Chatted with a friend over FB Messenger this morning; I set myself up in the ‘laundromat’ area outside my room, which looks like it’s supposed to be a secondary common space, but mostly seems to be a space people walk through.
Sometime during that conversation a couple of identical emails arrived from the Vietnamese Immigration Dept. about my visa. Wasn’t expecting that, I’d thought I had to keep checking back on the site. In any case, the site still said Processing, and the email link didn’t load, so I figured that their systems probably took a while to filter through, and I’d check later.
Headed out to follow a suggested self guided walk from Old to New as my “do something” for the day, so this is mostly going to be a photo dump.
Yet more Chinatown pictures, this time from around one of the station access, which puts you out right onto the street in the middle of things.
I tried to get a good picture of the Pickled Pepper Frogs menu item at one of the places by the station, but couldn’t get a clear one & didn’t want to obviously be that guy taking pictures of weird menu items.
St. Andrew’s Cathedral.
National Gallery, made by joining two old buildings together to make a really huge space.
I tried for one of those “between two mirrors” shots with the last picture, but it didn’t quite work.
Brightly coloured former police station. On Hill Street.
Riverside area, which seems to be where a bunch of restaurants have set up to drive each others prices down, based on what I saw of the menus.
It’s like a larger scale version of the Chinatown/Little India thing where the footpath runs through the store, except in this case it’s running between the restaurant proper & the outdoor seating, and there’s someone trying to entice you to come in.
A fat bird statue. Or birb statue, which I’m reliably informed is the correct term.
A Salvador Dali statue, Homage to Newton.
The walking route ended back at the Merlion.
That was a nice way to see more of the city. I’m not going to claim any great insights or knowledge gained from it, but it was nice to have something of a route to follow.
I went looking for a post office, but no luck actually finding it in a maze of linked underground malls.
I did spot this place, after misreading the name.
Back at the hotel, I was relaxing for a bit & ended up chatting to an Italian couple after we figured out how to get their plug adapter to plug in. (Ground pin unlocks the phase & neutral in the socket, and theirs had a separate flip-out ground)
I did some more digging into the Vietnamese visa thing, partly to see whether the emails were a spectacularly well-informed scam, and it turns out that they launched a new web portal yesterday, or maybe today, which probably explains the unresponsive site because nothing ever works right first time, & presumably everyone was hitting it.
The important thing for me was that the visa approval happened, and I don’t need to try to change flights, and can go ahead and book a few more things with some confidence that I won’t have to cancel them again.
Finished up the evening doing show-notes on the Gen Con 2024 episode we recorded some time back, and watching people checking into the hotel.
It’s an odd mix of hostel & hotel, and I wonder whether people got a different impression than I did, based on watching them being shown around by the place. I checked in after hours, and was essentially self-guided, which is much like most hostels I’ve ever stayed at; It’s only if they’re really bored that they show you around.
That said, some of it might be language barrier based, because I did see one of the staff going through the place with some printed cards in a language I didn’t recognise, showing them to the guest.