More of the Resort Area

I'm waiting for my sister to email me pictures of some of our outings, so you'll have to look at pictures of the resort for now. It will get slightly more interesting soon.

Here are some fighermen on the river. I took these shots from the observation tower:

Here's another shot of the grounds from the tower:

The river:

There's a bridge over there:


This doesn't look like much, but actually it's pretty cool. The water on the left is the ocean. The water on the right is the river:

The beach was extremely windy, as you can see below:

In fact, it was so windy that sand blew hard enough not only to collect on top of all our stuff and in our bags, but to sting us, as well. Consequently, we only went to the beach twice, and didn't stay long. I'm really said about that. This was supposed to be a beach vacation.

Here's mom and Amber on the beach, with the expensive beach villas behind them:

A couple views of the beach as we went walking:

This is the inside of the house we were moved to on the second day. Here's the upstairs balcony, overlooking the river:

It connected with mom's room and the room Amber and I slept in. The other side of the bedrooms had a view of the somewhat distant ocean. Those are mosquito nets, if you were wondering:

Here's the bathroom in our bedroom:


This is the kitchen, downstairs:

This is the living area, with a daybed that Amber claimed as her own:

The ground floor connected out to a back porch, as you can see:

The place was really quite nice, but odd. I was joking the whole time that it was ultra-luxury... for 1852. It was a very strange mix of pretechnology and modern technology. The whole house, pretty much, was made of wood. I think the only non-wood materials I noticed were the tile floors. There was no glass in the windows, and all the windows had real shutters, with the old school slats that easily let the bugs through. Hence the mosquito nets. The lighting was electric, but poor. When we had a lot of the windows and doors open, it was really quite well lit during the day, but because of the dark wood and shutters, when things were closed it was pitch black in there, almost.

There were no phones, and no clocks, so we had to use cell phones to wake us up in the morning (extremely annoying lack of consideration on the hotel's part). There was a tv, and a satellite dish attached to the house, but the cable didn't fit in the tv. Amazing. Surprisingly, considering the fact that the house isn't airtight, there were wall AC units in the bedrooms, instead of the fans that the other house had. Amber and I didn't end up using the AC, though. I never found myself too hot at bedtime, and although I woke up sweating a couple times, I found that the sweat did its job. In the kitchen there was a refrigerator and a stove/oven, which clearly had never been used. Each of the three bathroom had its own water heating unit in the shower, so that was really nice.

It would have been nice to have some mouse traps around. I think it was our first or second night there, and I heard Amber scream and run downstairs to tell me there was a mouse in our bathroom. Both of them are deathly afraid of creepy crawlies (stupid girls), so I had to chase out the mouse. They both had nightmares that night, and I had one of my occasional night terrors, which was probably brought on by the idea of the mouse, despite not being about the mouse. We found another mouse in the kitchen a couple days later, and I was only 90% sure that one actually went outside. That was the last I saw of mice, anyway.

Here are some pictures of these little animals that were all over the riverbed, which was visible from the gazebo. Whenever I see animals like this, I always feel like I'm seeing evolution right before my eyes. These animals have dorsal fins, and little fin-like front legs, and can clearly move around easily in water or on land. It's wicked cool:

Here's a tiny video that shows how they move a little. I don't know what happened to my longer video. Anyway, it's in superzoom mode, so sorry about the shakey:

Here's a video of the resort's private beach. There's a little river left by the high tide in the foreground. You can hear how windy it is. The waves were so gentle, and the water was so warm, it upset me we couldn't hang out there more. The beach also had tons of seashells, and I brought home a bunch to give to my students.

And finally, here are the hotel's resident dogs, for those dog lovers out there. I named them Scaredy, Whitey, Big Wolfie, and Little Wolfie. We couldn' t touch them because my mother's doctor recommended against it, there being no vaccination regulations in Vietnam. I don't like dogs, but the Wolfies were pretty cute: