What did we have for breakfast on Monday morning? Why, fried eggs of course, but we only just caught them before they started packing up. And it was only half past nine.
We twiddled our fingers for a while and then decided it would be good and worthwhile to walk ourselves down to the river running through town, and have a look at that and the area around it. We were wrong; the river and the riverside was basically a dump, although the streets leading there were what you would call a good part of town. On the way back to the hotel we bought some of the propaganda poster we had been admiring, as well as a new lens for the camera.
In the Ben Thanh market we acquired a fresh pineapple for 10,000 VND from a lady who sat herself up on a table and carved each fruit freshly, with two VERY sharp knives. She cut off all the spiny skin and chucked it, then removed the eyes very quickly by making two diagonal cuts either side of each eye, doing each one just right so that the final result was a juicy fresh pineapple with spirals running down the outside. Then she cut it in half and into quarters by wedging the whole blade about halfway in, and turning the knife upside down and whacking the top of the blade on the edge of a tub. The pineapple fell off both sides of the knife; that’s how sharp it was.
‘How many would you go through before you could learn to do it that quickly?’, Alice asked.
‘Pineapples or fingers?’
Then we went back to amusing ourselves in the hotel, catching up with the World again, and contemplating catching up with our travel journals, which were really getting out of hand. I think we were in Saigon and our journals were in Hanoi.
(sigh)
Later on we walked not very far to the KFC and got some chips because we felt like eating chips again, and took dinner back for Sophie, was alive and well and had organised her means of transport back to her group in Cambodia, and would be leaving tomorrow morning. So we chatted about this and that for a few hours and then went back to amusing ourselves. Amongst other things I have started organising photos into collections for each country; when we get back we’d like to properly print and frame at least one picture for everyone so you all should start looking through now to work out what you’d most enjoy.
Greg
