Nha Trang Day 2

The next day in Nha Trang was a lot more fun than I thought it would be. We woke up quite early, around 3:45 in the morning, to go look for sunrise photos on the beach. Unfortunately the sun was hid behind the cloud. We continued walking along the beach and came across an area of town that was quite poor. It was the size of Airdrie, and it was all shanties. Quite sad. We didn't want our morning to be a complete waste so we took some photos of boats and houses from the beach and headed back.

While we were walking back they we thought about doing some more sight seeing, as we still had a few hours there. We walked to all the sights this time. The first one on our list the Long Thanh gallery. Long Thanh is a resident of Nha Trang and a world famous photographer. We were quite impressed with his photos, and Kheang looked into buying one, but it was too expensive. It was 42USD just to ship the print alone. We did get quite inspired though.

Our second stop was the Long Son Pagoda and the Giant Seated Buddha. Both were quite beautiful. The downside of going to these places is that they're swarming with people who are trying to get every penny out of you. Whether it be kids looking to give you a tour, or people pretending to be monks trying to sell you insence to burn at the altar.

We weren't going to see anything else after that but it looked like it would rain so we hid in the Nha Trang Cathedral. A beautiful church where we sat for a while and were approached by Anna (who would later tell us that her name was really Kim Loan). She wanted a chance to practice her English. People here see an advantage of knowing a few words of English, and if they can't sell you their goods, they seem quite eager to run a few sentences by you. Usually it goes something like "Hi, where are you from?" followed by "When did you arrive?" and "Where are you going?" Normally that would have been the end of the conversation, but I pulled out the English to Vietnamese dictionary and had a long conversation with Anna. It was pretty slow going, but we managed to have a semi-intelligent conversation. She asked for my email and I didn't see any harm in that. Should be interesting.