Monday, July 30, 2012

Day 8

zomg ! 1/3 of the way there :)

so today is my last day in Vietnam before I go to the Singapore/Malaysia tour and then I'll be back in Vietnam for another few days.

I woke up at 7 am on my own accord today which is weird. I find that I wake up so damn early here. hahaha! I'm pretty sure I'm adjusted to this time zone but I wake up so early :P I guess it's not a bad thing though!

After I got ready and was finishing up my day 7 post........ I decided to eat my chocolates from the wedding yesterday. HOLY CRAP. LOL I usually hate the "assorted" boxes of chocolate because there's always something I don't like but this box ... I LOVE THEM ALL! LOL Granted there were only 3 but still...


soft fudge inside dark chocolate. I can't remember if the fudge was chocolate or caramel. It looks like caramel though. Whichever it was ... I liked it :P

caramel with milk chocolate

coconut pieces in milk chocolate

It was DIVINE. I threw out the box otherwise I would check what types they were. I should've taken more boxes... HAHAHA

So we went to An Dong market and ate breakfast. They have a "food court" so to speak. They're different companies but they all serve the same thing. Bun bo hue, bun rieu, com suon etc. It's kind of like how McD's and BK all serve burgers.


So I ate this thing called bun thai LOL. so it's bun with a thai style soup. It's not like tom yum though. It was pretty good though, it wasn't gross. In total our 4 dishes and 4 drinks cost us about $10


This was my mom's banh canh cua

my dad & aunt's banh canh ga 

my parent's coconut juice

my cafe sua da :)

This was the market place we were at.


They sell a bunch of stuff. It's almost like a supermarket LOL. candies, fruits, herbs, kitchen gadgets ... we didn't really look at the stuff though but that's what I saw. 
We then went to 3 different Chinese based temples and 1 Vietnamese one. I'm not religious so I have no idea what the difference is , but yes. we went LOL. There were some cool stuff there.
These are incense spirals that you attach someone's name to. I don't know what it's for but it's pretty cool!

This is some figures that was lining the open roof at a certain spot in the temple. It's so intricate and pretty!!! 

LOL us examing pictures in the wall. Well. I WAS but I was also reading something on my Kindle app LOL. That school there I walked by as well and it was the JHS my aunt went to.

LOL me chilling on the chair waiting for my mom and aunt to finish using the washroom.

This is the school my aunt went to! hahaha it's still standing :P

On our way to finding a place to eat... we saw this.

durians in racks for sale LOL.

Finally we've found somewhere to eat and it's a Korean place! YUM :)



utensils

the sides that come. left: some tofu with peppers, 2nd: kimchi, 3rd: green beans, 4th: bean sprouts

I actually didn't mind the tofu! It wasn't the soft ones, it was a little bit harder than ones I'm used to and the flavour was great. The kimchi wasn't spicy :( let down! The beans & beansprouts were typical :)

WATER LOL

japchae!

OMG so goood !!! had some bulgogi beef, bell pepers, onions, carrots and mushrooms in it, topped off with sesame seed! definitely my favourite dish of the meal. I think I wrote in one of my food reviews that I use jajangmyeon as my standard for Korean food, however they were out of it today :( 

dolsot bibimbaab

I didn't really care for the spicy sauce that it came with. It wasn't as good as I've had it at home. Just not enough of a kick to it, flavour & spice wise. I didn't like how the egg was yolk only :P I like having the whites too!! The veggies were bean sprouts, cucumber, bulgogi beef, carrots, mushroom, daikon and a chinese veg LOL I love having dolsot because of the crispy rice you get! If the sauce was better, this would've been my number 1 dish!

Drinks came after the food so this is my da chanh

this is my mom's papaya smoothie

seaweed soup

My aunt isn't one to venture out of her comfort zone and so she ordered her own stuff and tried some of ours. She ordered this seaweed soup which was really good! It had just the right amount of saltiness in it without it being overpowering. The seaweed was also cooked perfectly (or at least in my opinion)

My aunt's chicken skewer that she ate with her bowl of rice

Since they had no jajangmyeon I opted for the skewer sampler thing. It had 5 skewers on it. one was enoki mushrooms wrapped up in a thin piece of chicken breast( ?? I think it was chicken ,it was so thin I couldn't tell), chicken heart, chicken, pork and a chicken wing.

