The plan was to spend a few days in Vietnam, then fly out for a tour of South-East Asia, starting with Cambodia and Angkor Wat for Christmas, then Thailand and Phi Phi Island for New Year’s Eve and then trekking in Laos, and back to Vietnam. So, I spent the first few days recovering from jetlag and soaking up the warmth and sun. Oh, and eating. The food, the food! We went to a Korean barbecue, we ate a lot of seafood, spring rolls, pho soup and so on. The food was really great, and the fruit that one could purchase at the local supermarket were great: mini-bananas, rambutan, mangosteen and dragon fruit are excellent. Also, I’ve found out that I actually really like ripe mango, it’s just the unripe stuff that tastes like soap that I don’t like (unfortunately, that’s the stuff you usually can buy in Poland).
Of course it turned out that Vietnamese food has one weak point – desserts. There are some desserts that are quite nice, but when we went out to lunch with M’s coworkers we were treated to THE MOST VILE DESSERT IN THE WHOLE WORLD (probably) – Evil Black Jelly. It tasted like, well, jelly made from an industrial solvent (I guess, I never drank industrial solvent, but it would probably taste like this jelly). I don’t know how they manage to eat that stuff.
We also went to a restaurant that specialised in frogs. The fried frog were quite tasty, but there wasn’t really a lot of meat on their bones, but the restaurant was somewhat funny, because it was festooned with pictures and paintings of cute happy froggies.
Well, except for the one frog which obviously knew what was coming. 🙂
And another fun fact – they love Christmas here in Asia. Unfortunately. I hoped I’ll escape the whole Christmas hooplah by jetting halfway around the globe, but my hopes were quickly dashed. Christmas decorations were present everywhere, in supermarkets, on the streets, in front of our apartment block… (and, as a matter of fact, they are still present in front of our apartment block nearing the end of January, although the Christmas tree was removed. The rest of the decorations are still there, though, and I wonder when they’ll take them off. :-))
Crossing off the list of “fun” stuff to see in Ho Chi Minh City, we have visited the HCMC City Museum (tanks, Hueys and dioramas of Glorious Workers Revolution and fight against the French opressor and American invader) and the Reunification Palace, with NVA tanks on the lawn (not the original tanks which crashed the palace’s gates during the Fall of Saigon, but the same models). It felt, well, a bit like visiting something out of communist Poland. No wonder.
Visiting the War Remnants Museum (formerly known as the “Exhibition House for US and Puppet Crimes”, later “Exhibition House for Crimes of War and Aggression”, now War Remnants Museum) was deferred for later, since visiting two museums in one day overloaded my propaganda fuses severely.