April 10th, 2010 Diving at Nha Trang

7AM I wake up and walked to turtle, which was just 3 blocks away. We hopped onto a minivan and there was the same Israeli couple that I met in Cambodia who are also diving for the first time. Instead of diving 2 days like me as I am short on time, they were diving 3 days for the same six dives.

I was really worried about my ears, you know, with my flying troubles and all. I told the managers at Turtle Dive and asked for 10% discount on the discover scuba diving cost ($36) they were going to charge in case I had to quit right away. The female manager agreed. We left at 7:30AM.

At 3 meters I was really uncomfortable. Thanh helped me go up and down and we worked until 5 meters. I felt comfortable after 5 minutes in this area and though I was going to be able to do it. I agreed to take the entire open water course and went down to do 2 more dives, the deepest at 9 meters.

Thanh told me not to drink tonight. The lunch included was awful. I told the manager that and asked to get 20,000 VNDs back for the lunch next day. She agreed. I also did not eat dinner as the staff told me about the seafood buffet at Sheraton.

For the rest of the day, I checked out Truc Linh at Biet Thu, Four Seasons and the Sailing Club at the beach. There were expensive. Out of those, Truc Linh had the best deal for 640,000 VNDs for a snapper fish, a lobster, 6 mussels, 6 clams and 4 tiger prowns. I checked out Sheraton's buffet ($23.10). Even though there were only two ways of cooking the small lobsters and the shellfish at Sheraton, grilled or steamed, I found that those are the traditional way of cooking in Vietnamese cuisine. This is when I realized Chinese seafood is much more creative and better in more ways and not. In my opinion, the steamed tiger prawns is the only seafood memorable in Vietnam besides the garlic crab at San Francisco (which is not even Vietnamese but fusion). But for nearly the same price, I thought Sheraton offered the most and I decided to go with that and skip lunch the next day also. That hefty price in Vietnam demanded it.

6PM Before I went out at night, there were a couple of new arrivals. Richard told me that there is another one tomorrow so I had to leave in the morning. I said okay but I checked with the couple later and they told me that they were going to move downstairs. At the moment there were Marlon, me and those two in the room, which was at maximum capacity. But if they move, would not there be enough room for me?