the city of saigon
so life has been a little up and down this year, but if nothing else, saigon was a resounding success!!1 mostly. i pulled an itinerary out of my ass two days before we left, so i'm just pleased it wasn't a total suckfest. the hotel was maybe a little bit of a suckfest for my parents with the traffic noise and the construction work going on at 2 in the morning or whatever crazy hour traffic actually calms down over there, but that didn't bother me too much.
(true blue city girl here, traffic noises are my lullabye. i don't think anything has been less peaceful for me than the two nights we spent in pangkor laut in absolute, utter silence. AND DARKNESS, CAN'T FORGET ABOUT THAT. for a relaxing weekend getaway, deposit me in the heart of light pollution city, thank you very much.)
so the afternoon we landed, i booked us a motorcycle food tour. we've been back a couple of weeks, and i still can't believe i pulled that off. i'm so glad my aunt came along, if she hadn't been all about the ????-ness, my parents would have flat out refused. my mum already did, but she changed her tune when my aunt volunteered to risk her life with me. (it wasn't at risk at any point.) ANYWAY. we got to the hotel with a little bit of time to spare before the tour, and after being speedily checked in by the (very handsome) vietnamese shift manager, my dad said he was hungry and needed a quick bite. we'd met a vietnamese student studying in singapore on the plane ride over, and she recommended a place called pho 24, and there was one right by our hotel. it turned out to be the equivalent of the vietnamese mcdonald's, but for pho. i had the best coconut EVER there, oh my god. i will be dreaming about it forever. unfortunately, the food was less good, so we abandoned ship and went next door instead. on google maps, it was called "best restaurant". and it lived up to its name, yay! we had probably too much to eat to be considered a snack (especially since we had the food tour coming up), and when we got back to the hotel, our tour guides were pretty much already waiting in the lobby.
the tour was SO MUCH FUN. the tour guides were all young ladies (and one gent), and we had our own motorcyclist to ride pillon with. they were all lovely and knowledgeable and super engaging, and chatted with us about everything from vietnamese culture to the state of the local economy, to netflix. (one of them learnt how to speak english from watching netflix, and another was a translator for the shows currently airing. all on top of the part-time tour guide gig, and being full-time students. AMAZING.) they earned USD 11 per tour they did, which is a lot. a fresh graduate earns USD250 a month if they find a good job, and maybe upgrades to 400 over time. with our guides, we explored the different districts of saigon, and ate at places only locals knew about, which was FANTASTIC, even if most of the food itself wasn't mind-blowingly good. (it was all very tasty, though!)
riding on the motorcycle was so much fun, i could've done it all night. but we had perfect timing, because it started to pour just as we got to our first stop for banh xeo (aka crispy pancakes). i've had banh xeo a bunch, and i'm mostly apathetic about it, but there was a weird starter dish that i really liked! and we got to smell and taste all the different herbs, even the weird ones like fish mint??? and i liked it all!
the rain subsided as we were leaving (yay) and made our way to the next stop for a crab broth noodle dish. i thought it was bun rieu at first but i'm pretty sure they called it something else and i was to enthralled trying the dish to double check. the noodles were SO GOOD. i have never had silkier, better textured noodles, mmmm. i was a little more take it or leave it with the broth but it was a vehicle for the noodles, so that was fine.
then we went to a vietnamese cafe, and i'm not a coffee drinker at all, but my tour guide (anne) recommended iced coffee with condensed milk (which is a thing there), and it was surprisingly good! it also kept me up till like three in the morning when caffeine usually has zero effect on me, but hey! live and learn.
finally, we stopped at a little dessert shop where we tried a variety of weird things. it seemed like there was coconut and/or tapioca in every one. definitely not my kind of thing, but the chendol-like liquid-y thing with durian and jackfruit and coconut milk was pretty good!
food tour!
