Under the sea

We're just back from dinner. Holy smokes, it was amazing. We went to a seafood restaurant, Cay Bang (omitting the diacritical marks, sorry), hanging over the Pacific in Phan Thiet. All 10 of us, with Thao ordering dish after dish of things that moments before hitting our table had been swimming in open-air tanks in the back of the restaurant.

We're talking steamed shrimp, grilled squid, steamed crabs with tamarind, snails, and oysters, plus fried rice and sauteed water spinach, and round after round of beer. The tab was $18 per person. And we couldn't eat all the food they brought.

A couple things I loved: the salt/pepper/lime juice dip for the shrimp, and the custom of bringing, after the shrimp and crabs, large bowls of lukewarm aromatic tea (with the loose tea still in it) and lemon for you to dunk your hands in after cracking all those shells. Why hasn't Southern Maryland figured this out? My hands smell like I've spent the afternoon at Bath & Bodyworks, not like I've been working in a Crisfield plant.

On the way to the restaurant, we stopped at some local sites -- temple ruins, a working Buddhist temple, and the famous Phan Thiet sand dunes, which Ray says compare with the dunes of northern Indiana, only a different type of sand.

So, tomorrow at 11 a.m. our lives change forever. I hope all three of us are ready. Tomorrow's going to be a busy day, but I hope to post at least something brief to document how it went.

The last few days have been the most amazing of my life. Every moment has been an adventure. But tomorrow is when the real fun starts.