A Quick Post

As you can tell by Pippa’s last post, we both love Hoi An. It’s a little up market for us and there are expensive restaurants but amazingly this has been the easiest place to find good value food so far in Vietnam. We walked into the old part for dinner and nearly sat in an expensive-ish restaurant till we came to our senses and escaped still with our money.

We took a walk down by the river and found some of the makeshift restaurants cooking on the pavement so we sat down and ordered… something. I can’t remember what mine was called but it came almost immediately so I was happy straight away.

We couldn’t help but be a little bit smug about how good our meal was and how rubbish the ones in the expensive places looked in hindsight. Our meal ended up being an order of a noodle dish, wonton and spring rolls. It was so good we then ordered two more of the noodle dishes and it still cost less than one of the dishes at the first place. “Haha” was all I thought about that.

For a while we have found it hard uploading photos from the camera. That’s why the photos lately have been a bit poorer quality as they have come off phones. The hi-res camera photos take forever to upload on the internet and we have not actually noticed many Internet cafes here anyway.

This reminds me. I don’t care if it’s nerdy, but we found the coolest place in Hanoi which I was too scared to go in. It was the night we arrived so we were tired, had got used to the quiet Vientiane but were in the middle of chaotic Hanoi and weren’t anywhere near the tourist area (bloody scamming taxi driver) so were getting funny looks from locals. Anyway, I noticed the familiar sight of faces lit up by computer screens and gazed up at the sign for the shop. It looked like the coolest seedy dive bar ever but it was actually a ps3 gaming bar. Full of super nerds. There was spare screens but I didn’t go in. I wish I had…

It looked like a gamers version of fight club.

For more experienced backpackers who read this and think “aww bless, still think the locals are looking at them” then you don’t understand what happens. We can be walking around with westerners either side of us, but people still stare, nudging their friends and pointing at us and either giggling or staring in amazement. I have no idea why and it’s really confusing. I’m waiting to meet a vietnamese person with a good enough grasp of English so I can ask them. Will tell you when I find out. We guess that it’s because I’m tall with long hair and Pippa’s tall with gingery hair and freckles. We must look like a circus act or something because the reaction we get is amazingly weird.

Tomorrow I intend to upload another batch of photos, but this may not work out!