Our days start early. Why am I incapable of sleeping past 6.30am? Hopefully that’ll change at our next destination… In any case, as luck will have it, breakfast also opens at 6.30am in this hotel, so I can entice my girls to wake up and come eat with me! And when the room starts stirring, Joe is up as well. Voila, a whole family breakfast!
Joe has found a street called Book Street, so that’s where we’re headed this morning. The weather is relatively cool, so we decide to walk there and potentially taxi onwards, but at least get some steps in.
Right before we get to Book Street, we get to the Notre Dame Cathedral of Saigon. This impressive sight meets us:
There are so many things to see right here! There’s the “old” Post Office, which on the inside is still a very much functioning post office, but also a mish mash of souvenir stores and anything else you can imagine selling to a tourist. I have to say though, I definitely regret not buying the silver earrings from the silver earring vendor in the middle, and I hope to see similar art again!
Right next door, quite literally, is the street known as Book Street. It’s a collection of super cute book shops, cafés and gift shops. Most of the books are in Vietnamese, of course, but Téa’s eyes lit up when we came across books in English! Only, they were old classics and business themed, not exactly popular tween reads…
After our walk and our visits to the cathedral, post office and book street, we were hot and in need of some air conditioning. At the end of book street, we see a huge CHAGEE sign, and we’ve seen this before all over the place, but we don’t really know what it is. There’s also a large glass entrance, and it looks like it could potentially be a mall? We head in that direction, and discover that Chagee is a Chinese milk tea chain, so we decide to check it out. It’s a beautiful store, and the branded items for sale make me want them all (except I can’t figure out how to open the travel mug…)!
The menu is all tea. No coffee, no non-tea items whatsoever. Upon noticing the kids in our party, the staff member recommends an Oreo blended milk tea. Ok, I guess, but the girls have to share it, we’re not ordering a beverage each and then have two extra if they don’t like it… I ordered a Lapsang Souchong milk tea, and knowing the tea from before, I was hoping to taste it. It tasted more like milk than anything else, not even a hint of the smoke the name Lapsang Souchong promises. It is supposed to taste like you’re sitting around a campfire!
We figured out that what we thought was a mall entrance is more of a business tower entrance, with Chagee on one side and Starbucks on the other. (I’m not a fan of Starbucks, but I noticed their sign in the lobby: Business bundle – 4 beverages and 2 snacks, or 6 beverages and 3 snacks. Why don’t we have business bundles at coffee shops in North America? Or do we??) We are very ready for an indoor activity, and Joe has found a mall in the outskirts of town, promising to be as good as the impressive malls we found in Bangkok. We book a car, and head out of town.
The Vincom Mega Mall – Thao Dien is a pretty mall, but it’s about 20 minutes out of the city centre, giving us the opportunity to see a bit of the city, and crossing two rivers. I love the taxi apps we’re using in Vietnam, both Grab and the fully Vietnamese Xanh SM are saving our feet from the heat in this country! Did you know you can pick your size of car, or even get a moped taxi? They store any “luggage” (small bag or crate of water bottles) in front of the driver’s feet, and then sit lazily at the back, with the branded helmet. We haven’t tried this type of taxi yet (for obvious reasons, what about the kids??), but would love to try it one day! I’ll try to snap a picture of one eventually…
The first thing the girls do when we get into the mall, is pose with this Christmas display:
There are five floors and a basement, but where are all the people? Are they at the cramped and crowded market? This mall feels so EMPTY, and it’s also about 1/5 in size compared to the malls we got used to in Thailand.
An empty-ish mall means we have the store to ourselves, essentially. It’s fun and all, until you are monitored closely by four staff because they are bored out of their minds, and all little girls are thieves, right? I have never felt so uncomfortable walking through a store ever, but the girls didn’t notice so they didn’t mind. We hurried out of that one…
I have to say, this next store got their name right! “Oh! Some” kind of sounds like Awesome, and it has all the things my girls want to look at and play with. We saw one at the mall on our first day here, and they gravitate towards this one as well. It took about 30 minutes before I could wrench them away from the store…
Outside the Oh! Some store, which is on a very kid-friendly floor, we find this train driving laps, with a very lonely looking driver. The girls want to ride the train, and when they realize that each train car is actually also a video game for two, they get even MORE excited (how is this possible? Is there a limit to how excited they can get? Is there a point where they’ll actually explode?)!
