I’m not feeling good. I slept all night, but wake up feeling like I have a cold, and my stomach is not great. We’ve asked our AirBnb host to look at a couple of issues in the condo, and he says his representative is coming to inspect the place this morning. Joe takes Maylin out to the store, while Téa and I wait for the inspection. The representative comes in, notes our concerns, and calls a plumber. She also promises to provide another frying pan, as out of the three that are here, only one works with the brand new, fancy schmancy stove.
Joe comes back with sunscreen and a bundle of plastic beach toys for the girls. They all get ready for the beach, while I now wait for the plumber who will come to fix the leaky sink in our bathroom. Once the plumber has been and gone, the frying pan arrives! Then I head down to the beach to see what the others are up to.
The girls are having the greatest time! When we were in Hua Hin, they thought they had reached heaven with the 9 pools, only an elevator ride away. Here – we walk across the street and get to play in the OCEAN! Even Téa is dealing with sand and shells between her toes, obstacles we weren’t sure were surpassable.
We fill buckets of water to build sand castles, and there are other shapes that end up looking like hippos and crocodiles when we fill them with sand and turn them upside down. But their favourite activity of all is when their dad takes them out to the waves to jump and float and play in the ocean.
I don’t get out to the beach until after 11am, so we don’t stay there much longer after I arrive. While Joe and the girls head upstairs to shower and change, I’m tasked with buying takeout for lunch. I walk around the block, trying to find something other than the pizza and banh mis we’ve had since we got here, and I come across Pappa Roti. I place my order for three meals and two drinks, and sit down to wait. Twenty minutes later, I am back in the AirBnb with lunch, and the girls are almost ready to eat.
The first place I saw soups and lunches in flexible plastic bags was in Bangkok, where you would buy your sauce, curry or soup in a plastic bag, and get a container with your rice or noodles, to avoid them getting soggy on your way to wherever you were eating them. Smart, but plastic bags? In North America, our tendency is to steer away from single use plastics, and it is truly something that has smacked me right in the face since we arrived in Thailand. There, in Bangkok as well as in Hua Hin, everything you eat comes inside minimum one plastic bag, and in cases of extra hygenic precautions, two plastic bags. Want some fruits? Here, let me put your fruits inside a plastic bag that you can eat out of, but here, let me put that bag in a bag with handles, so you can carry it where you are going. I tried bringing and using my own shopping bag with handles as much as I could, but it’s so ingrained in their movement, it’s in a bag before they realize I’ve said “no bag, please”…
After lunch, we were headed into the city centre of Nha Trang, to check out a circular market. This market is very traditional in the middle, and then there’s a more modern building surrounding it, with nice white tiled floors, wide aisles and bright lights. It’s incredible how dark some of the markets get, as there are wares hanging absolutely floor to ceiling, blocking most light sources.
When we have checked out the market for a bit, we let one of the drink stands talk us into sitting down and ordering some beverages. It’s always nice to cool down a bit, even though the climate here in Nha Trang is much cooler than in Ho Chi Minh City. Saigon was averaging 35 daily, here is maybe 24, and very windy by the beach. In fact, in the building of our AirBnb, there’s a coffee shop called Windy Coffee. How apt!
The girls are on their way to a dentist appointment this afternoon. This is the dentist that I originally reached out to for my root canal, and then had to cancel the appointment because it suddenly became an emergency while in Saigon. So today, I’m bringing their office my two daughters instead.
Both girls have now had their adult teeth emerge behind their baby teeth, which means the baby teeth don’t loosen as normal, and the adult teeth pick their own spots to emerge. In Téa’s case, back in 2021, she ended up having her four lower front baby teeth extracted. Today, Maylin gets to have only two extracted.
The process is so fast, so simple, probably painful, but the injection is more painful than the actual extraction. The dentist asked me three times if I was ok with the price before going ahead with the work, as they were going to charge me 50.000 Vietnamese Dong per tooth. I promise, I’m ok with the price, that’s equivalent to approximately $2.50 Canadian. Times two, $5 for the entire procedure? I’m SO in!
Téa gets away with promising the dentist (and her parents!) to get the tooth out on her own. This tooth has been loose since before we left Japan, so it is about time it gets out! The adult teeth are coming on both sides, and it’s getting scary. Will it get stuck? Will it obstruct the normal growth of the two new teeth? Ugh, I wish I knew more about dentistry!
We head straight home after the dentist. Maylin is a little shocked that her teeth are out, as these are her first baby teeth to come out. It’s a good thing that she was in the dentist chair an entire 5 minutes from start to finish, she never really had time to dread anything! But she’s feeling a bit sore, and she has a wad of gauze in her mouth. By the time we get home, she’s right as rain, with her two baby teeth in a plastic baggie for under the pillow. The dentist told us there is a Vietnamese tooth fairy as well, so we are hoping this will work!
None of us girls feel like going anywhere for dinner tonight, so Joe and Téa head out to get so. Maylin requests congee, and Joe really tries, but nobody serves congee for dinner, at least in our immediate surroundings. Even the restaurant where we had congee for breakfast yesterday, it’s not available in the evening, even for little girls who just had teeth extracted! Honestly, if that’s not worthy an exception, I don’t know what is…
When he comes back, he says “I went to Pappa Roti, as you suggested”. I don’t recall suggesting it, but that’s how we ended up having Pappa Roti take out two days in a row. Now, Joe promises he ordered “red curry”, but somehow his bag has an order of fried rice in it instead. Téa was the only one who remembered to take a picture of tonight’s dinner, and that’s completely ok. Joe had a second bowl of pho, which he meant to give to Maylin, but she wanted the wrong order of fried rice instead. I got another order of stir fried noodles, this time with beef instead of seafood. Téa chose stir fried beef with pasta.
The girls get to bed late. I hope the tooth fairy is patient enough to wait until they fall asleep… (In fact, he fell asleep as well, and the tooth fairy was THIS CLOSE to being too late for the magic to happen!)
I wonder if people go to Vietnam just to get dental work done.
Both dental and other surgeries are definitely a source of tourism, both here and in Thailand.