Life Eaters

Day 2

After our free breakfast at our hotel we laced up our walking shoes and ventured out to the streets. What we met was completely unlike what we encountered after-hours the night before. This town is crazy, I mean really Crazy! The streets are packed with buzzing scooters handlebar to handlebar, zigzagging around each other with no real concept of lanes. The sidewalks are so crammed with parked scooters and locals eating on tiny plastic stools for restaurants that you’re forced to walk in the street with the traffic. Every where were street merchant women wearing the traditional conical hat either pushing a bike loaded up with fruits and vegetables. Or carrying two baskets of produce suspended from a board over their shoulders. If you want to cross the street, just look forward and start walking. Keep a steady pace and don’t hesitate and traffic will flow around you.

Alyssa made her first attempt to buy some street food, where she paid the equivilant of $7 for a bag of donuts and fried sweet rice balls. We later found out that this should have only costed her a dime or two.

We ventured down to the lake, saw a temple, and checked out the showtimes at the water puppet theatre, then headed up the busy shopping street towards a goods marked that was recommended to us by our hotel. If we thought the street markets were crazy, this place was ten times so. It was a giant covered building divided into hundreds of tiny stalls where shopkeepers haggled over mountains of fabric, scarves, jewelry, clothing and just about anything you can imagine. If you want a bag of 500 cheap shirts, then this is the place to come. We were a bit overwhelmed by the whole experience so we aborted immediately.

Our walk took us down a side street where we saw a dozen of so locals sitting in front of a restaurant drinking beers, having lunch, and having a generally merry time. Through some confusing conversations and language issues, we got ourselves a table upstairs where we were served a pretty delicious Vietnamese lunch. Fried spring rolls, barbecued chicken with greens, soup and tea.

Later on, through another recommendation I found on somebody’s travel blog, we went out in search for another local treat. Egg coffee. This apparently is a cup of coffee with an egg in it! We never would have found the place of it weren’t for the detailed instructions on the blog where I found out about it. In a small streetside clothing store, we walked to the back and then through a narrow alley where we found the small open air coffee shop. We ordered there, then up three flights os stairs and a spiral staircase to a rooftop patio overlooking the lake. It was a great find that we ended up re-visiting a few times during our stay. The egg coffee wasn’t as scary as it sounds either. It was a shot of espresso with a full three inches of sweet whipped egg whites, beaten with sugar to stiff peaks and drizzled with some sort of caramel. I reached some sort of coffee pinnacle in my life here, this may be the best sweet coffee I’ve ever had.

Our dinner that night was sort of a bust. It was a nicer, sit-down in full-sized chairs restaurant called Highway 4 where the food was overcooked. Getting wore out from our jet lag, we were back on our rooms and ready for bed by 8:00

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