Weekend Plans

On Friday night, I was feeling better, but not up for a night on the town so we headed to Hung Vuong Theater to see Vantage Point. To our disappointment, contrary to what the website had said, Vantage Point was no longer playing, so we decided to see Mamma Mia. Both of us were pleasantly surprised, not thinking we would like it at all, and enjoyed our evening at the movies. After the movies, we wanted to get something to eat, so we wandered around the streets in our neighborhood looking for something enticing. Unfortunately all we came across were street restaurants with, presumably, no English menus, if they had menu's at all, and not yet quite up to sitting down and trying to say 'Vegetables' or 'Fish' in Vietnamese, nor wanting to eat mystery meat, we headed back to the chicken restaurant under our apartment. If nothing else, the poor quality of the chicken and rice at the chicken restaurant will drive me to learn the names of some of our favorite dishes in Vietnamese for the next time!

On Saturday, we went to a party given by three of our friends who are sharing a house. We planned to eat dinner in a different neighborhood given our experience the night before, so when the taxi dropped us off we headed down an alley we had been directed to by one of our hosts. The alley was lined with typical open front restaurants with a small grill on the street out front and a table of shell fish in different containers on a table in front of an open kitchen inside. When we turned down the alley, we were immediately waved into the first restaurant and decided to have a seat at one of the two tables available in the busy restaurant. Once seated, we were handed a menu with pictures and some English descriptions of various snails and shell fish. After a few minutes perusing the menu, we pointed at two of the few non-snail dishes on the menu, not exactly sure what we were ordering and sat back to wait for our meal. When the dishes arrived, we saw that we had a plate of about six clams, attractively prepared, topped with some type of cream and spices and another plate of oysters, again, topped with various spices, but without the cream. Steven immediately declared the oysters, the best oysters he had ever had in his life and I sat back and enjoyed the meal, happy to know that we would be back.

After dinner, we left the restaurant to find our friends' house. The house is in District 1, very close to the elementary school, down a street with lots of little restaurants and then down an alley leading into one of many residential mazes of alleys hidden throughout the city. The first floor consists of a kitchen, shared bath and living room with very high ceilings, revealing a balcony from a bedroom on the second floor of the house. The balcony has a curtain overlooking the living room, very much like a stage. During the party some of our new friends put on dance and musical numbers from the second floor balcony much to the amusement of the people below. The third floor houses two bedrooms and the third bedroom is on the fourth floor. Up yet another flight of stairs is a fifth floor outside balcony and on top of that is a roof top deck with deck chairs and a hammock and a great view of the neighborhood. It is a beautiful house and it was a lovely party and allowed us time to visit with teachers from both schools as well as some of the Vietnamese staff.

We left the party after three appearances by the police for noise (which was surprising as it wasn't a very noisy party, but may have seemed more so because of the amount of people in the house and the fact that the house has, not windows, but open grates to the outside) and motorbikes parked outside the house that were at risk of theft, and arrived home at 1:30 a.m., an hour before the Florida/Tennessee Game was set to air from Knoxville Tennessee. Since my technologically savvy brother has connected me to his Sling Box, we are able to watch his home television from our laptop, allowing my live coverage of the game. Once the game began, Steven made it about two minutes in, but I managed to stay up until the third quarter, waking up to check the final score of 30 to 6, Gators. During the game an announcer mentioned that Tim Tebow's (the Florida quarterback) siblings may be watching the game live on their Sling Box from Bangladesh.

On Sunday, I slept a lot and in the afternoon we went to the gym near Steven's school. It is 50,000d to use the gym on a single entry which is less than $4, much less than the $100 a month some of the teachers pay at another club. They gym is nice, nothing fancy, but with a variety of equipment in good condition and there is also a pool you can pay extra to use for the day as well. We'll have to take advantage of that another weekend.