we headed back to the hotel stuffed with food and knowledge from our new friends, and ready to spend the next couple of days exploring saigon. we woke early to try a banh mi place in the morning, which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, and not just because the traffic in saigon is INSANE??? RIDICULOUS??? TOTALLY BERSERK???? ANY OTHER SYNONYMOUS ADJECTIVE??? motorcycles make up 75% of the vehicles on the road and THERE ARE NO GOVERNING TRAFFIC RULES FOR THEM. they can ride against traffic, don't necessarily stop at red lights, and drive on the pavement if it strikes their fancy and/or gets them out of the jam on the road. it's chaos. approximately 30 people die from traffic accidents in vietnam everyday. suffice to say the 15 minute walk to the banh mi place was an adrenaline rush, and not always in the fun way.
after we filled our stomachs, my mum and aunt went to get a facial done while my dad and i headed over to the reunification palace. it was bizarre to hear about history from the opposite perspective. like, i understand logically that history books are skewed by perspective, but i got really confused reading about the heroic revolution freeing the country from the oppresors and the roles were reversed from what i'd been hearing about for three decades. also, the interior of the palace was ridiculous, all kinds of opulent but paired with the strangest things. leather seats and gridlocked windows, horrifying stepford wives type curtains with modern sleek wood furniture. i'm still totally baffled. the tanks and the helicopter were probably my favourite parts of the whole thing, but it was a different experience overall.
we rendezvoused with my mum and aunt back at the hotel, and the proceeded on to a long and trecherous journey to oc dao for lunch. i'm not sure how we got as lost as we did with our uber driver, but it was a long trek to the restaurant, which wound up being tiny and cramped and not the sort of place my parents enjoyed being taken to at all, oops. we had all sorts of strange seafood / molluscs and got appropriately messy, but the general consensus was that it didn't taste as good as our local shells. alas.
my parents were in need of a rest after lunch, and my aunt and i split off from them to go shopping! it was kind of eh, because we were in the equivalent of their orchard road / bond street / fifth avenue / take your pick, and we stopped in departmental stores like takashimaya (which - why did we do that when the takashimaya in singapore is more than adequate) for a look around. finally we decided it made more sense to go for ice cream and a mani-pedi at the little shop next to our hotel instead. it ended up costing an arm and a leg, pardon the pun, but it was nice to get to chill out and have my nails done without feeling like i was wasting my time in saigon cooped up in the hotel room. after, we had an hour or so to kill before dinner, so we decided to take a little stroll up and down the street our hotel was on. my aunt tried on all manners of vietnamese traditional wear, which was adorable and hysterical, but we ended up blowing all our money at one particular boutique (that i'm pretty sure was an american brand), wrecking our newly-done nails in the process, yay.
eventually my parents joined us, and we headed to the nearby night market for some dinner. it was terrible and touristy, and my dad made it clear he hated every minute, but it was just the thing i was looking for that night. then it was back to the hotel for some much needed rest, in view of the long day we'd had and the even longer one coming up!
we awoke on day three at the crack of dawn, and scurried to get ready in time for our bus to the mekong delta. i thought i'd have a couple of hours to sleep on the bus, but our tour guide - dong - kept us all awake with chatter almost the entire way there. it ws just seven of us on the bus when we'd been told to expect close to forty, though, so that was a nice surprise! we were taken to the floating market, which was much smaller than we were expecting (but also much less touristy, since there really isn't any need for the floating markets anymore, except the one in particular that they set up just for the tourists). but we got to try a coconut and a bunch of fruits off one of the boats. they were all terrible except for the banana (and the rambutan, by my aunt and mum's accounts) but it was exciting all the same.
after, we went to a little island/village. the morning gets a little fuzzy for me at that point, but we, in no particular order, listened to some traditional vietnamese singing (which would have been an interesting experience, but was made all the better with my aunt's ridiculous narration in my ear about what was going on despite her grasp of vietnamese being about as proficient as mine was (as in, not at all), had some honey tea, tried our hand at making the local version of popcorn, bought a ton of local candy, tried a tiny cup of snake wine (WITH AN ACTUAL SNAKE IN IT AHHHHH), perused all manners of local products, and got suckered into buying unnecessary postcards from tiny children. (my parents did, at any rate; i, on the other hand, am made of stonier stuff.)