I had everything except for the heart :P hahaha everything was nice and flavourful. It had a great hint of smokiness form the BBQ, no doubt. Our meal cost us about $22 and we were definitely filled to the brim!

We also went and bought some mopiko!! <3 thankgod. LOL I can finally relieve some of this itchiness.

After lunch, we went home to rest and my cousin asked if I wanted to watch The Dictator with her and her 2 cousins (lien and chanh - yay I figured out how they romanized her name). My cousin told me movies at 315 when it was already 2:50 and that Lien would leave their house in 5 mins and be there in 5 mins = 10 mins before I need to go down right? So at 2:55 I went downstairs and sat in the lobby because my cousin told me to wait downstairs. So I sat there reading on my Kindle app and waiting. It was already 3:20 and still nobody showed up! I didn't have her number and I didn't bring my mom's cell. Finally she came in and she was waiting for me outside because she's not allowed to bring her motorcycle up to the front of the door, only taxis are allowed. LOL SO FAIL. So in the end Chanh didn't come and it was just us 3 going. We went to the theater and arrived there around 3:40. (The Dictator was actually showing at 3:10 so we missed a lot LOL) so we decided to watch The Dark Knight.. LOL.  UM I've never seen any of the Batman movies because I thought they were stupid (I prefer Marvel) but I wanted to be able to watch a movie so I picked it anyway (especially since everyone said it was so good). The tickets are so damn cheap here and the theaters are as nice as ours! Maybe even better cause we have sticky floors all the time. The tickets were 4.50 for VIP aka choosing our seats (or AVX at home). Since Lien paid for the tickets, I was swift and got to pay for our food. They've been paying a lot for me the last few days because everytime we go out I don't have pockets on my clothes ahhaha so I never brought money with me. We had two bags of popcorn & four drinks. We decided to "up-size" it and ........ it costed 9.50 WTF RIGHT. but not. because look how small it is LOL.

Sorry for crappy quality, I didn't bring my BB or digicam, all I had was my iTouch. haha

Anyhow, the movie was so effing long and my cousin had to pee approx 1 hour before it ended but she held it in like a trooper HAHA. Our parents kept on calling us, and yeah we ran home from the theater because they were waiting for us to go eat dinner. 

Which brings me to dinner! :)

Tonight we had something I've never had before and my mom's sleeping now so I can't ask. but it was really good too. I found out it cost about $70 

We basically wrapped stuff in rice paper. however, the rice paper is different. I think it's dried in the sun so it has a chewier taste to them and there's no need to wet them with water first!


nem nuong

shrimp on sugar cane

grilled fish

mmm kay, that is all for day 8 I believe. I really should be sleeping now because I'm leaving for the tour in about 7 hours.

I hope I can still post while on tour!!

Thanks for reading lovelies. 

Sunday, July 29, 2012

Pics HAHA

I forgot to post up pics that my cousin and I took at the wedding of ourselves LOL.

So a lot of people at the wedding said I looked white (at night time) and I figured out it was my hair. Some reason my hair made me look white which is SO weird!!!!! I figured it out because after the wedding I went to my room and was talking to my mom about it, I took apart my hair and BAM, I looked Asian again. hahahah





Day 7

Hello!!! :)

Today WAS THE DAY. The day we were all waiting... the main reason for coming here.. WEDDING DAY!

It was the wedding day of my second cousin & his now wife :) :) So cute! I don't know him well but I met him for the first time when I first started vacationing in Vietnam. MAN weddings are so emotionally overwhelming, in a good way! I must admit at one point I felt a little choked up LOL. I'm such a sucker for these things. I know for a fact I'll cry during my wedding just cause... when I watch "say yes to the dress" I cry sometimes because I'm so happy for them !

