My wife & I visited Vietnam in March of this year
(Hanoi, Hue, Danang, HCMC). What we generally found
was that they want to trade in US$. In HCMC, most
everything is available, although probably out of
reach for the common Vietnamese. Most brands of
cigarettes (often smuggled) are available everywhere,
including 555s. In the country-side and at many of
tourist spots, we were swarmed with kids looking for
handouts or trying to sell small items. Small toys
and writing pens seemed to satisfy them (as opposed
to just giving money. Hope this helps.

ttt - see my point, kybourbon?

Robespierre - how about letting the rest of us in on the point? A 1996 post to the wrong forum resurrected?You've got my interest, but I'm mystified.

In this thread fodors.com/forums/threadselect.jsp?tid=35029803 kybourbon suggested that a poster's oldest post would be found at the end of a chronological list of posts s/he had contributed to.

I am merely pointing out that this is not true, because when anyone tops a thread, it "loses its place in line" so to speak, and is no longer in any chronological order beyond that of the latest post in the thread.

True, Robes, but many posts died in the early days with no responses at all. Most don't get resurrected as this thread did. BR (before registration) many posters used a variety of names anyway which makes it even harder to find your oldest posts.

Were there multiple forums? It's seems there weren't by looking at the 1996 link you provided. The links Rex and I gave have a forum tag (Europe), but perhaps this was added as a search feature later.

The complete name of this thread is http://www.fodors.com/forums/threads...=3&tid=101

I just edited out the part that isn't needed.

ttt