then it was off to a different little island for our little sampan ride down the mekong. it was fun for about five minutes, but then my dad lost his patience because of the heat and the humidity and spent the rest of our (twenty minute?) ride complaining about it. fun for all! still, the lady rowing our boat couldn't understand a word of english, so his pleas to turn around fell on deaf ears. when we finally made it to the other side of our trip, we were led to a little home for lunch! but first, a bicycling trip around the village. i haven't ridden a bicycle since visiting mette in, idk, 2012? so it's been a while, and these bikes had THE WORST BRAKES - like my brakes were me planting my feet on the ground tyvm - and there was no real road and the grass was so tall on either side of you that most of the time we had no idea if we were next to a ditch or a mountaintop. LIVING ON THE EDGE!!! we saw fields of durian trees and a dilapidated little temple and lots of vegetation. also my aunt almost fell at one point, but my dad caught her, so all in all, it was a successful expedition.
when we got back to the house expecting a good lunch, we were told we had to help with the prep! we wrapped some meat in flowers, and some other meat in leaves, and left the deep frying/barbequeing to the experts. we ended up with the fried flower-meat, the grilled leafy-meat, some appetisers, soup, grilled fish rice wraps and some mango. the meal as a whole was pretty tasty, with the exception of one or two dishes, and we had a lovely getting-to-know-you chat with our australian tour buddies. (one of them had a nokia windows phone!!!! the only time i've seen someone else with one in real life!!!) as a bonus, just as we were leaving, another bunch of singaporeans came into the house, so we had a fun time saying hello.
mekong shenanigans!
it was a long drive back to the city after our busy afternoon, so we decided to make a quick banh mi stop at a place i'd marked on my list as "tastiest banh mi???", called bánh mì huỳnh hoa. AND IT WAS AMAZING?!?!?!? RIDICULOUSLY DELICIOUS AND PROBABLY THE BEST THING I ATE THE ENTIRE TRIP. i was bummed it was only a tea break, because we already had dinner lined up. i would've had two helpings of that bahn mi if i could.
BEST BAHN MI!
we stopped for some coffee at the cafe opposite the little stall as we shared our sandwiches, then headed to a place i'd been recommended for suckling pig. we wound up only arriving at close to 8pm, and the suckling pig was all sold out by then, SADNESS. the rest of the food we had that evening was woefully not awesome, but the restaurant itself was HUGE, like nothing else i've ever seen, and full of people yelling and drinking and clearly having a jolly good time. so that was that.
we got back to the hotel just in time for me to duck into the nail salon next door and ask if they could fix my previously ruined nails. everyone was clearly packed and ready to leave, but the owner sat down and fixed them for me herself. she looked supremely displeased with my nail job, but i couldn't point out my nail girl from our visit the day before, soooo. my parents came along this time, and had a swell time getting to know the owner. they chatted about food (and how terrible it was in saigon compared to the freshness in california), and where to get the best crab rolls, and the best deals she could give us for a full body massage. we had two appointments fixed up for my aunt and mum the next morning, and the owner also promised to order the most delicious crab rolls in town for us, though she warned it would be a little pricey.
the next morning in saigon, also our last, i went with my dad to try some bahn mi op la, which is basically deconstructed bahn mi with half-boiled eggs. it was tasty but not as good as kaya toast with half-boiled eggs, so. we went back to the hotel after, to share the verdict with my mum and aunt and settle their post-massage plans so we wouldn't be left scrambling to get to the airport, and then me and my dad went out to explore the rest of the city's tourist spots. like the post office, which was lovely, and the opera house (and i was so bummed i hadn't thought to do that before, because the shows looked awesome and the venue looked lovely, and you're only allowed inside if you have a ticket to a show!). we also checked out rex hotel, and the view of city hall from the ground, and all in all had a ball of a time.
when we got back to the hotel, my mum and aunt were just about done, and the crab rolls the salon owner had ordered for us were piping hot! we brought the rolls back to our hotel room for a quick taste, and it was the second best thing we had all trip! (it was tainted by the fact that when i googled "best crab rolls in saigon" it was one of the first things to pop up, and we realised the owner had charged us more than five times the price for it. thanks, salon owner!) and then raced to good restaurant for one last proper (if disappointing) meal, before bundling into a cab to head to the airport for our flight home.
it wasn't everything i thought it was going to be, but in many ways it was better. i can't wait to visit hanoi at some point! all the food trips for me forever, please and thank you!