Woke up at 4am (which was horrible especially since I didn't sleep till 11 yesterday because my cousin stayed so late) and then got ready and went to my second cousin's mom's (which I think makes her my first cousin once removed?) house. They said to be there at 6 ish because we were leaving the house at 630 to go get the bride etcetc. some Asian tradition stuff (which I will have to read up on!) BUT in true Asian fashion, we didn't actually leave until 830 , maybe even 9. Seriously. I could've had more sleep man!! At any rate, I love this food place right by the house (I sometimes stay there when I'm in the city but since there's a wedding this year, others who came before us stayed there). So I had to get my faves!

wonton soup & che dau xanh !!

Unfortunately I didn't catch how much this way. BUT SO GOOD. Anyway we left to go to my second cousin's dad's house first. There were tables with some chocolate, water, coke and watermelon seeds (gua ji). Boo , I just looked through my pics and I have none of the tables .. oh well :P hahah it's nothing really special just a bunch of tables with stools around it and we just sat around it hahaha. Then we went off to get the bride!! Which was also the ceremony.


Aw! Happy couple :)

It was kind of weird though. I didn't even know what was happening and then suddenly he just pulled out the rings and put them on each other... LOL no vows were exchanged, no papers were signed then (maybe they signed them later or they will on a later date) I don't know. I've never been to an Asian-based wedding before so I have no idea how the traditions work etc. After this we ate some buns and drank more pop / water.


I had the small rounder ones and those ones were similar to pate chaud. it was pretty good. I wish it was a bit flakier though. No biggie! 

After this we went back to my second cousin's dad's house to eat snacks again and do a tea ceremony for his now-wife's family, then we ate lunch. The lunch was alright, but it was awkward cause we sat with people we didn't know LOL (and hence why no pictures). Anyways.... then we went back to his mom's house to do a tea ceremony for his side of family (aka us!) Then we were finally all done!.......... at 3 pm LOL. Long long day.

I went to my cousin's place and we went to go get our hair done for the dinner at night. I wanted my hair to look like this but they didn't really know how so they persevered and sort of did it. This is what it ended up looking like.  Not bad I guess, but not entirely what I wanted. Anyhow here's more wedding photos!

Party Favours!

When I saw the thing in the little box, the first thing that popped into my head was that chocolate store thing I said I saw in theday 6 post! hahah

This was our center piece:) So pretty!! The lights turned on when food was served.

This is the newlyweds pouring champagne into a tower of glasses (which I assume has dry ice in it?) which started giving off smoke :P

They cut their cake really fast... like to the point to where I didn't get a chance to get a picture :( 

ONTO FOOD which is always the best part of weddings!! hahaha


This was our setting LOL


Appetizer. It had shrimp on a sugar cane, something similar to sweet and sour pork, fruit with shrimp in a mayo sauce and a bell pepper and squid stir fry.
Isn't the center piece cool? LOL It has the candle on the top and then underneath was just some dry ice.


Unlike in Western weddings I've been to, here they bring you the plates and scoop out the portions for you and then hand you a plate.


sweet corn soup

Chicken with a mushroom and gogi berry sauce


I had to wait SO long for them to get to the breast... it was seriously the last piece they grabbed LOL. It was really good though!

steamed fish


heineken LOL 

salt and pepper shrimp

They were pretty big!

vegetables

LOL I only ate the bokchoy, I don't really care for baby corn.


fried rice. I didn't eat this because I was full.

dessert. also didn't eat haha 

There was a lot of entertainment last night LOL. mostly a lot of people singing. The funniest thing was when one of the guys kept on saying "ding ding ding ding ding" over and over. Because it was funny the first time but then he kept on doing it. I was thinking k stop it's not funny anymore and then he'll do it again LOL! The violinist/guitar/piano trio were really good!

The night ended at around 1030 ish. Luckily it was in my hotel so I could just go upstairs and shower right away HAHA. Anyways that was my whole day !!

HORRIBLE mosquito bites. I got a TON just sitting at my cousins. two on my lower left calf, one right by the ball of my foot, one on the top of another foot, one on the side of my achilles tendon, another one by the ball of my foot on the other foot, and one more on the back of my calf. like seriously mosquitoes. is it because I'm from Canada LOL

Anyways this post is so pic heavy LOL and I don't really have much to say but congrats to my second cousin and have a happy and lifelong marriage! <3<3


Thanks for reading friends! :)