narrowed it down to 10. Then we had to make a few difficult choices and eventually we spent our last Dongs on posters of The Avengers, The Great Gatsby, Little Mermaid, Aliens and a few others. Really nice posters that still fit in our suitcases, which was great. During our shopping trip (which was extremely hot) we had lunch at this great place called Kafe. I had a lovely mason jar full of fresh juice, which I will miss so much when I am back in boring only-orange-juice-and-apple-juice-Holland.

In the afternoon we had to step into our bus once more and go to the airport. It was a bit sad to leave, especially as we grew pretty fond of our Vietnamese guide called Sun or Son (we are still debating that). We loved how open he was about his family and his life, he even showed us his wedding pictures! It is very important to have a great guide with you on these group tours, and I must say, when we went to China we definitely missed great things because of our unprofessional acting tour guide.

Anyway, I really liked our trip to Vietnam, as it is a gorgeous Asian country which has an interesting history. I love the fact that there are so many buddhist temples, such friendly people and that everybody takes care of eachother one way or another. The cities full of little scooters, the people having supercrowded markets packed with all kinds of stuff and of course those impressive tunnel systems and other mechanisms from the war: the Vietnamese people are truly remarkable.

I will miss the good food, the heavenly fresh juices and the beautiful surroundings, but I am kind of happy to go home again. Usually I would not have this problem, but now I do because of some stuff happening there that I need to take care of. Unfortunately I cannot say anything about it yet, but I am sure that time will come soon. Thanks Vietnam for being so open and so great for us. Not in all countries turists get so well treated as here and that is one of the many qualities of this place: no dwelling on the past, we are living here and now. I will definitely try to remind myself of this when I am home.

So as I am secretly typing this from home, I can already tell you that the flight was good. Just like the way to Vietnam I have watched five movies, so that was nice. Did not sleep much though, and our plane was late so we nearly missed our second plane from Hong Kong to Amsterdam. Thankfully Cathay Pacific is an excellent airline, so they took us through all the VIP queues as quickly as possible to make our flight. The food on the plane was great, they even had Toblerone, so loved it!

Pretty sad and happy to be home again, lots of exciting stuff happening right now, but more about that later. First: pyjama day and cuddling my cats to death! And hanging and enjoying our amazing film posters…