(true blue city girl here, traffic noises are my lullabye. i don't think anything has been less peaceful for me than the two nights we spent in pangkor laut in absolute, utter silence. AND DARKNESS, CAN'T FORGET ABOUT THAT. for a relaxing weekend getaway, deposit me in the heart of light pollution city, thank you very much.)
so the afternoon we landed, i booked us a motorcycle food tour. we've been back a couple of weeks, and i still can't believe i pulled that off. i'm so glad my aunt came along, if she hadn't been all about the ????-ness, my parents would have flat out refused. my mum already did, but she changed her tune when my aunt volunteered to risk her life with me. (it wasn't at risk at any point.) ANYWAY. we got to the hotel with a little bit of time to spare before the tour, and after being speedily checked in by the (very handsome) vietnamese shift manager, my dad said he was hungry and needed a quick bite. we'd met a vietnamese student studying in singapore on the plane ride over, and she recommended a place called pho 24, and there was one right by our hotel. it turned out to be the equivalent of the vietnamese mcdonald's, but for pho. i had the best coconut EVER there, oh my god. i will be dreaming about it forever. unfortunately, the food was less good, so we abandoned ship and went next door instead. on google maps, it was called "best restaurant". and it lived up to its name, yay! we had probably too much to eat to be considered a snack (especially since we had the food tour coming up), and when we got back to the hotel, our tour guides were pretty much already waiting in the lobby.
the tour was SO MUCH FUN. the tour guides were all young ladies (and one gent), and we had our own motorcyclist to ride pillon with. they were all lovely and knowledgeable and super engaging, and chatted with us about everything from vietnamese culture to the state of the local economy, to netflix. (one of them learnt how to speak english from watching netflix, and another was a translator for the shows currently airing. all on top of the part-time tour guide gig, and being full-time students. AMAZING.) they earned USD 11 per tour they did, which is a lot. a fresh graduate earns USD250 a month if they find a good job, and maybe upgrades to 400 over time. with our guides, we explored the different districts of saigon, and ate at places only locals knew about, which was FANTASTIC, even if most of the food itself wasn't mind-blowingly good. (it was all very tasty, though!)
riding on the motorcycle was so much fun, i could've done it all night. but we had perfect timing, because it started to pour just as we got to our first stop for banh xeo (aka crispy pancakes). i've had banh xeo a bunch, and i'm mostly apathetic about it, but there was a weird starter dish that i really liked! and we got to smell and taste all the different herbs, even the weird ones like fish mint??? and i liked it all!
the rain subsided as we were leaving (yay) and made our way to the next stop for a crab broth noodle dish. i thought it was bun rieu at first but i'm pretty sure they called it something else and i was to enthralled trying the dish to double check. the noodles were SO GOOD. i have never had silkier, better textured noodles, mmmm. i was a little more take it or leave it with the broth but it was a vehicle for the noodles, so that was fine.
then we went to a vietnamese cafe, and i'm not a coffee drinker at all, but my tour guide (anne) recommended iced coffee with condensed milk (which is a thing there), and it was surprisingly good! it also kept me up till like three in the morning when caffeine usually has zero effect on me, but hey! live and learn.
finally, we stopped at a little dessert shop where we tried a variety of weird things. it seemed like there was coconut and/or tapioca in every one. definitely not my kind of thing, but the chendol-like liquid-y thing with durian and jackfruit and coconut milk was pretty good!
food tour!
we headed back to the hotel stuffed with food and knowledge from our new friends, and ready to spend the next couple of days exploring saigon. we woke early to try a banh mi place in the morning, which turned out to be a bit of a disappointment, and not just because the traffic in saigon is INSANE??? RIDICULOUS??? TOTALLY BERSERK???? ANY OTHER SYNONYMOUS ADJECTIVE??? motorcycles make up 75% of the vehicles on the road and THERE ARE NO GOVERNING TRAFFIC RULES FOR THEM. they can ride against traffic, don't necessarily stop at red lights, and drive on the pavement if it strikes their fancy and/or gets them out of the jam on the road. it's chaos. approximately 30 people die from traffic accidents in vietnam everyday. suffice to say the 15 minute walk to the banh mi place was an adrenaline rush, and not always in the fun way.
