Ger’s Excellent Adventures

Yesterday I met up with Roger and Marjorie in Hoi An. We did some sightseeing during the day, had some very tasty pho, a round of 21 cent beers and some really good spring rolls for a snack, then we splurged and had an excellent 5-course meal for our Christmas eve dinner. ($6.50 CAD)

I am having a hard time getting used to the currency conversion rate here. When Roger suggested a restaurant for dinner (Cafe des Amis), I checked the blurb in my Lonely Planet and thought it sounded really good but seemed pretty expensive for Vietnam, $40-50 CAD. Turns out I was off by a bit and it was actually $4-5 CAD. (that’s the price quoted in the book; we paid $6.50.) Even with a bottle of wine and a G+T it came to less than $10 CAD each.

After dinner we went to a restaurant/bar called Tam Tam for a few drinks, and ended up meeting tons of people and playing pool until 4am. It’s amazing how many interesting people you meet when you travel. Just last night I met:

• Karl and Emma, a Kiwi couple Rog and Marj met in Hanoi; spent a year in Kelowna.
• a Dutch couple from Amsterdam on their way to Hong Kong where they will live for the next 3 years. I forget what the guy does; she’s a lawyer and quit her job to move to HK. I congratulated her for having the guts to do so.
• a couple Finnish guys, one of which just won the light heavyweight Muay Thai (thai kickboxing) division of the King’s Cup in Bangkok (didn’t talk to him much; played pool with his buddy. Actually, I’m not sure the boxer was Finnish; the pool player was.)
• a French dude who reminded me of Brad Pitt; he held the pool table much of the night (playing doubles) and was pretty cocky about it so it was fun when I finally played him one on one and kicked his butt.
• a Vietnamese guy who was an excellent pool player; we wanted to play each other but didn’t get a chance so we agreed to play tomorrow. I didn’t know it last night but it turns out he’s teaching our cooking class today. (he took us to the market a couple hours ago to buy ingredients for the dinner we’ll make tonight)
• about a dozen other people

On the way home I happened upon a busy fish market that was just getting started for the day, quite a sight to see. (though nothing compared to Tokyo’s)

I just changed rooms at the hotel because my previous one had bedbugs :( I have about 100 bites down the right side of my body, from shoulder to ankle… hope I didn’t bring any of the annoying little buggers with me to my new room!

This entry was posted on Monday, December 25th, 2006 at 9:10 am UTC and is filed under Asia '06-07, Vietnam. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.