On to Hue

In all our travels, this is one of the first places (other than the US) that has not had multi-language signage.  Not just the airport, but most of Saigon.  And there may be multi-languages, but English is not one of them.

Even the alphabet is somewhat different, not only dropping 3 letters (G, W and Z, I think) but adding in 3 replacements not to mention a number of symbols and accents above and below the letters.

Check-in was pretty easy.  Remember, we’re traveling on the equivalent of Friday before Christmas here.  There was the potential for the airport to be a zoo, and it was certainly busy although not frantic.  Our tickets got us admission to the Business Lounge, so we popped in there to try to catch up on the blog and work stuff in the time we had.

Eventually it was time to go to our gate and prepare to board.  At first, we couldn’t really figure it out – you could see people going down an aisle that was glassed in from somewhere else, presumably to our plane.  After a bit, though, we realized that they were going a plane further back that had a shared gate.

When it was our turn, we went to the gate and were immediately directed down the stairs – no escalator, down the stairs – to board a bus to be rode out to the plane.  At the bottom of the stairs, they divided us into two groups  and we were assigned different busses.  When we got out to the plane (sitting on the tarmac) we then reversed the process and climbed the stairs UP to our seats.

On the plane, you get to see cultural differences – not necessarily among the flight crew, but among the passengers.

Children weren’t strapped in as one might expect, but were allowed to move around and sit on mom and dad’s lap.  All except for one kid about 12, who wandered down the aisle from coach class to the front of the plane to try to go to the bathroom AS WE WERE TAXIING.  I thought the senior flight attendant was gonna have a stroke as she not only whooshed him back to his seat but had what seemed to be strong words for his parents.

We got breakfast.  Some kind of little sandwich and fresh fruit.  We ate the fruit.  I took a bite of the sandwich and regretted it.  Etiquette be damned, it got spit out on the plate.

This was just in a 1 hour flight, mind you.

Pretty soon we were landing at a tiiinnny little airport in Hue, which seems to be pronounced a variety of ways. 

When I say “tiny”, I mean it.  Think of the Key West International – you have either Gate 1 or Gate 2.  That’s it.  That also makes it easy for the guide to find us – plus he was holding a sign up for “Mr. Edward Beard and Mrs. Larry Johnson”.  We had to ‘fess up why we found that humorous and wanted a picture.

Sau is our guide and seems like a nice guy.  He’s asked us to help him with pronunciation and grammar, which helps because then we don’t feel quite so stupid when we need him to repeat something or explain it better.  The driver is a young man – Mr. Lock – who, like the others, doesn’t really talk.  We’re in some kind of mini van this time around.

After we were collected at the airport, we immediately started the days activities – we only have 2 days here – so we went to see two different tombs before going to the hotel to check in and have the afternoon to ourselves.

Remember, it was only 10:30 in the morning, so we had lots of time.