My friend Mary Ellen and her friend Tony leave Atlanta for Vietnam at 10:00am EST Friday, and will be arriving in Vietnam at about 10:40pm Vietnam time Saturday night.  (Due to daylight savings time, Vietnam time and the time in Atlanta are exactly 12 hours apart right now, so it’s taking a total of 24 hours and 40 minutes door-to-door.)

I’m picking them up at the airport, and I think we’ve got a pretty good itinerary – which I posted earlier – planned for them.  I think we’re going to make one change though.  There has been some severe flooding in the central part of the country around Danang and Hoi An – 30 people died in the flooding, about 3,000 people were stranded at the Danang airport at one point, 5,000 crocodiles escaped from a crocodile farm (!), etc.  We were originally scheduled to fly into Danang and stay in Hoi An, but we’re concerned that even though the floodwaters are down, the towns might not be 100% back to normal.  So I think we’re going to hire a car and driver and drive the three hours to the beach at Mui Ne.  I’ve never been to Mui Ne, but everyone here says it’s really nice, so hopefully that will be a good alternative.  [Update:  We were unable to cancel our tickets to Danang/Hoi An, so it looks like we'll be going.  I talked at length with our travel agent (who is the ex-husband of our office manager, Thuy, and he assures me that Danang and Hoi An are safe and will be no problem.  A client of his was in Hoi An yesterday and said it was pretty much back to normal, so everything should be 100% by next week.  I'm actually kind of glad because I've been to Danang and Hoi An before and there's a ton of stuff to do there.  We'll likely rent motorbikes and drive to the various nearby beaches, which are beautiful.]

I’m excited for Mary Ellen and Tony to come.  It will be my first chance to show people around Vietnam and I am looking forward to seeing how they like it.  We don’t actually have that much time in HCMC – really only this Sunday.  I’ve asked one of my Vietnamese friends to meet us for lunch on Sunday, and another Vietnamese friend – who speaks excellent English – to meet us for dinner Sunday night.  i think it will be interesting for Mary Ellen and Tony to meet some Vietnamese who speak English but who aren’t trying to hustle them in the tourists districts or whatever.

I have to admit it, though:  I am also very excited because I have loaded poor Mary Ellen down like a pack mule with stuff she’s bringing me from the U.S.  My Nike digital watch that I love busted over here, so she’s bringing me a new one of those.  The same goes for my beloved Sonicare toothbrush.  I haven’t been able to find cartridges for my Gillette Fusion razor over here (and it would obviously be impossible for me to shave with anything less than 5 blades), so I ordered a bunch of those off of the internet and she’s bringing me those.  Also two books from Amazon.com and some vitamins I can’t get over here.

But . . . the one thing I asked Mary Ellen to bring over at the last minute, and the thing I am most excited about is an Apple iPhone:

I finally found the people here who can hack the iPhone to unlock it so that it’s compatible with the Vietnamese mobile networks, so it’s game on.  If you buy an iPhone here, it costs $630.  But you can buy them in the U.S. for $399 and pay $30 to the people to unlock it here, so Mary Ellen is saving me $200 by bringing it here for me.

My “wife” in my Vietnamese beer commercial had an iPhone on the set, and that was the first time I ever actually held one in my hand because they didn’t ship in the U.S. until after I’d left.  I didn’t really get to explore too much of the functionality, but the stuff I saw was awesome.

I have been thinking about buying a better phone to text and IM from over here – texting using the numeric keypad on my $50 hand-me-down Nokia phone just sucks – and the iPhone’s user interface seems miles ahead of most or all of its competitors, so I was leaning toward the iPhone already.  Add in the ability to surf the internet, use email, etc., using wi-fi (I don’t think they have an Edge network or its equivalent here in Vietnam yet) – and the fact that free wi-fi is all over the place in this city, and it’s a no-brainer.

I don’t like the tactics Apple is using to prevent people from installing native applications on the iPhone, and to prevent people from using the iPhone with carriers other than AT&T.  Philosophically, I’m much more in line with the open standards announced by Google’s Open Handset Alliance last week.  But the first OHA phones aren’t expected until mid-2008 at the earliest, so I figured I’d go ahead and get the iPhone now.

I think I can even publish posts to Orangwutang using the iPhone – it has a 2-megapixel camera, which isn’t great but which will suffice for quick shots while I’m out and about – so that will be cool to be able to see something, take a photo of it, and publish it in nearly real time.  I’ll definitely post with my first impressions of the iPhone soon!