One Step Closer to Home

Well, good news on many fronts today. The day started with Troy and Kasey getting a call from the US Embassy confirming their appointment today at 10:30am along with us! We were all excited and relieved to get this news. The whole appointment took about 2 minutes once they called us up to confirm the accuracy of the documents and our identities. We were back at the hotel by 11am and planning a relaxing weekend. We should get our baby visas on Monday assuming things go well with the Embassy's process for that. At this point, we are about 90% assured of making our Tuesday flights.

Upon arriving back to the hotel, Martine and I decided we would catch another tourist site on our list and grabbed a cab for lunch at Mama Rosas (very nice suggestion!) and then off to the Vietnam Museum of Ethnology. If you recall, Noah is part of a Vietnamese minority group known as Tay. We were unable to find much info on this group on either the Internet or back in the States so we were excited to finally find a source of info. It was a great experience and provided us with the opportunity to learn a bit about his heritage as well as take some great photos and buy some authentic Tay items at the gift shop. Below is a picture of a traditional Tay home. You can catch more on Flickr...

We arrived back to the hotel after the museum visit in time to meet Uyen and the visa person. Check that one off the list as well as we successfully extended our visas well past our date of departure.

Also while out, we stopped by a local tour agency and booked all six of us on a day-long excursion to Halong Bay. We are told this is a must see for anyone staying in Vietnam. It is a beautiful bay with thousands of forested rocky islands scattered through it. We are taking a boat tour around the bay and will stop on floating villages and have a fresh meal while on the water. We are excited to get some good pictures and video from this excursion and are also looking forward to getting out of our rooms for the day.