2/3 Back in Saigon

We arrive back around 6:30 and head to the hotel for a shower – oh lovely!  It’s so hot.  My new saying is it’s too hot to be cute!  Forget make up, it just melts off you.  Forget doing your hair, it just wilts (or in my cases frizzes up).  Forget how you look in pictures because you’ll always be the shiny faced frizzy haired girl.  Well at least I can do the Asian pose!

So, nicely refreshed, we head out for dinner of Pho.  We were going to eat at the street cart at the end of the lane, but then decided to go to the little restaurant at the other end of the street so we could sit and have beer.  The street vendor looked great – but she only has 6 seats and we decided we didn’t want to have to wander about waiting if she was full.

The restaurant, Pho Quynh, is great – 2 floors – we scored a table downstairs and ordered. The great thing about Pho is that its FAST.  No sooner than you have ordered and it is in front of you.  I got Chicken, Ed got Beef. Both excellent and filling.  And only $2.25US each. Seriously!

  

Afterward, we wander around, avoiding the street vendors and turning down the guys who call out in these little funny hoarse whispers “hey, marijuana”.  Every time they do it, I almost giggle, it’s so comically sly.  Rounding the block, we spy a store named after me – cool!

Then sit at the Lucky 7 bar with the sexy girls, drinking beer and being fed little candied fruit treats they bought off a cart.  I asked what they were and no one could tell me, but they kept offering them to us!  One was like a candied cherry maybe?  Another a pickled olive you dipped in salt. Then they had these weird seed things that they gave us.  I thought they were like sunflower seeds and popped a whole one in my mouth. Well the girl screamed, literally!  I’m like, what?  She shows me how to crack them open with her teeth and then eat the little seed out of them.

I’m not very good at it, and to tell the truth?  They’re not worth it.  They don’t taste like anything really, so I’m not sure why you’d bother, but boy do they go to town on them!  They bought 4 little bags of them and sat and ate them all night long!

After a couple of beers and wines, the music got too  much for us and we headed home for a good night’s sleep.