First Post!

It's about 7:30 in the morning (8:30 PM at home) and it's an understatement to say I'm happy to be finished traveling. Overall, the trip wasn't bad, it was just looooooooong. I counted 32 hours from waking up in Pittsburgh to the Victory Hotel. It was mostly uneventful, just watching movies and things, like that. Zero Dark Thirty - not terribly impressed. Forrest Gump on the other hand was obviously the highlight of the trip. The weirdest thing though, the way we were flying, it was bright until about an hour into our last flight, so it was over 24 hours of daylight. Mentally it felt like a very very very long day. The only event worth mentioning was my meal choice on the flight from Tokyo to Ho Chi Minh City. I had been pretty heavily asleep for 2 hours before that, woke up with the flight attendant in front of me, and in my loopy state picked the Japanese meal option rather than the American one. It was actually pretty good - eel, rice, and noodles. The only issue was there were salads (maybe?) and other assorted food items that I had no idea how to approach, so I didn't totally fill up. I got a decent amount of culture shock in Japan and the last flight, with English not being the primary language for example. I'm still pretty sheltered, but after tonight I'm sure I'll be immersed. The only real taste of Vietnam we got last night between the airport and hotel was the chaos of the motorbikes. Here are some pictures of the trip I thought were cool.

The arrival countdown was pretty discouraging early on.

This is the screen on the seat in front of me on our Chicago-Tokyo flight. It played movies, TV shows, video games, music, etc. My favorite was the flight tracking though.  Right about here was a good feeling, about breaking the half way point on the flight path. The map would zoom in too, so it was really easy to tell when we were going south and my engineer senses were tingling noticing the tangent line going down.

This was pure relief. I can't even describe the feeling in my legs, even walking around every couple hours.

Obligatory wing pic.

Selfie time.

And Sam

Greg and I woke up around 5:30 today and I snapped this. Jet lag could definitely be worse; I think by tomorrow we'll be on schedule. This morning was pretty nice, Greg and I went to the gym and then went for a swim on the rooftop pool. Sometime this week I'll post a picture of that and of the outside of the hotel, but I didn't bring my phone to the swim. It is about to be breakfast time and after that we are headed to the University of Economics and Finance (which will from now on be UEF). After UEF we're going to the Embassy and then a formal dinner. These should be my first cultural experiences, so hopefully my next post will be more meaningful.