I am back from a week at the beaches in Mui Ne, and now I am already preparing to go to China. I fly tomorrow to Hanoi and then I will cross the border at Lao Cai in Vietnam. I will spend about 2.5 weeks in Yunnan Province in Southwest China. It is a province full of mountains, nature and a very large population of ethnic minority groups. I am pretty excited to go. I may try to update the blog from there, but not sure.

Anyway, I am back from Mui Ne where we had our VIA annual meeting. Mui Ne was really nice, but it is essentially one street with resort after resort on the beach. It is nothing like the rest of Vietnam. For some odd reason, it is also full of Russians, so all the signs are in English, Russian and Vietnamese. It was fun to see all the other volunteers, but I am not a huge beach person and I did get sick, so overall it was just an ok trip.

After Mui Ne, we went back to Saigon where we had a dinner provided by a former VIA volunteer who is now the head of a major law firm in Saigon. The dinner was amazing, pretty much my real Thanksgiving dinner because it included turkey, stuffing, mashed potatoes, gravy and even apple pie at the end. It almost made up for my lack of any real Thanksgiving celebration while here. I came back to Tra Vinh on Sunday, and Anh-Thu and I met up with our friend Ai, who is a VIA volunteer in Hue, but her hometown is Tra Vinh. Ai was here visiting family, and when she was here we discovered that probably our best friend here (Huyen) is actually Ai's cousin. It was such a crazy coincidence. We had no idea that they were cousins, and we became really close friends just by chance. It's a small world I guess.

Now I am just starting to pack for China. Everything is good out here. Thanks everyone for reading the blog and writing messages. Happy holiday's!