dalat,vietnam

well, we are still in vietnam, but getting close to the end. after hue, we went to hoi an and then to nha trang and now we are in dalat. nha trang was good, we spent one day on the beach and the other soaking in mud and hot springs. so relaxing, but soooo resorty!!! i think i was glad to move on, but have dalat to be a bit resorty as well, except its in the mountains and so beautiful.
the man who owned the hotel in nha trang was extremely friendly and one of my favorite mornings was chatting with him. he and his family had quite an interesting life story. he not only wanted to share his life, but was interested in ours as well. its so great when you are traveling to meet someone so genuinely kind. for the most part vietnamese people are wonderful, but many are out to get our money and its a constant hassle in the streets. its also nice to have such a nice, stable, and sane place to sleep, because the lady who works at the hotel we are at now is psycho!
so we arrive and she tells us $8 (american) for the room and we say no $5 (this is why it is so exhausting to travel and live in asia, you have to bargain for everything!). we go back and forth and i insist that $5 is the most we will pay. (yes $5 for both of us!! so cheap here...) anyway, she shows us one room, but after deciding on $5 she puts us in another room. the room is the same, however its on the first floor right by the door and the lobby where people sit and chat. i make a comment to susan that i hope it isn't too noisy, but for $5 we'll take it. the lady leaves and we begin to relax for a bit before we head for the day. 20 minutes later there is a knock on the door and the woman asks us to move rooms, in fact, insists that we do because it'll be much to noisy where we are..... ??? k, so we move.
all the while, she is pushing us to buy a tour that the hotel offers. we have only been in town for like 10 minutes and keep saying, we haven't decided, we'll look later..... oh yeah, on our way into town we met a guy selling motorbike tours and he was an "independent agent" we'll say, so we were interested in patronizing the local man rather than this huge tourist maze they have going on here. soooooooooooo, we've changed rooms and are extremely irritated with this pushy woman, but are ready to settle in and go explore.
"side note": not only is this woman pushing her damned tours, but there is meek little woman following her offering to do our laundry..... really, every 5 minutes she says she can do our laundry and every 5 minutes we have to say no, we just had it done. i saw this woman 4 times today and she asked me every time.... white people, we all look the same.......
ok, so we leave the hotel, but not without this woman attacking us once more. we finally escape to do some errands and decide to go back and talk with the man on the square. i once again bargain a price (not a very good one, but i think i'm catching on to this negotiating crap) and he says he'll pick us up at 8:30 at the hotel. great! deal is done.(this is how things are done here, you have to be careful, but its really safe) we go back to the hotel and get our key from the front desk hoping that crazy lady won't notice us, but she comes running to the front desk and insists that she'll have 2 motorcycles pick us up in the morning we just have to tell her what time. i say, sorry, we've already made plans. and she says "with who? why didn't you buy one from us?". she has this disgusted, sad, insulted look on her face, and i think who the hell is this lady? i try to make it sound like we were meeting another friend and they had already booked the trip, but i couldn't lie, so i just said "its ok, it doesn't matter, its no big deal".... now, i'm not sure why i said that, because i couldn't tell what emotion this lady was feeling. i come to find out, it insult and disgust, because every time susan and i have seen her since she gives us this disapproving look and makes us feel totally uncomfortable.
the story doesn't end there.......................
we get up this morining about 7:30 to get ready for the day and there is a knock on the door. susan and i look at each other with confusion... i answer the door and its HER. i'm really, really pissed off, cuz i'm sure she's going to either try and sell me something or tell me off for not booking a damned tour with her or she's kicking us out.
nope, she asks us to move rooms again...... she gives us some story and walks away in a hurry, scared i'm sure that susan and i will check out right then or not pay at all. so anyway, we move rooms and whose in their cleaning? the laundry lady!!! she's so sweet, but come on, you have to know that we are the girls who have been 3 different freakin' rooms and that you've already asked 50 freakin' times about the laundry. apparently not, cuz she proceeded to ask me four times today. ugh! so that's my rant on vietnam. not bad for 10 days of traveling so far. there definitely have been other annoyances, but similar to those in china, so i'm better able to overlook them. if you ever come to dalat, vietnam DO NOT STAY AT THE PEACE 2 HOTEL. the woman is crazy and she will hassle you and make you crazy..... oh, and the moto guide we had was so great i'm so glad we went with him. he even took us to a com chay or vegetarian restaurant afterwards and bought us persimmons from the roadside.
today we also met a monk they nicknamed the "crazy monk" because he lives in a pagoda by himself and is an artist. an amazing artist actually. its been one of the highlights of the trip. we went in and immediately he sat us down and had us help him translate a poem from vietnamese into "good" english so he could better explain it to people. we took quite a while and he told us that if we were poets, we would understand and know the words right away... ha! anyway, he was really great and not actually crazy. most of the money he makes from his art he gives to charities and he has art shows all over the world. i have pictures, i'll try to get them up soon. the internet here is really crap. whooooo, this is long and i'm tired... i'll write again soon, probably from cambodia!!!! hope all are well.
peace nrj