10-28 (Saturday) Continued . . .

We killed at least an hour in a department store. We went to the Internet – we stayed an hour even though we probably only did 10 minutes worth of mail because the computers were so slow. When we finished we got to talking to the young guy who works there. He was telling us that he works from 2 p.m. until 8 a.m. daily. That’s 18 hours a day! He makes $50 a month out of which he supports his elderly parents and his sister who is at the university.

At 10:00 we went back to our hotel and got a taxi to the train station. As soon as we got out of the cab some guy grabbed our luggage and wouldn’t turn loose of it. We needed help anyway so we didn’t protest too loudly. We got to the correct track and showed our tickets to one of the conductors to help us find the right car. He started shaking his head, “No.” Come to find out when we went to pick up our tickets the day before the girl gave us the wrong ones! She gave us tickets on the 7 p.m. train instead of the 11 p.m. train! We were out of luck. The guy that had grabbed our bags went with me to the ticket office. The woman at the booth was real snotty to me. I knew I had to buy new tickets and that she wasn’t going to give me “credit.” Dinki, remember when this happened to us in Russia? I had to come up wit 1,866,000. Thank goodness I had cashed a check the day before. The soft sleepers were sold out so we had to take a hard sleeper. The soft sleeper in addition to being a little more plush had 2 bunks in a compartment – ours had 3 but we were extremely lucky that we were the only two in it. Joyce paid the guy who had grabbed our bags and hauled them all the way to our cabin. She gave him 28,000 (about $2) he said he wanted 50,000 ($3.) She didn’t understand him and thought he was saying 15,000. She counted out the money and told him she gave him more than 15,000. He took the money and stormed off.

We prepared to settle in for our trip on the Reunification Express to Saigon.