I call this living on the edge. I'll be staying with a couchsurfing host in Hanoi with no references. But I think it will be okay. She sounds nice in our correspondences and she looks nice based on her profile picture. In my experience communicating with people online from craigslist about my room for rent, I think I always got a "funny feeling" or "red flag" from strange people which turned out to be correct. I don't have any funny feelings with Hang, just a bit of nervousness from hoping everything indeed will be okay.
Today I realized around 4pm that I am going to Vietnam tomorrow, not Laos like I originally thought, and that I needed a visa to Vietnam before arriving in the country! This was such a shock! I looked up the U.S. embassy website which clearly states that people that arrive without the proper documentation will be "immediately deported".
So I frantically went to two travel agencies to see if they could arrange a visa application form for me by tomorrow but since tomorrow is Saturday and they don't work on Saturday, the soonest they could arrange it would be Monday. Well, I have a flight to Hanoi on Saturday, a Halong Bay tour booked for Sunday, and a flight from Hanoi to Luang Prabang Laos on Monday.
The manager of my hostel called another company for me which said they could get one for me on Sunday. Then I could change my flight date to Hanoi from Saturday to Sunday. I went online to check the change policy and realized I in fact didn't have a flight booked to Hanoi like I thought I did!
The confusion with the flight is because I had booked one though a Vietnamese travel agency which was double the normal price, and emailed them immediately after to cancel it. Then I never booked the flight I actually wanted.
Imagine me showing up at the airport tomorrow for a flight not scheduled, trying to go to a communist country without a visa.
Yes, I'm living on the edge.
God keep me safe.
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