Indochina Day 5: Food and Tour in Hanoi

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I got woken up by the street traffic which seemed to go on through the wee hours of the morning. It was 0100 when I got roused from my slumber and I had serious trouble getting back to bed. This made getting up this morning that much harder. We had planned a home cooking meal for the morning and then a half day tour in the afternoon. Maggie did all of the arrangements with Hanoi Nom Nom since she wanted to learn how to cook Pho properly. We were to meet our guide at 0900 so we had an early breakfast at 0700 and I had time to walk down to the cruise office to pay the balance of our account before then. After our guide showed up at the hotel we headed straight to her house, where we picked up her mom (who did not speak English) and the second guide (who spoke English). We walked down to the market which was just down the street and picked up some ingredients for the pho and some other food. We headed back to the house where we prepared the stock for the (chicken) pho, some beef and greens for the spring rolls, and a grass jelly and black bean dessert. Preparing the pho stock and spring rolls took some time, but it was all tasty and we were all stuffed by the end!

Our cooking team (minus one).
After a short break to digest and eat some sort of cantaloupe like fruit, we headed out to the Temple of Literature for a couple of hours, then to the Hoa Lo Prison. Afterwards, we tried to escape the heat by having some egg coffee at Cafe Giang 39 (the original one). I actually had the egg chocolate with ice, which sounds rather disgusting, but was quite tasty and refreshing! I was told that our second guide was really excited that they would be shepherding a couple of Japanese tourists but we had to explain that we were actually Chinese. Still, I inquired about the Survey Corps shirt from Attack on Titan that she was wearing and I unleashed an AoT fan girl. Wow, it was.. I had not had that sort of reaction since Maral. After we bade goodbye to our guides we took a quick break and Maggie went to sleep.

Our tour guides and us after some egg coffee.
I decided to go hunting for my banh mi at Banh Mi 25 again, but when I got there, I saw that they were cleaning their display case. The lady told me that they close at 1900. It was past 2000. What the hey? She told me to come back tomorrow as they open at 0700. Great. I decided to head back to the night market to check things out there and grab some buns from Banh My P again. I think I was suffering through heat exhaustion because I was getting a lot of head aches during the journey and now that I am relaxing in our air conditioned room, I feel a lot better.

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