Anyone for Morning Glory??

Thursday 22nd.

Now we're cooking! We are again up early to be at Morning Glory Restaurant for our market tour and cooking class. Didn’t catch the guide’s name but he took us to the local market in town, not the one Ngoc took us to the other day. Showed us all sorts of fruit and veg, spices in their raw form which was interesting to see, then we walked through the wet market. Saw skinned frogs, and Brenda’s right, once something has been seen, it can’t be ‘unseen’. It’s raining again today and it looks as though it might be going to set in. Well, it is the start of the wet season in these parts. There is a lady in the group with us who will come to be know to us as 'Hoi An lady', a woman from Melbourne visiting Vietnam with her family and when we see her kids, I realise how much I have seen them around town. They were at Mermaid Restaurant the same time as us and it turns out they are staying at the Hoi An Historic with us too.

"Hoi An lady" with Carolyn and I at the cooking class.

Once the tour was complete, we walked back to Morning Glory and upstairs to meet the delightful Miss Loi who will be our teacher for the morning. She is a real sweetie. The set up for the class is really good and if we can’t see what she is doing there is an overhead mirror. She demonstrates, then we cook, cabbage soup which sounded very ordinary but tasted lovely. This dish is used as a guide by the man’s mother to check to see if the prospective daughter-in-law is capable of looking after her son. Little bundles of shrimp mousse wrapped in blanched cabbage leaves really set this dish apart from what we imagine the soup will be like.

don't talk with your mouth full

We eat everything we cook and there are 5 dishes all up, summer rolls, char-grilled chicken, green mango salad, banh xeo (crispy Vietnamese pancakes) which are my favourite.  Again, worth the money. I try to find the Hoi An chilli sauce when the class is finished but no luck. We pick up the last of our tailoring and say our goodbyes to Na, Kim and Anh. I buy some metal julienne shredders from Anh and she is very happy that I finally buy something from her. We have had so much fun talking to these girls, especially Kim who acted as Trevor’s minder on the first day we went to the Cloth Market for tailoring. He told her his name was Joe, so we all have to remember that is his ‘name’. 

The thing that Anke and I have both noticed today is the mood of the stall holders. Our theory is that they are very subdued because the rain is setting in. They aren’t all calling out to us and their main concern for the day is keeping dry. Even the ones in proper shops aren’t calling to us as loudly or as often.

Gorgeous Hoi An. Love this place!

Even though it was raining it is still hot and I was determined to go for a swim. The water in the pool was actually cool due to the lack of sunshine heating it up. Lovely! Bob and Anke had jumped on the hotel’s shuttle bus out to the Hoi An Beach Resort, our sister hotel in Hoi An. They said the beach was very long and the surf was rough, again due to the weather here. Trevor and I got together with the princesses for a sundowner and to chat about dinner tonight and Saigon tomorrow. The princesses decided they were too, too tired to go back out so were going to have room service (again…). When Bob and Anke got back from the beach we made plans to go find ‘Chips and Fish’ over on the Islet, taking some night shots along the way.  It’s over the footbridge across the river near the Japanese Bridge, then turn left and walk to the end. A big sign says “Hoi An Eating and Drinking area”. Chips and Fish is on the other corner. We all found something that appealed so in we went. B & A had chips and fish and we had Cau Lau with pork, a big bowl for 25,000 each. Hopefully we got some pretty night pics. Looks like it when I looked at them on the laptop screen. OK, I looked and it seems like we got some good ones.

the eyes on the boats are to keep the crocs away and they work

No need to get up early tomorrow, we are off to Saigon, pick up at 11am, so all we have to do is eat breakfast and pack. If it’s not raining I might go and try to find the well where they get the water to make the Cao Lau noodles.