The train does two full laps, I think we paid 100.000 Dong (about $5CA) for the 5 minute ride. The girls had a blast, and the parents kind of enjoyed themselves too…
Then it was time for lunch. We picked one of the few places that looked Vietnamese (seriously, what is it with all these countries and their crush on all things Japanese? There’s an entire floor in each mall with all Japanese restaurants, or so it seems at least!), and the girls have another moment of excitement when they see they have a kids’ set! Two options of the same kids set, so Maylin gets the pork and Téa gets the chicken. Joe picks a noodle soup (imagine that?) and I pick a rice noodle dish (no surprise there either!).
We figured out that the plate of greens and shrimp paste went with Joe’s noodle soup, but I kind of looked at them thinking I could make lettuce wraps there for a minute… Lunch was tasty and safe for my teeth, and both girls were filled up by their plates. Sometimes kids’ sets are too small for Téa, but that brick of broken rice was very dense, and both girls left about half.
After lunch, we headed to the entertainment area of the mall, just to check it out. Some malls have a card system like the one in Hua Hin, and we don’t end up trying it because you have to pay for the card and we don’t want to do that for just one random visit. But this area was different, and the girls have lots of fun! In the end, the amount of tickets they earned allowed them to pick one bag of snacks, and the staff member gifted Maylin a tiny plastic dolphin as well.
On our way back down through the floors, we stop at this iron man massage chair. It can be yours, in your own living room, for the low low price of 160.000.000 Dong! (Approx $8500 CA) I don’t think that includes shipping…
This is where we took two different paths. Joe and Maylin were done, they had had enough of walking and looking and all the things, and wanted to go home. Téa and I were craving a cozy mother-daughter solo experience, and stayed behind while the other two took a Grab back to the hotel.
For months I’ve been looking at things to do in Ho Chi Minh City, and top of the list of treats to do with Téa is something called a Teddy Bear Café. When we arrived, it was one of the first things I looked up on Google Maps – and it says Temporarily Closed. Temporarily Closed?? What does it mean? Why now? What on Earth?? I asked the hotel receptionist to help me come to the bottom of this mystery, but she says she gets a busy signal when she calls them, and she thinks they’re on the phone. Their Google Maps listing has a review asking if the café still exists. No reply. Buuuuuuttttt, at this point, we decide it’s probably not worth the excursion, it’s probably closed, and we should look for a different treat.
Téa and I explore the basement of the mall, the grocery store is enormous, but also oddly high ratio of stern looking staff, and a dozen sample people that aren’t actually offering their samples to anyone. They see us (the only customers there) and turn away. Are we not the right demographic? Do they not want to sell whatever they are sampling? We buy a chocolate bar and that’s it. We see the cute bakery across the hall, but there are no seats. After a (too short) while, we decide to ALSO go back to the hotel, mother-daughter date coming to a close. Oh well.
I’m connected to Joe’s Grab account, so when I book a Grab through my account, it just says “bill to admin” and I don’t even have to put in my own credit card. HA! I book a car to come pick us up at the side of the mall, and the skies look ominous. Like proper, thick tasting air, feeling like the raindrops are just on their way down from the skies but haven’t landed yet. Our brand new, all tech EV ride arrives, and we hop in. (I’m amazed by all the cameras and touch screen surfaces in new cars. Maybe my beautiful old Jeep was just too old to have any of that…)
The rain starts. It’s just as bad as yesterday. It’s cats, dogs AND buckets. But our driver is not as nice as the driver Joe and the girls had yesterday, so he stops on the right (and very wrong) side of the street, so we have to both step in puddles to get out, and run across during a break in traffic, all while getting absolutely drenched. Joe and Maylin have been enjoying a coffee at the coffee shop I wrote about yesterday, right next to the hotel entrance, and they didn’t have egg coffee today either!
We hurry in to the hotel, up to the room, shower our very gutter-dirty feet and shoes (my beautiful leather sandals), and relax until we start getting hungry. When we get ready, we bring out those rain jackets again, and decide to go exploring nearby. The rain has slowed to a drop here and there, so we stay nice and fairly dry on our way to dinner.
The restaurant we find around the corner and across the street looks beautiful from the outside, and the menu is huge. It takes us a good 5 minutes to read through their options, and make the best (but who really knows) selections.
After dinner, it’s no longer raining, but it’s still good that the walk home is a short one. Téa and I walk around the corner to go find some snacks at Circle K, and end up buying THREE bags of chips because of a “gift with purchase” of a potato stuffie… We figure we’ll need them for Thursday’s super long train ride anyways!
Only one more day to go in Ho Chi Minh City, and tomorrow is also my last dentist appointment. We were absolutely hoping we wouldn’t be spending most of our days at a dental office, but that’s the way it has ended up. I cannot wait to be done with all these appointments, and be able to heal and eat normally! On Thursday we leave for Nha Trang!