July 29th, 2017
first full day in Hoi An-July 29th
Firstly I want to say I am impressed with the breakfast at the hotel (Thuy Duong 3 Hotel). They had some very tasty options and really good fruit. And yummy yummy coffee! Can’t put a price on that. The coffee was so bad at the Sophia (hotel in Da Nang). I really had to persevere to get through it.
We didn’t do too much today. We went back to the Old City and focused on a couple things. #1 getting an egg coffee and #2 shopping!
#1: The egg coffee was recommended to us by Andy and Lily. I have yet to see this anywhere but hear it’s quite the coffee. It’s like a latte but has whipped egg yolks and sweetened condensed milk floating on the top. How could that be anything but delicious? We did manage to find a cafe with a chalkboard sign out front offering egg coffee. Richie and Vanna are 100% in. Troy manages to find ice cream on the menu, so there’s something for everyone. 😁
The girl asks me ” hot or cold” despite the fact that it’s 95 F out, I go for hot as I can’t imagine egg yolks on top of iced coffee. Vanna and Richie same same. It was delicious! I need to figure out how to make this at home…..
#2: shopping…..saved shopping for the last stop of the trip. This always presents with some amount of risk especially when it’s a new place and we don’t know the quality of the shopping. But in this instance we lucked out and there were plenty of opportunities to shop. Markets, shops, street vendors 👏👏. My negotiating skills aren’t what they used to be, but I’m certainly trying. The standard response here to my initial offers is pretty consistently a gut holding outburst of laughter. Really? Straight up funny am I? Then I pretty much always get to my number or very close. So how funny is that! Even found a new bag to carry home my treasures. I had been thinking about a bigger carry on that what I currently use. Especially if we are going to be “one bag” travelers, we need to maximize the carry on luggage, which we currently are not. So I got myself a (I’m sure) legitimate 50L Northface rolling backpack for 450,000 dong. (~$23). Filled it with other purchases and I’m on my way……
I managed to navigate my way back to where Richie and Troy were enjoying some time in a cafe while I shopped. Vanna, the nanny and Alice had gone back to the room so Alice could nap. We decided to try to find a Bahn My place that Troy had read about on TripAdvisor. Supposedly the best sandwich in Hoi An. We did find it and apparently so did every other tourist. It was called Madame Kahan the Bahn My Queen and we decided to wait it out as clearly the sandwiches must be worth it. There were no tables so we were loitering around the entrance and we grabbed a drink from the fridge. They “took our order” which equated to asking us what meat we wanted. Then they pointed at some stools – I guess they wanted us to sit? Was our pacing making them nervous? Regardless the line was continuing to build out into the street. I watched a guy going out and pay some money and I thought I heard the lady say “40” so when he turned around I asked him if the sandwiches were 40? He said “20” omg that’s a dollar. I’m sitting here watching them make sandwiches as fast as they can (the cart was out front- not hidden in the back) toasting fresh sub buns and stuffing them full of meat, veggies, sauce. How can this only be $1? So as we sit there, two tables of people get taken past us to sit at tables. Wait, what?? So Richie gets someone’s attention and says “hey-what about us?” “We’ve been waiting”…..they of course say “sorry sorry-ok-come in”. They take us to the back and try to put o a metal pop up table. It’s horribly unlevel, so they put it away and just present us with chairs cozied up next to another table (of strangers) 🙄ok, all in the name of a good cheap sandwich. We continue with our drinks and then they bring us our sandwiches. Still no table. Ok! Still assuming it’s going to be worth it. Enough suspense, the sandwich was totally worth it! Really good. I had about one bite left and a table opened up and believe it or not they moved us there. Yikes. Hardly worth it at that point, but we played along.
We got back to the hotel and after some time relaxing in the pool, I figured it was time for a massage. The guys decided to stay in the pool and drink beer. I had seen a massage place a couple doors down that looked good, so I made my way over there and lined myself up with a foot massage. It was fantastic….. massage is getting more expensive as we move along, this was 280,000 doing ($12 usd) for a one hour massage but this is less than hotel massage which is 290,000 dong for 45 minutes.
We had made a plan to go to the Vietnamese water puppet show on Saturday night. It only plays 3 nights a week, so luckily one of those is when we are here. We walked down to the outdoor theatre and got our tickets 80,000 dong ($4). It started right on time at 6:30pm and was a 45 minute showcase of some very good storytelling and cultural information through puppets – in the water. It was very cool actually!
We wandered back to the old city for supper and ended up at a “BBQ” place where I decided to try some local food. Cau Lau. It’s a Hoi An specialty apparently. The noodles are handmade and it has greens and some flavouring and braised pork belly. It’s really good. Pleasantly surprised. And only 70,000 dong ($3.50). Hard to argue with that. Troy had pork ribs for 120,000 dong and was happy with his choice also.
That was a wrap for Saturday. Long day in the sun, time to go to bed….