after we filled our stomachs, my mum and aunt went to get a facial done while my dad and i headed over to the reunification palace. it was bizarre to hear about history from the opposite perspective. like, i understand logically that history books are skewed by perspective, but i got really confused reading about the heroic revolution freeing the country from the oppresors and the roles were reversed from what i'd been hearing about for three decades. also, the interior of the palace was ridiculous, all kinds of opulent but paired with the strangest things. leather seats and gridlocked windows, horrifying stepford wives type curtains with modern sleek wood furniture. i'm still totally baffled. the tanks and the helicopter were probably my favourite parts of the whole thing, but it was a different experience overall.
we rendezvoused with my mum and aunt back at the hotel, and the proceeded on to a long and trecherous journey to oc dao for lunch. i'm not sure how we got as lost as we did with our uber driver, but it was a long trek to the restaurant, which wound up being tiny and cramped and not the sort of place my parents enjoyed being taken to at all, oops. we had all sorts of strange seafood / molluscs and got appropriately messy, but the general consensus was that it didn't taste as good as our local shells. alas.
my parents were in need of a rest after lunch, and my aunt and i split off from them to go shopping! it was kind of eh, because we were in the equivalent of their orchard road / bond street / fifth avenue / take your pick, and we stopped in departmental stores like takashimaya (which - why did we do that when the takashimaya in singapore is more than adequate) for a look around. finally we decided it made more sense to go for ice cream and a mani-pedi at the little shop next to our hotel instead. it ended up costing an arm and a leg, pardon the pun, but it was nice to get to chill out and have my nails done without feeling like i was wasting my time in saigon cooped up in the hotel room. after, we had an hour or so to kill before dinner, so we decided to take a little stroll up and down the street our hotel was on. my aunt tried on all manners of vietnamese traditional wear, which was adorable and hysterical, but we ended up blowing all our money at one particular boutique (that i'm pretty sure was an american brand), wrecking our newly-done nails in the process, yay.
eventually my parents joined us, and we headed to the nearby night market for some dinner. it was terrible and touristy, and my dad made it clear he hated every minute, but it was just the thing i was looking for that night. then it was back to the hotel for some much needed rest, in view of the long day we'd had and the even longer one coming up!
we awoke on day three at the crack of dawn, and scurried to get ready in time for our bus to the mekong delta. i thought i'd have a couple of hours to sleep on the bus, but our tour guide - dong - kept us all awake with chatter almost the entire way there. it ws just seven of us on the bus when we'd been told to expect close to forty, though, so that was a nice surprise! we were taken to the floating market, which was much smaller than we were expecting (but also much less touristy, since there really isn't any need for the floating markets anymore, except the one in particular that they set up just for the tourists). but we got to try a coconut and a bunch of fruits off one of the boats. they were all terrible except for the banana (and the rambutan, by my aunt and mum's accounts) but it was exciting all the same.
after, we went to a little island/village. the morning gets a little fuzzy for me at that point, but we, in no particular order, listened to some traditional vietnamese singing (which would have been an interesting experience, but was made all the better with my aunt's ridiculous narration in my ear about what was going on despite her grasp of vietnamese being about as proficient as mine was (as in, not at all), had some honey tea, tried our hand at making the local version of popcorn, bought a ton of local candy, tried a tiny cup of snake wine (WITH AN ACTUAL SNAKE IN IT AHHHHH), perused all manners of local products, and got suckered into buying unnecessary postcards from tiny children. (my parents did, at any rate; i, on the other hand, am made of stonier stuff.)
