Of knives, sugar and chips

This morning started super early (meeting in the lobby at 6:30) so that we could go and see the floating market. Truth be told, I was expecting much more from such an endeavour (waking up at this indecent time), and the market kinda disappointed me. Yes, there were boats floating and selling things but… Nowhere near as colourful as the Google images made it out to be. Maybe we were late, not sure, all I know is that I succeeded in buying a floating… sandwich and then slept a bit on the way to “somewhere else”. The tour included a visit to a rice factory (me, Jody and Katherine, an American Vietnamese who was with us, got lost while eating at the rice shop and then walked for ages missing the rice factory completely), another visit to a fruit garden (!?) and finally an attempt to put us in a overpriced restaurant for tourist (attempt foiled by me as far as myself and the girls were concerned – I found a nearby local place for a third of the price). The best part of the morning was definitely getting lost while looking for the rice factory: while walking around we met a lot of kids, all looking at us in awe and shouting “hello, hello”. One of them, who must have been 6 or 7, had this massive knife/mini machete in her hand and was entertaining herself trying to… chop down a tree. We guess for the real machete she has to wait one or two years more. This sparked a string of funny commentaries by us for the rest of the day (“If you behave you can have a butter knife to entertain yourself…”) and generally made us think twice about safety concerns in the West. Anyway: after a few hours ride back to Saigon, I checked into Jody’s hostel and once fresh&clean we went looking for our daily fix of trouble, this time in the shape of a moped. We got one for 130.000 dong (3.9 GBP) for a full day (that we will probably extend by a few hours, since we want to make good use of it both today and tomorrow) and off we were, with one single goal: to get lost. After 10 minutes we started the game “spot the whitey” (I won when we came back to District 1 some 3 hours later) and after a quick refuelling (a full 20000 – 0.6 GBP of gas) we headed off following the flow, funny characters and / or calling a turn each in a random direction. We got to a great spot whence we could see a great Saigon skyline, and I even played poi there. Let me assure you that very few Westerner have ever been there, and if they did, it’s because they took a wrong turn. We literally chose it 🙂 Next stop was the most local place we could find (compared to which Con Tho’s restaurant was a palace): food was acceptable, especially for the cost (one soup and one…something for 30000, 0.9 GBP). Yet, they only had those 2 things… So we moved to another restaurant where no white person has ever been before, guaranteed. The language barrier was huge this time, and they kept telling us funny things (No water left, no rice left, no coca cola left…) while we google translated our replies trying to make sense of it all. The best part was when they gave us French fries with sugar on the side. We asked for ketchup, got a sweet&sour sauce and finally… the Asian version of tomato ketchup, akin to basically a tomato…sauce. Whatever. Our main waitress, Dam, was so funny that we laughed more than we ever did in a restaurant. After that Jody tried her hand at driving the scooter (check!) and then we made our way back navigating through Saigon like real pros. Thank you again Vietnam for the fantastic day!!