January 2018, the start of something great
Nadine and I packed and got the house travel ready during the day. We left and headed for Adam’s for a quick visit.
We popped in and said our hi’s and bye’s, we will miss this family, but thank heavens for Skype.
We then drove over to take Peter out for dinner at the diner. After supper Pete came with us to Sue’s and took our car back to his place. He is keeping it for the three months. We had already taken Special up to Pete’s. We chatted with Sue in her dining room because Jade was prepping for an exam tomorrow. We drank wine and signed our wills. Our first will.
The next morning Sue drove us to the airport after dropping Jade off at school. Our flight left at 11:15am and we flew to Montreal. A nice flight. We didn’t have much of a layover so we grabbed a sandwich and took it on the flight with us. The flight to Shanghai was 13 ½ hours and was quite uneventful, which is always nice. We lucked out and no one was sitting in the third seat beside us so we were able to stretch out.
We arrived in Shanghai very tired and not really sure what to do to clear customs. We were told in Halifax that we would have to pick up our bags, go through customs and back through security. It’s a good thing we had a six hour layover because we took almost four hours to get through their system and back to the flight area. We waited in a number of line ups during this time.
We arrived in Ho Chi Minh City a little behind schedule. We had a four and a half hour wait before our flight to Danang. We found a McDonald’s restaurant across the street from the domestic terminal where we had some comfort food.
We arrived in Danang around 8:30, withdrew 2,000,000 dong and took a taxi to our hotel. We could not check in until noon so we wandered around looking at the local area. We found a stall selling Vietnamese sandwiches for 10,000 dong each, just over 50 cents, a nice start to the day.
The next day we made contact with two real estate firms who I emailed from home and we started our apartment hunting in earnest after lunch. We saw five units the first day and five the next and only one was high on our list.
On the 30th we contacted the agent and asked to see the one bedroom again, we went over, met with the landlady and signed a three month lease. Later that day I found a spot where I bought a SIM card, good for a month.
Nadine in front of the apartment .