then it was off to a different little island for our little sampan ride down the mekong. it was fun for about five minutes, but then my dad lost his patience because of the heat and the humidity and spent the rest of our (twenty minute?) ride complaining about it. fun for all! still, the lady rowing our boat couldn't understand a word of english, so his pleas to turn around fell on deaf ears. when we finally made it to the other side of our trip, we were led to a little home for lunch! but first, a bicycling trip around the village. i haven't ridden a bicycle since visiting mette in, idk, 2012? so it's been a while, and these bikes had THE WORST BRAKES - like my brakes were me planting my feet on the ground tyvm - and there was no real road and the grass was so tall on either side of you that most of the time we had no idea if we were next to a ditch or a mountaintop. LIVING ON THE EDGE!!! we saw fields of durian trees and a dilapidated little temple and lots of vegetation. also my aunt almost fell at one point, but my dad caught her, so all in all, it was a successful expedition.
when we got back to the house expecting a good lunch, we were told we had to help with the prep! we wrapped some meat in flowers, and some other meat in leaves, and left the deep frying/barbequeing to the experts. we ended up with the fried flower-meat, the grilled leafy-meat, some appetisers, soup, grilled fish rice wraps and some mango. the meal as a whole was pretty tasty, with the exception of one or two dishes, and we had a lovely getting-to-know-you chat with our australian tour buddies. (one of them had a nokia windows phone!!!! the only time i've seen someone else with one in real life!!!) as a bonus, just as we were leaving, another bunch of singaporeans came into the house, so we had a fun time saying hello.
mekong shenanigans!
it was a long drive back to the city after our busy afternoon, so we decided to make a quick banh mi stop at a place i'd marked on my list as "tastiest banh mi???", called bánh mì huỳnh hoa. AND IT WAS AMAZING?!?!?!? RIDICULOUSLY DELICIOUS AND PROBABLY THE BEST THING I ATE THE ENTIRE TRIP. i was bummed it was only a tea break, because we already had dinner lined up. i would've had two helpings of that bahn mi if i could.
BEST BAHN MI!
we stopped for some coffee at the cafe opposite the little stall as we shared our sandwiches, then headed to a place i'd been recommended for suckling pig. we wound up only arriving at close to 8pm, and the suckling pig was all sold out by then, SADNESS. the rest of the food we had that evening was woefully not awesome, but the restaurant itself was HUGE, like nothing else i've ever seen, and full of people yelling and drinking and clearly having a jolly good time. so that was that.
we got back to the hotel just in time for me to duck into the nail salon next door and ask if they could fix my previously ruined nails. everyone was clearly packed and ready to leave, but the owner sat down and fixed them for me herself. she looked supremely displeased with my nail job, but i couldn't point out my nail girl from our visit the day before, soooo. my parents came along this time, and had a swell time getting to know the owner. they chatted about food (and how terrible it was in saigon compared to the freshness in california), and where to get the best crab rolls, and the best deals she could give us for a full body massage. we had two appointments fixed up for my aunt and mum the next morning, and the owner also promised to order the most delicious crab rolls in town for us, though she warned it would be a little pricey.
the next morning in saigon, also our last, i went with my dad to try some bahn mi op la, which is basically deconstructed bahn mi with half-boiled eggs. it was tasty but not as good as kaya toast with half-boiled eggs, so. we went back to the hotel after, to share the verdict with my mum and aunt and settle their post-massage plans so we wouldn't be left scrambling to get to the airport, and then me and my dad went out to explore the rest of the city's tourist spots. like the post office, which was lovely, and the opera house (and i was so bummed i hadn't thought to do that before, because the shows looked awesome and the venue looked lovely, and you're only allowed inside if you have a ticket to a show!). we also checked out rex hotel, and the view of city hall from the ground, and all in all had a ball of a time.
when we got back to the hotel, my mum and aunt were just about done, and the crab rolls the salon owner had ordered for us were piping hot! we brought the rolls back to our hotel room for a quick taste, and it was the second best thing we had all trip! (it was tainted by the fact that when i googled "best crab rolls in saigon" it was one of the first things to pop up, and we realised the owner had charged us more than five times the price for it. thanks, salon owner!) and then raced to good restaurant for one last proper (if disappointing) meal, before bundling into a cab to head to the airport for our flight home.
it wasn't everything i thought it was going to be, but in many ways it was better. i can't wait to visit hanoi at some point! all the food trips for me forever, please and thank you!