Jesus Excursion

Our second excursion with Din was to Vung Tau to see a Jesus statue and a temple. Here's the statue from afar:

Um, I'm gonna say these are dinosaur eggs, so the architects of this whole shebang must have been from a looser faction of Christianity:

Statues of some little children:

Here's a fountain at the base of the hill that Jesus was on:

Here we are after a couple hundred steps or so:

Here is an example of Korean public affection--only same-sex allowed:

Here's me with like, the apostles or something? And the Lamb of God--not the metal band. There's really a lamb or two in there:

And Amberger:

This is the final stretch before the base of the statue. I can't remember for sure, but I think Din said it was 880 steps from bottom to top:

Maybe you know what important moment this is:

Ah, such angels:

Jesus Christ, that's a big statue:

It was a hundred or two steps to the top, too:

You can go out onto the arms and see the view:

Amber and mom had kind of a hard time with it, since they're afraid of heights, but I was okay. Here are my legs:

Here's the rest of me:

Here's Amber outside the opening to one of the arms. Din neglected to tell us that there was a dress code for this place. Amber's shoulders weren't covered, so she had to hold a towel around them the whole time. Those glasses got her a lot of attention everywhere we went:

Here you can see how narrow the steps are. You have to squeeze yourself against the wall when someone is coming up or down against you:

Here are Ambro and I on an observation platform that's at about the halfway point, which we stopped at one the way down:

Oh, you guys. You can't build ANYTHING without putting a cannon next to it:

Here's another little pond outside the base of the statue:

After the Jesus, we walked back down the steps and I counted something like 892, so I guess I either lost my place somewhere or maybe I counted things as steps that weren't officially steps or something. Then we went to some temple nearby where we put some money in a pot, had some incense lit for us, and were given little pamphlets that we couldn't read.

Nobody calls me chicken.

I'm not sure what the significance is here:

Here's my mom and a big bell:

Here's me playing with the bell:

Afterwards, we went into town for a seafood lunch.

I think we got crab. It was good, but a major hassle, as I recall.

We also learned that the very messy way we had been mixing our delicious iced coffees every morning was totally wrong and we were fools to have done it that way. Din watched me try to just pick up the little straining cup from the top of the glass and dump the unmixed hot coffee and condensed milk into the glass with the ice. Sorry I don't have visual aids. He spazzed out wicked and showed us that the cover of the straining cup can be used as a tray, so we could put the cup down, mix the coffee with the condensed milk, and then pour the mixture into the iced glass. He claimed that not mixing the milk into the hot coffee first would give us a stomachache (the milk probably isn't pasteurized, I guess), but we never had that problem. I was just pissed that we kept staining the white tablecloths everywhere, but for five days no one else had bothered to show us the right way to drink the damn coffee.

Anyway, to add insult to injury (on an unrelated topic), back at the hotel, Din decided he needed more than just a verbal explanation of the cost for that day's trip. So he brings this sheet with a bunch of day trips on it to show us the price. Reading that, we find out that there were at least two other trips, like going to caves to see monkeys or riding a little basket boat on the river, that we would have much preferred over some religious stuff. I'm sill kind of pissed off at the negligence and illogic of what was supposed to be a really great hotel.