My last week being a resident of HCM was as you can imagine, busy, sad, and fun all at the same time.  I was lucky enough to have a visitor from Australia, Craig so we explored HCM.  His flight arrived on time, however we had just had one of our massive storms that dumps rain and then the roads flood.  I somehow managed to avoid it all, no delays in getting an Uber and arrived at the airport in good time however the roads were flooded.

In Vietnam the notion of queuing is foreign so we had some fun at the taxi stand and ended up sharing with a Vietnamese girl who had been ordered out of her previous taxi by a white male.

The next day we started bright and early on Tuesday and I picked up Craig on Oscar.  We had some noodles for breakfast and a bit a congealed blood is always a good way to start.

Craig is the fourth person I have taken on the “Julie’s Personalised Tour of The Ho”.  We had views of the city, went on a ferry, saw rice fields, had Vietnamese Coffee, drove over a massive bridge and had dry Pho for lunch with some of my work friends.

The next day was my farewell party at work.  I have been learning Vietnamese for about 10 months, so I wrote the below speech and presented this.

I got many lovely gifts as well from the team at work:

Craig wanted to go to the Chu Chi Tunnels and I hadn’t been since 2012 so off we went.

The traps that they made were deadly and the way they lived, amazing.  Vietnamese who killed Americans were called The American Killer Hero and we watched an entire documentary about this.

We crawled through the tunnels and fired a few weapons.  As you can see I didn’t really enjoy it, but Craig looked like a professional with the AK47.

You can’t spend time in HCM without going to one of the many roof top bars

I had my final lunch with the Habitat team and of course it was Bun Cha

Craig headed to Angkor Wat, Cambodia and I had to pack, see the before and after shots. I am not sure how it happened but I accumulated at least 20kg more.

My last night as a resident was spent having a seafood dinner, cruising around on the motorbikes and having coffee, very typical and I will miss it.