On Tuesday morning Sophie could even go downstairs without fainting, so, on the promise that she wouldn’t be violently ill or nuffink we went and had fried eggs from our favourite footpath stall.
But an odd thing happened. Along the footpath leading from the roundabout, along Ly Tu Trong, something threw everyone into a huge panic. The wave of panic transferred between the footpath people; motorbike vendors, food sellers, ladies with baskets of everything, shoeshine boys; toward us at a great rate; the egg-cooking lady and her friend picked up their small metal cabinet holding all the ingredients, and the little camp-size gas burner, and ran around the corner.
Everyone else at every other table scarpered, and the coffee lady came back and rounded up the plastic tables and chairs and flung them around the corner as well.
I stood up expecting the shockwave from an explosion to arrive.
Alice and Sophie stood up, and somebody came and grabbed our table with food and coffee on it and sequestered it as well.
We looked up and down the street trying to work out what the hell was happening, with no success, and after a minute everything was bought back out, including our table with our food and drinks, not a drop or ounce of which had been displaced. We were motioned to sit back down, which we did. They had done this before.
An English speaking gent at the next table explained that there is not supposed to be any footpath business anywhere in Saigon, but particularly not in the middle of town, where they don’t really have space for such things. And yet; there is quite a lot of footpath business going on everywhere in Saigon, particularly in the middle of town. So every know and then the Federales ride past to give people a hurry up, and sometimes they even impound a bunch of property and make you pay to get it back. Or he might have said that the footpath business is legal, but you have to pay for a licence, and nobody wants to pay.
Very amusing.
About 10 minutes later, when we were actually nearly finished eating, the whole scene started up again. We got up and walked away from our table much quicker this time, so that they could get it out of view with maximum efficiency, and did even get to finish our breakfast. Which was nice.
We said goodbye to Sophie and then waited around for a video call which had been set up with Alice’s grandmother at one o’clock, which is five o’clock in Australia. It was good to talk to Granny again; we were all done and dusted by 2pm and then we walked the three or so blocks back to the Clinton restaurant where we both nearly died of starvation waiting for lunch to come. We were pretty hungry when we arrived, but at least it was after lunch time rush so there were about six people in the whole restaurant. I took a picture of Alice so that in the future when she is rich and famous they will be able to prove that she did eat at that restaurant; then they will finally be able to take down that picture of Clin-ton which doesn’t even have Hilary in it.
I had a coconut juice which came in a real cut-open coconut.
With a late lunch under the belt, and another fresh pineapple and some pears from the market, we didn’t have dinner that day.
Greg.
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