I’m up early, as usual. We’re all excited to check out our surroundings in daylight, so the others wake up once I start stirring. We have no food in the house, and no clean dishes (we like washing anything we plan on using before we eat off them), so our plan is to find a nearby place to have breakfast.
While I wait for the rest to brush teeth and hair, and get dressed, my friend Google Maps and I find Pansy, which is open early and serves breakfast. They call themselves an Italian restaurant, but have both sushi and burritos on their menu.
After breakfast, it’s still only about 8am, so we go for a walk. Once we cross the street (which, if you didn’t catch it before, is an extreme sport, and should probably come with its own level of insurance. “Ma’m, do you plan on crossing any streets in Vietnam as a pedestrian?”), we look up and get a feel for how immense this condo complex is. There are five identical buildings, 40 floors each, 18 condos per floor, or at least if our floor is one to go by… That’s a lot of condos! There are also 8 elevators in each building, and they stop often.
Strolling north just to get a feel for our immediate area, we find this building. It stands out amongst everything else which is so square, bright white and all 90 degree angles. I like this softer shape and colour!
It’s very cloudy this morning, and we’re early enough to only see the sun lounger staff and leisure walkers out and about. Oh, and there’s workout equipment between the beach and the road, so there’s people using that. There is also a surfing instructor and a few of his students getting ready to hit the waves.
We had to get some provisions. In the building directly across from ours, there’s a large store with groceries, lotions and potions, household items, alcohol, toys, clothing… From outside, it looks like separate stores, but when you go inside, they’re all connected and you can pay at any of the cashiers. They also have an outdoor pizza oven, which smells divine at all times, and makes you more hungry. They obviously know what they’re doing, tempting grumbling bellies with pizza so we buy more food inside!
I love exploring new countries through their grocery stores, and this one is no different. When you have all new brands to choose from, and all the bottle says is “Cooking Oil”, we might as well choose this one because I like the dragon?
Back upstairs, the laundry is all done and we hang it to dry. The washing machine is on the balcony, and we haven’t used one since Hua Hin on Jan 1st, so we may have done too much. We have just enough hangers to hang everything, and I run back across the street to pick up one of those round hanging things with about 20 clips on it for the smaller items.
We’ve messaged the AirBnb host to enquire about the promised “ocean and mountain view from both bedrooms”, when the second bedroom’s window is covered in a white sticker material, and faces the interior hallway… But the view if we stand on tippy toes on the balcony is very nice!
Joe has done some Google Maps research, and found a place he wants to go to for lunch. It’s around a bend and through an alley, and on a road where fewer tourists wander. There’s a street back there, where it seems to be more local food and less touristy restaurants, I mean the menu when we sit down isn’t even in Russian! (This is a high Russian tourist area, most menus are Vietnamese, English and Russian, which one comes first depends on who owns the restaurant…)
We place our order, and it’s not until later I realize, this is a Thai restaurant. We came looking for local food, and found another “international” restaurant, even though it is by and for locals. Only Vietnamese is spoken, only Vietnamese on the menu, and Google Translate is our most used tool in these situations. In any case, we love Thai food, so we’re not complaining! There’s also a kitten bugging the staff in the restaurant, looks very young, and its meow is so tiny…
After lunch, we walk back to the AirBnb. I’m feeling not great, so I lay down for a nap. When I wake up, there’s a message from Joe that he took the girls to the beach, along with the following pictures:
When Joe and the girls come back, we’re all in the mood to just relax at home, so us girls send Joe out to hunt for food. He ends up buying the girls burgers from one place, and him and I banh mis from another place. There are two different banh mis, one traditional and one special, and the special one is too spicy for me. I give him my half back, and take whatever is left of his traditional half instead. It’s a good thing we mostly like the same sort of thing!
I do some blogging while Joe and the girls watch some TV. It’s a very relaxing evening, as most of our evenings are. Hopefully we’ll have more energy tomorrow!