Sunday the 2nd of November.
Our first full day in Hoi An; at 10am we were to be picked up out the front of the hotel for a Vietnamese cooking school.
I went out onto the road and found some croissants and things at a bakery, and bought this bounty back to our room. I took myself across the road for a coffee at the same cafe as yesterday, and looked at pictures on the computer. Life was fun.
At 10.15 a bubbly girl in a pink t-shirt turned up on her motorbike, and was followed by her friend about half a minute later. Her name was Hahn Le. She was sorry she was late.
Only the two of us were booked for the lunch time school, so we got on the back of the motorbikes and had a ride over to the market which we had walked past night, except now it was open, and full of fourteen types of everything. Fish, meat, vegetables, grains, beans, cocnut and rice paste sweets, herbs, spices, humidity, jelly lollies wrapped up in banana leaves, Vietnamese music over the PA, motorbikes squeezing their way through the people crowding the narrow alleys between tables. And they even sold coffee, and coffee filters, and those little cinnamon wood toothpick holders that give the toothpicks a cinnamon smell and taste.
The whole place was a live animal.
Hahn talked to the cinnamon lady and determined that the price of the cinnamon toothpick holders should be 20,000 VND, which became relevant later. We bought some of the things we were about to cook, others they had already, and we got back on the motorbikes and rode a little way up the hill, away from the river, to the cooking school. We thought we would be going where Tuan had pointed out, but the restaurant really was closed, and the cooking school was being run in the back of somebody’s narrow terrace house. What they had done was set up a preparation table, and next to it was a sidetable with spices and sauces and whatnot, and in the middle of the room a gas burner with two cooking rings. With the entire back part of the house open and air coming in, it didn’t seem all that hot.
We sat at the table and Hahn explained which recipes we would prepare, and then we stood and did what she told us to for about an hour and a half. She didn’t seem to consult any instructions or recipes, but talked as though she was. 100g of this, 1/2 a teaspoon of that… fry for 30 seconds. Our lunch was made up of four separate meals; vegetable spring rolls, a green papaya salad, stir fried tofu with chilli and lemongrass, and a Clay Pot eggplant; clay pot being the thing it was fried in.
All were delicious, and while we chopped and changed which one we were working on, and put things aside to marinate or for later, Hahn told us all about how they had started the cooking school because floods in October had ruined their restaurant and kitchen for too many years, and cost too much in appliances and painting to fix, so now they just close in October and move everything out of the restaurant. It goes without saying that the best part of the cooking school was eating lunch, seeing as we’d done a fairly good job with all the recipes. If I’d known it was so easy to make spring rolls I would have been doing it all the time at home.
We were back in room 201, at the front of the hotel looking over the road, by 1pm, and spent most of the afternoon looking at pictures from the cooking school and typing out the recipes that Hahn had dictated. We had offered to put together a proper design which they could print for the recipes we’d done; Hahn was enthusiastic.
At 4pm we met out front of the hotel and saddled ourselves up onto a bicycle each, and went riding out through the countryside and the laneways and concrete bike paths for an hour or so. As we trundled past little children waved hello. Once again ‘Georgie’ ran off a few times, but that’s just how he is. I didn’t realise that we were going to end up at the beach; I thought we would just ride around for a bit and then come back to the hotel, so when we pulled up in the sand, and parked our bikes underneath the rows of palm trees, I had to quickly sneak behind a building and shuffle my undergarments out from beneath my shorts.
The beach was fantastic, but like the ones we saw on the way here, it doesn’t seem to have any waves. The water gets pretty deep pretty quickly, so there’s just a bit of foam at the edge and that’s it. Great for wading around in, though. In Viet Nam the sun sets rapidly and early as well; we swam around for 15 minutes and then got out as it got dark, and sat on the beach dripping, then found our bicycles and rode home along the main road at the slowest possible speed. Traffic goes so slowly in Viet Nam that riding in the gutter with all manner of things passing you is a very pleasant experience. This was going to go down in our journal as the day I decided to move to Viet Nam, but we can’t move to both Yangshuo and Hoi An, so something needs to get sorted out. After all, Yangshuo doesn’t have a beach…
Next to our hotel, and across the road from the cafe we had been to yesterday, was another restaurant, which also turned out to have an adjoining cooking school and tailoring shop, which was owned by a very friendly lady. When Geelong-Adam and Catherine and ourselves finished dinner she said, ‘OK see you for breakfast…OK you promise’ They had an item on the dessert menu identified as ‘Steamed Bananas with Orange Rhum’; Adam ordered this, still salivating from the bananas we’d had during our bike ride around Hue, and found that it was everything he had hoped for. The steamed bananas were as good as before, while Orange Rhum turned out to be an orange juice and rum sauce. Jackpot!
(tee hee… jackpot… that reminds me of the man in the station at Rotterdam collecting his 20 euros of change from the change machine, and saying ‘Jackpot!’ for a giggle)
There had been a plan to get in the bus and go see a temple named My Son (‘mee-son’) tomorrow morning, which was built by the Cambodian emperors quite some time ago, but as we were all going on to Angkor Wat anyway, this plan was abandoned, and we went to bed knowing we didn’t have to get up at any particular time.
Greg
