Pho
We started the day off with a quick walk to a Pho place, serving the traditional breakfast food, beef or chicken noodle soup. I chose the chicken, and it was delicious, a blend of silky rice noodles, tasty broth, melt-in-the-mouth chicken, and piquant herbs.
Our second stop was at the Hanoi Cooking Centre, where we tried some Vietnamese coffee, served either black or with a spoonful of sweetened condensed milk. This wasn’t too bad, but a bit strong for my tastes! We sat up on the roof terrace and people-watched for a while, leafing through cookbooks like the KOTO one we’d been given by a friend last year.
Frogs? Toads? Alive!
Once we’d forced ourselves to move, we all walked along to the fresh food market to have a quick guided tour. They had an amazing array of incredibly fresh food, a lot of it live!
Vegies
There were a lot of recognisable foods, like various greens and herbs, and others that were not so familiar, like live toads (!!), water snakes, baby crabs, and some styles of vegies not easily available in Australia.
Durian
After trekking through the food market, the next stop was the Old Quarter for more food! We stopped for a couple of different types of street and local food, like rice pancakes, crispy spring rolls, fertilised egg (a baby chicken still in the egg, cooked in the shell), the famed stinky fruit durian (not as bad as I’d feared!) sweet potato fritters with shrimp, black sticky rice and even crème caramel. You can see the French influence here!
Kitties in the market
We jumped into taxis to take us to a traditional teahouse near the Temple of Literature to learn about Vietnamese tea. The expert was very expert, but since everything had to be translated to us, it took a really long time to watch his presentation, and since we’d eaten quite a bit just beforehand, there were more than a few yawns! The tea ceremony was interesting though, and we all tried a tea of our choosing afterwards. I can highly recommend the Honey Ginger tea.
Tea ceremony
The rest of the afternoon was free time until the cooking class back at the Cooking Centre in the evening, so a bunch of us went to a massage place T recommended, and had reflexology and pedicures. Almost fell asleep there, but ended up with fabulously relaxed and painted feet nevertheless!
Pedicured toes
I think I can safely say that the cooking class was the highlight of the day for most, if not all of us. We made a variety of Vietnamese dishes, like crispy seafood spring rolls, banana flower salad, caramel pork, and we watched as the teachers made a black sesame and crushed peanut dessert. It all tasted amazing, and we got to keep our Cooking Centre aprons and we have the recipes to take home, too. Thank goodness it was a lot cooler, as the class would not have been quite as fun if we’d been sweating onto our chopping boards!
Mixing
A few of us decided to stay at the hotel bar for a drink before bed, and were eventually propositioned through the glass frontage of the hotel by a woman selling tourist t-shirts. She had one with Tintin, so I decided to grab one to add to R’s Tintin in Cambodia t-shirt I’d found him in Phnom Penh. Two of the others decided to get in on the action, so some heavy-duty bargaining came into play with the end price a satisfactory-to-all 60,000 dong each.
After all this excitement, we were having a fabulous time until the bar was shut and reception came to tell us to go to bed (at 10pm!) since we were making too much noise. It seemed a bit rich since we could barely hear each other over the street noise outside, but so be it, we headed to our rooms to pack for our trip to Halong Bay in the morning.
Two Weeks Away 