Day 18: September 7, 2014

I decided this morning that I should go to the grocery store and buy some fruit for breakfasts. Going to the grocery store is always an adventure, but today was ridiculous! The only time that it isn't packed seems to be at 9am when it opens, but I headed out the door at about a quarter to ten. I took one step inside the store and could see that it was absolutely chaotic. All 18 checkouts were going and the lines were crazy long. I headed to the produce section where people were standing two or three deep to pick out what they wanted. I also noticed, however, that the store sells older, cut-up fruit for half the price of fresher fruit. I decided to go this route both because it's cheaper and because I don't need to buy the freshest of the fresh. I picked up half an orange and about two apples for around 30,000d.

I made my way to the check-out counter where I had to choose which of the 18 stalls I wanted to use. Not only were all of the lines long, but everybody had a full shopping cart. To make matters worse, the people who check you out go very slowly here. There is no rush like there is in the United States. Plus, I'm pretty sure I chose the stall where it was the cashier's first day since she had a notebook she kept looking at before pressing buttons. All of these things added together made for a very long process of buying two items, and I was in the store for about 40 minutes, the majority of which was spent in line.

When I say the cashiers are slow, I'm not exaggerating either. They check things out in groups of related items. If you're buying drinks, they want all of the drinks to be checked out at the same time where they then go in the same bag. When you are talking about people with FULL grocery carts that include candy, drinks, noodles, fruit, meat, etc., this takes a long time! I also witnessed the clerk bag some items only to take them all out and put in a bigger bag because more of the same items were found buried at the bottom of cart. It's such a process!

At 1:00 Cate, Tori, Alex, Summer, and I headed over to the zoo. Very interesting experience. I had read that the zoo was not the best and to be prepared for small and dirty exhibits but it still surprised me. Dirt or cement exhibits, no grass, trash in the exhibits, and people throwing food at the animals. The elephant exhibit was smaller than the one at Niabi Zoo and had four elephants. At the zoo here, the elephants just lined up by the fence, trying to get sugar canes from the people who were buying it. People were throwing it at the elephants since there was some distance between them and the cage, but often the sugar cane would hit the elephants. Two of the elephants also had a chain around of their feet. The hippo cages were similar. One hippo per cage with an area smaller than a swimming pool to swim. Another interesting thing about the zoo was that often times they had multiple cages of the same animal. They had a lot of different animals, but it just wasn't maintained well based on what I'm used to.

I saw a lot of colorful butterflies at the botanical garden area in the zoo.

Common iguana

One of the elephants who waited for humans to give it sugar cane.

Cate, Alex, Summer, and I all decided to get supper together. They really wanted pho, so we roamed the streets for a little while before deciding on a place that didn't actually have pho. Instead, they had some really good looking spring rolls, noodles, and rice. We split a few fried and normal spring rolls. They each had noodles in vegetarian broth while I got rice mixed with beans and vegetarian supplements and more fried spring rolls. I was very hungry, so it tasted very delicious! Or maybe that's because it was nice to have rice mixed other items.

As mentioned before, this weekend was the Mid-Autumn Festival. To celebrate, our OU partners took us to District 7 where we got to see lots of lanterns lit up and the biggest moon cake. I rode with one of the partners on his motorbike, and let me tell you, that is my favorite way to get around. It's less touristy than riding in a taxi, I feel like you see more when you're on the back of one, and it's thrilling going through traffic and weaving around cars and other motorbikes. Plus, it's about half the price!

The lanterns and moon cake were at the biggest mall in HCMC in District 7. The mall has all kinds of Western brands and is where the more wealthy Vietnamese shop. Outside the mall lanterns hung above the street in rows of red, green, blue, purple, yellow, and white. It was a very neat experience. The largest moon cake was inside the mall and hopefully tomorrow I will finally get to try one! Since the festival is over, they are supposed to be on super sale, as in buy one get six. When we got back to the dorm around 10:00, I headed to get an avocado smoothie. Not as good as the strawberry smoothie I had the other day but still good.