Sunday Funday in Buon Ma Thout
We wanted to actually take a tour of the coffee fields to see how it was picked and processed but the fields are a sensitive area according to the provincial police, requiring two day prior notice to clear the paperwork for Westerners to visit. We didn't know this ahead of time so we were kind of out of luck on that one.
Instead, we went to a place called Coffee Village that was a beautiful series of gardens and usual coffee shops where you could drink Vietnam's finest Java. They also had a coffee museum that they purchased from a German collector featuring coffee accoutrements from around the world since the beginning of coffee culture. We paid the few thousand dong to get in and Jaclyn asked if someone could tell us about the artifacts. Mimi did an amazing job translating our docent's explanation of Arabica vs. locally grown coffee and items from Germany, Turkey, Africa, Italy and Vietnam. The French introduced coffee culture to Vietnam. They make really strong, sweet coffee using a drip method directly into your cup. The cup has condensed milk at the bottom and you can either drink it hot or pour it over ice. I did the later. It was delicious. The coffee shop we were in was behind an artificially constructed waterfall and looked and felt like a cave. It was really cool.
After the coffee village we decided to go into the city center to get massages and perhaps find the pagoda the front desk guy told us about. Neither exactly happened. The spa that Candy had recommended had a funny vibe and the workers mysteriously "weren't there yet" so we left in search of the pagoda but everyone we talked to gave us drastically different directions so we never found it. Our group was getting hot and hungry so we split into two teams: team KFC and team "I don't even eat that in the US". Guess which team I was on??
Jaclyn, Mimi and I started walking around vaguely looking for food and mostly just taking in the sights, walking through parks, past a group of people selling gold fish off the backs of their motorbikes, and eventually found ourselves in a lovely open air restaurant seated in tiny red chairs at a low table drinking 333 Bia and eating a vegetarian Vietnamese feast of seafood mushrooms, corn salad, soy nuts and fried rice. During lunch Chengwei called (he was on team KFC with mom, Chris and Karen) to invite us to a movie. We obliged and decided to walk off some of our lunch and to get some ice cream from KFC since not only did they have delicious fries, but glorious chocolate dipped cones. The movie cost about $3 and was called "Epic" I think it was Disney or Dreamworks, it was computer animated and, like almost all movies in Vietnam, was in English with Vetnamese subtitles. I don't think it was in theaters in the states for very long. I was a father/child tale that incorporated aspects of The Lon King meets Fern Gully meets Avatar meets Honey I Shrunk The Kids. But boy was it nice to sit in an air conditioned theater for a few hours.
After the movie we collected our things from the hotel and sat hip to hip for the last time on the way to the airport. They had a covered outdoor Pho restaurant so we sat listening to the rain come down eating soup and waiting for our plane to take us back to Saigon.