The meat of the trip
March 12, 2007
I’ve already listed a few of the expenses of this trip, but I wanted to lay out the total for an overall look:
$2787 – airfare for two
$ 170 – visas for two
$ 200 – initial cash exchanged
$1000 – for PaDucky’s expenses
——-
$4157 total
I actually spent, of the initial 200, approximately $100 on cash gifts to my cousins, another $40 on cash gifts to a temple that my family has been donating to, and about $25 on clothes and shoes for myself. [Check out the shoes! They were about $6/pair. I decided I needed a pair that looked like heels for work, though it doesn’t, and the other pair was pure greed because they were so cute.]
I actually had about 750,000 Vietnamese dollars left when we were at the airport, so I left that with my dad for expenses and for my favorite cousin.
We probably spent about $75 dollars at both the Ho Chi Minh airport and the Hong Kong airport on almost a dozen gifts and souvenirs. Not too shabby, actually, considering the most expensive things were a book for him and a little mother-of-pearl handbag for me at $13 each.
Considering how much I thought it’d cost (~5k/person), less than 5k for 2.5 people isn’t half bad. Granted, I didn’t use my pocket money for lodgings as we stayed at Grandma’s, and food and transportation came out of the money I gave PaDucky, but I think the 1k that I gave him covers it.
There is one thing I wish I’d spent some money on before the trip, though. An extra battery for BoyDucky’s camera! Or a camera of my own (*drool, Panasonic DMC-FX07S*). An extra battery for him would be more affordable, though. We had his camera and my cousin’s little Fuji that used AA batteries. As usual, low-batt’ry problems kicked in by the fourth day and we had to be conservative about the photos we took. My cousin’s camera was just an evil piece of crap that would turn on, and then turn off when I tried to snap a photo. And it drained AAs like they were juice! No more than 5 pictures into a new set of batteries, it would start the shut-off-shenanigans again. My aunt will be disappointed, she wanted me to take at least 200 photos before I returned. I managed about 40, and another 20 on borrowed batteries, but it was incredibly frustrating. That camera’s a jerk!
Here’s the question: once I pay off the credit card with the airfare expenses, we’ll see how much the e-fund has been knocked back down. Should I wait until the end of the year to start refilling it again? Or should I reprioritize the house/wedding funding goal to start after this one? The mini-e is almost full, but the house/wedding fund is up next in line.
My feeling is that even though the gaping hole in the efund really bothers me, I should just let it be until the end of the year, and continue with the original plans for the year. If I get any windfalls in the last quarter or if I’ve accomplished any of the other goals and have extra money left over, it can start refilling the efund.
you can get carried away quick at the duty free shops. I scored a bottled of 21 year Scotch at a price I’ve never seen. The funny part came when my roomates mixed it with diet pepsi, lol.
On cameras, I have a DMC – fz30k, and I love it. I was little on the fence about buying a camera made by panasonic, but this camera won me over. Great zoom, good stablization and pretty fast shooting. I’ve shot over 4k photos with it last year, love it.
Yeah, I was actually pleasantly surprised by the quality of Panasonic’s digital camera. I wouldn’t necessarily wholeheartedly endorse them all the time, but I would definitely give them a higher rating than before.