Kitty's 20th Birthday!!

We went to La Casa for Kitty's birthday

For starters, we had escargot

Mum shoving down her 1st escargot

May's pasta. Some kinda duck thing (so, so)

My dish, I had the chicken cream sauce (yum)

Hanoi, Vietnam Part 3

Hanoi, on the 3rd day.. What to do? Shopping!!!! But there isn't much things to buy. We went to the night market 2 days in a row, but just can't seem to find anything nice. So we decided to... EAT!!

We went to this cutesy little Italian restaurant called Mediterraneo.

The camera was balanced on top of a Sprite bottle

View outside the restaurant from where we are seated

Pizza, Ham and Cheese I think. Soooo delicious, much better than pizza hut and dominoes combined

Fettuccine Carbonara. Sooooooo goooood.. The noodles you can see are hand made, because it doesn't resemble the packet ones you buy from Jusco.

Before you start blasting off with, "These are terrible pictures!!". The restaurant has this really romantic atmosphere, so everything we take in here are red. (And May is taking the pictures, not me :P)

Like the 'Green Tangerine', this place is also an eatery mostly catered for foreigners.

In the afternoon, we took a stroll down the Hoan Kiem Lake. It's easier to take a picture in the day time rather than night.



Some kind of turtle temple, according to the map book, the turtles are like 100 years old and sometimes will crawl out of the lake to rest. We didn't see any..

peek a boo

So later, we went to have lunch at Pho24. It was recommended in the guide book as a must go for Pho, which is pronounce 'Furr'.

I'm not a really big fan of this... Because it's really vege.. the soup taste like vege soup, the noodle taste like vege.. It's okaaaaay, I guess. And it also comes with a plate of raw vege..

Yum?

After eating pho, we tried looking for Bobby Chin's restaurant, but we couldn't find the restaurant :( so we decided to venture to yet another restaurant. On the way, May found this really cute place, a cafe out of nowhere, it's right beside the museum (no, we were not venturing into the musuem), so we decided to hang around there till our bloated belly's calm down.


It's a really nice place to just hang out, play your laptop and just chat with your friends. The weather is really nice too. It's breezy and a little cold. When we walk in, the stares that we got are really strange. It's a mixture of, "Where are these people from" and "What the hell are they doing here??". Yeah, this is the place where the high class Vietnamese hang out. I think..

Our food and drinks. I was so stuffed I couldn't even eat a piece of that cake, but according to May it was goood.

A shop with 2 addresses. Strange??

So after relaxing at the cafe, May decides to continue our journey to the restaurant downtown. So after 10 minutes of walking, the restaurant we wanted to visit... is closed for construction..

We notice a lot of this around Hanoi. Damn scary.. no birds will dare sit there for even just a while. Electrocuted in a second.


So, disappointed after walking so far to a 'close for renovation' restaurant, we walked all the way back to our hotel, and we notice something very strange.

People are staring at us everywhere we go!!! And then we think, "Ohh, maybe because we are foreigners". So we stop at a park and saw an American walking pass a couple of Vietnamese but there were no reaction from them. But when we walk passed the same vietnamese people, they stared... What's going on??? And then it suddenly hits me, they are not staring at us, they staring at May!! This old lady, she actually stops walking to stare at May when she walks passed the old lady. HAHA, that was sooo funny!

When May finally notices that people are staring at her, she quickly runs back to the hotel and refuses to come out. HILARIOUS!

That's May hiding underneath the blanket

Since it is our last day, we can't just stay in the hotel just watching tv (there's HBO and Cineplax and Disney and AXN!!), we went down to try a Vietnamese dinner instead of eating western. We actually went to a tourist information center to find the restaurants!

So in the end, we chose to come to "Mon Ah Viet".

Another cutsie place. It's small but it's got a nice environment in there. Both Vietnamese and foreigners come here to eat.

Reading the menu

The food was realllly good. You know why? Cause it taste exactly like chinese dishes. The name of the food is in vietnamese but basically they cook it exactly the way we do it back here, so basically, nothing special. There was one thing which fascinate both me and May though.

The do's and dont's on the chopstick wrapper

The 1st one, Do not use chopsticks to drum the bowl
(Calling homeless and hunger ghost)

2nd, Do not cross chopsticks
(Bad weather for the rice crops)

3rd, Do not suck chopsticks for too long. (Too bad there's no picture illustration)

Hmm, what would Donkey Kong taste like???

The lady who took our orders was super nice! She tried to explain the 3rd don't on the chopstick do's and don't for us in English, and May ask her on where we could get tea leaves (because it's kinda known in Vietnam), and the lady marked it on our maps, and even wrote on a piece of paper translating the name of the tea's we wanted into Vietnamese so the tea seller would understand what we want! SO nice!!!

On the way back to the hotel, we saw this little store which sells some sort of croissant and it smelt soo good, May wanted to try it. So we ordered and sat inside. I told May to take a picture of the place, not of the lady's ass, and she insisted that she was trying to take a picture of the croissant's on the shelf..

This is the most delicious thing I have ever tasted in Vietnam. Basically it's vege, onion, beef, pork and fried egg in there. It was soooo good that later when we went back to the hotel, we decided to go back down again to the store and get another sandwich!

It's hot, but May won't put it down till she gulps it all

So overall, Hanoi is nice, Halong Bay was nice, the whistles we get from numerous trishaw drivers and motorcyclist asking us if we needed a ride are not, the weather is nice, people in Hanoi are genuinely very nice. So yes, Hanoi is nice I guess. I miss the croissant though!

Hanoi, Vietnam Part 2

Halong Bay, a UNESCO World Heritage site in Vietnam. I was told we muuuust come to Halong Bay when you visit Vietnam, so we went on the 2nd day.

So the package we took was this, 4 hours bus drive from 8am (!!), from the Hotel to Halong Bay. Takes at least 15 minutes of boat ride from the port to Halong Bay, where we will be served lunch (not very good), play around on the boat, see some staglamites in a cave, then 15 minutes boat ride back to the port, and another 4 hours drive back to Hanoi.

So for 4 hours, we were sitting ass to ass with a couple of tourist (a pack van). We thought at least the tour guide would have the decency to tell us some history on Halong Bay or Hanoi, but noo, he sat in front and just chatted with the driver. Man!!


So we amuse ourselves by taking a couple of pictures in the van and made a deal with each other. If either falls asleep and starts snoring, we're suppose to nudge the other person up to stop it. Hehe. Mostly May is the one snoring though..

This place is a tourist spot, so there are so many many people here, and the sad part is when you see the boats leaving the port, the water here is extremely polluted, the dirty water or oil from the boat can be seen pouring out of the boat into the sea. It's just so sad to see a UNESCO heritage place being so dirty and smelly. The amount of boats parked at the bay are too many to count.































The fishing village


















Huuh, at sea also got people sell fruits??

I think this is suppose to resemble a lion. It kinda looks like one though




























Okay, next are the stalagmites. First time I see a cave so brightly lighted with different colors and packed with tourist. Inside is pretty cool. Basically, our tour guide uses his laser pen and points out some stones, and said to use our "imagination" to point our some different animals and lookalike human stones in there. Ya sure, that's sooooo something I want to see..

I think this was suppose to be something about from hell, looking up to heaven, hence the small bright light at the top of the cave.

Some kinda waterfall. A couple of coins in there, is it a wishing pond?

The boats waiting outside the cave

After Halong Bay, it's back to the 4 hour journey back to Hanoi. During the toilet break, the driver dropped us off at some ceramic place, which was quite a snooze. Everything in there is in USD though. Strange isn't it, that nearly everything in Vietnam is in USD instead of Dong's.