So we decided to make an extra stop on our journey and visit Da Nang. The girls we met in Hoi An had promised us some karaoke if we came to visit and that’s really an offer you can’t refuse. The city is really quite modern an well built, with skyscrapers and modern bridges, one of which is actually a dragon. The dragon even spits fire on the weekends, Saturday and Sunday. Sadly we didn’t visit on the weekend but the bridge looks amazing both during the day and lit up at night.

If you looked up a picture of he world’s most amazing hotels you wouldn’t find the hotel we had in Da Nang, but it was clean and did the trick for one night. It was a bit of a let down as we had paid the mighty sum of $26 for the night. Usually we try and get a room for maybe $16-20 a night. It may seem strange but the people in Vietnam use the Dong to pay for everything but you’ll more often than not get the price for things quoted to you in Dollars, then you can do the math quickly in your head. Roughly it’s 1 Dollar = 20000 Dong.

So the girls, our new best friends: Ni, Cuc, and Huey picked us up from the hotel on their scooters and we got to pick with whom we wanted to cruise around the city with! It was our second motorbike experience after our hosts in Hoi An had brought us to the bus. This time we were on the bikes for longer and it was dark. The girls were really safe drivers and in general people in Vietnam don’t drive so fast.

We drove to the main street food area to grab some food and it turned out to be really delicious! There we 5 of us and we ordered loads of food and some red bull to drink. One of the dishes was a big pile of snails. My very first try of this fine food. The were mostly chewy and very spicy. The other treats included some fried delecicies and some fresh sort of “do it yourself” spring rolls. We then took a tour of the bridges and took some seriously cool photos on the bridge. Our new best friends are really crazy so we were constantly laughing and making jokes with them or playing crazy games.

Now for the highlight of the evening: karaoke!!! Oh how we had waited for this change to cover ourselves in glory, to sing songs a d really show our talent. 😉 We ended up going to a local karaoke bar and belting our some seriously good renditions of classics like; my way, shiny happy people, wicked game and last, but by no means least one direction’s song, something something…..beautiful. By this stage our other new friend Binh had joined us too, straight from a hard day at Uni. I definitely hadn’t had so much fun in quite some time and couldn’t get the crazy song out of my head for the rest of the night. Our night finished up with a round of ice cream and talks about boys, as you do with 20 year old Vietnamese girls. I couldn’t offer them much help but promised to try and find them a handsome boy, who they could marry in Germany. I’m open to suggestions, I’ve included some photos of the lovely ladies in this post.

So far I’ve really enjoyed my time in Vietnam and am really loving every minute of the adventure. My life in Berlin seems a million miles away and so long ago.

Next stop Hue.

Snails for dinner

New best friends

Yummy ice cream