Saigon Meanderings

After class this morning I headed to Monsoon, the really nice restaurant where Kim and I had dinner on her last night.  I ordered a delicious banh mi with crispy pork and an iced tea with lime.  Even though the restaurant is not far from our hotel, I got a tad lost because the restaurant is not on a main street and the map misidentifies the street closest to the one the restaurant is on.

On the way back I got sidetracked, first into a web of alleys where not a tourist was in site.  A group of young boys laughed and mocked me, pretending to speak English by mimicking how they think it sounds.  They giggled and pointed me away from a dead end and out of the area.  The thing with these alley streets is that you never know if you'll hit a dead end or if there is a sharp turn down the road.

I also ended up at a pagoda.  And then in a supermarket.  I hadn't yet seen a supermarket in Saigon, so I decided to check it out and see if they had moisturizing cream.  Well, all of the skin cream I saw had a "whitening" agent (bleach), which I found disheartening.  I decided instead to make ginger candy my goal item, but I only found the hard kind.  I bought a box choco pies instead because I've seen quite a few ads for them.  I meandered in the aisles just to check out the goods.  There was an entire supermarket aisle dedicated to fish sauce of all varieties.