From market to plate

Wednesday.

Early start again today so we can get out in time for the White Lotus man who's coming to pick us up at 8.45. Ron managed to scare a breakfast waitress by trying to desperately grab at a plate as she removed it. Turns out Ron thought Callum had knocked it off the table. The waitresses avoided our table after that.

We had a green papaya salad, crispy pancakes and lemongrass chicken to hunt down at the markets and cook.

Arrived at White Lotus and headed off to the markets with Christina and Simon from Austria and Ty from the restaurant.  The markets were total mayhem, with wrinkly old ladies elbowing their way through the stalls as we attempted to follow Ty and listen to what he said. Ron and I kind of gave up trying and went into photo frenzy mode.

Fortunately Ty gets his meat from the supermarket. The meat market looked pretty gross. Why have an expensive and hygienic stainless steel workbench when an old cardboard box balanced on a bucket of bilious goo can do the same job.

We moved onto the fish market which seemed a little cleaner somehow, before boarding a boat back to the restaurant. We managed to pick up some 4 in 1 grater things that Kyra said would be an invaluable aid to the kitchen.  About a dollar each. No doubt it'll be in the bottom drawer in a few weeks time.

Got back to the restaurant where the main room had been split in two, with an eating table down one side and a work table down the other. We donned our smurf hats to get on with the cooking. Mine was particularly tight.  I don't have a Vietnamese size head or blue blood, obviously. The kids loved julienning the veggies, while we watched on anxiously, fully expecting a beautiful, thinly sliced finger nail. But aside from a few oil burns the kids survived unscathed.

A special award goes to myself for creating the best tomato rose to sit on top of the papaya salad. Even Ty was impressed and Christina thought I must be a chef. Yay me! I now have to get out of having to cook dinner every weekend when we get home.

Everyone enjoyed the whole exercise-it was great value for money. All the profits from White Lotus go to a charity called Project Indo China which is run out of Melbourne. Kyra's looking to sign them up to Givit. They seem to be doing some fantastic work fighting the abject poverty that exists outside the tourist strips. Go communism.

After we left the restaurant, we went to pick up all of the forged shoes and jewelery ordered yesterday. The girls were pleased with their jewellery, but we had mixed results with the shoes. Ron's Jesus boots were a bit too Jesusy and Jonah was disappointed; claims he now has a pair of size 11 lawn bowls shoes - they have a Nike swish with Adidas sole. Nobody is allowed to wear the shoes for a few days so the glue has time to dry.  Angela had to try three times before her sandals actually fitted.

We left Angela and Kyra in town waiting for the shoes to be changed and headed back to the hotel. Ron spotted a cock fight from the taxi on the way (i.e. chicken cocks.) A small reminder that we're still in Vietnam. Hoi An is far more civilised than Hanoi and we were forgetting that we were still in a third world country.

Had a couple of hours down time at the hotel, the boys spent most of it in the chilly pool in the rain.

The kids decided they didn't want to go back into town for dinner, so we got them some takeaway from across the road. We left Jonah to supervise and caught the shuttle bus into town for another feast at Morning Glory.

I was tempted to go for the Muc nhoi tom thit (stuffed squid), but it would have just annoyed me. Instead I went for the tom carry, which is prawn curry. Ron had the tom thit, Angela crispy pancakes and Kyra stuffed egg plant.
Ron managed to use the restaurant wi-fi to load his Vietnam Got Talent video, of a local nutter singing us his ozzie song. If you are not a friend of Ron's on FB you will miss out on this golden moment.  It will eventually get loaded onto you-tube, where I've no doubt it will go viral. You heard it here second...

Had an hour to kill before catching the shuttle back to the hotel, so we had a short walk down by the river where there was some kind of improvised karaoke thing happening. Very strange, but it was pulling a big local crowd.

Ended up at The Cargo Club for a flat white and some white chocolate kahula cheese cake.  It was a bit sickly but I managed to eat it all.

The other major event of the day was that Kyra got the direction wrong going back to the bus. We think it's a first, but we probably don't know otherwise.

Tomorrow we have another early start to catch the plane to Nha Trang for our chill out stop for a few days. Probably won't be much to blog about because it's a resort stay, but I'll try my best to come up with something for all our fans out there.