Our housing search continues.  We have to stay together, so our choices are either a guest house with 5 cheap rooms or a large house.  But, we find ourselves caught between 3 unfortunate realities.  First, it’s almost impossible to find a guesthouse with 5 available rooms.  In fact, we’ve found only 1, and the rooms that were available 3 weeks ago have all been taken.  Second, we haven’t found any houses willing to lease for 3 months (2 months, at this point).  Third, the effort it would take to scour the city in search of other options is simply beyond us.  We’re weary from teaching, exploring Ho Chi Minh City, running Jet Set Zero, filming, etc.

We want to get outside the backpacker district (Pham Nhu Lao), which is overflowing with tourists and backpackers, hawkers and high prices, and – if the night-time street vendors are to be trusted – almost every drug imaginable.  It’s a neighborhood very much oriented toward travelers, and we’ve been told that if we want to immerse ourselves in Ho Chi Minh City, we should move out of the area.  The search has so far remained fruitless.

However, we do enjoy where we’re currently staying – Xuan Spring Hotel.

It’s a cozy comfortable little place nestled in a bustling alleyway.  Sure it has the occasional gecko dashing about, and an air conditioner that sometimes decides it’s time to take a nap, and an 11pm curfew that means we have to wake up the owners to be let in after a late night, and 4 flights of stairs for Brian and me.  Nonetheless, it’s run by the nicest cadre of people we’ve encountered in Vietnam: 1 patient grandmother who always smiles in greeting and chuckles quietly when we try to speak Vietnamese, 1 adult gentlemen who speaks English quite well and never fails to help, and 2 young sisters who always make fun of me when I mispronounce “Cam On” or “thank you” – which, by the way, is almost all the time.

They’ve made this place quite a welcoming place to live in the short term, and I’d definitely recommend the hotel to anyone traveling here.

I think I’ve supplied a good deal of laughs for this family: mispronouncing the most basic word in “tourist Vietnamese,” forgetting my room key downstairs when I trudge up 4 flights of stairs to my locked room, and even locking the key inside the room (only twice in 4 weeks…that’s pretty damned good).

So while we’re scrambling around trying to find something permanent, almost 4 weeks have flown by in the Spring Hotel without any cause for complaint.

- Matt