Christmas this year was definitely not like all the other years I've had back in Canada. It's usually the family all gathered together to have a home-cooked meal with the Christmas tree set up and snow falling outside (the typical Hallmark card). I certainly wasn't expecting to be riding on the back of a moto for one and a half hours through crazy Saigon traffic and then heading to a crazy theme park with extended family I had met a week earlier!

We got into Saigon on the morning of Christmas Day and hired (more like haggled) a taxi to my grandma's place. We were leaving for Cambodia early the next morning so we decided to stay in a hotel that night, right next to where the bus was leaving. After a quick lunch and time to swap Christmas gifts, my uncle and cousins loaded our packs on their motos and we all headed off to the hotel in downtown Saigon. It was crazy enough watching Saigon traffic from a car but it's even crazier on a moto! My mom and Callie were on the back of my cousins' motos and I was on the back of my uncle's, and it was clear he knew how to deal with the traffic. I was passing semi-trucks at 50km/hr close enough that I could reach out and touch them!

Navigating downtown Saigon is like being in a Labyrinth. None of the streets run at right-angles and there are even some traffic circles that have six or seven streets feeding into it! What normally takes an hour to get to the hotel took us an hour and a half. We were cruising through alleyways, down side streets and across traffic circles, all in the midst of afternoon traffic. My uncle was doing his best to find our hotel but he was starting to get frustrated. He asked a few strangers at stop lights if they knew where it was and a few pointed him in the right direction. Once we knew where we were going, my uncle sped up and the others had a tough time trying to catch up to him. It was a few minutes later we realized my cousin and Callie weren't behind us anymore! They had been caught by a red light and had to stop but we didn't notice and kept going. We waited on the side of the road to look for them in all the traffic, but after five minutes it was apparent we had been split up. We decided to continue on and luckily when we finally found the hotel, Callie was only a few minutes behind.

We took a few minutes to drop off our bags and then immediately headed to a place called the Dam Sen amusement park. It's in the lonely planet as "quirkiest" park in Vietnam. I would call it.. more.. random! With our train conductor dressed as a Mrs. Santa Claus, we spent a few hours looking at alligators, snakes and elephants, plastic dinosaurs, 101 (plastic) dalmatians, golden dragons, five-foot fish, cat and mouse mascots, a communist-egyptian monument, Buddhist pagodas, ferris wheels, rollercoasters, a Disney-themed children's area, a zen garden, mirror mazes, swan paddle boats and Che Guevara statues. It was a pretty awesome (and different!) way to spend Christmas with relatives.

Once it started getting dark out, we decided to go and said our goodbyes to my mom and cousins. We weren't meeting up with them again so this was the last time I was going to see them. My mom helped us get a taxi (without haggling) and we took a taxi back to our hotel. We had left at the perfect time because it started pouring rain on our way back to the hotel, like it had been building for days and finally decided to open up. It was the first rain we'd had since being in Vietnam but fortunately we were heading to Cambodia the next morning and leaving the rain behind. We learned later that the rain that started that evening didn't stop for the next four days.