It’s Saturday and beach day! Or… maybe not? Joe goes for an early morning walk, and comes back reporting that the air is thick of smoke. Like THICK. I poke my head out on the balcony and take these pictures:
Joe investigates, and we THINK this is the yearly burning of old crops leading up to the Vietnamese New Year celebration, Tet. They get rid of the old in plenty of time to start the year afresh. One thing we know for sure, is Joe won’t be able to last long outside in this, his seasonal allergies are triggered by bad air quality, and a layer of smoke is exactly that. Then we read on, and find out that this is supposed to last for the remainder of our stay in Nha Trang. This does not bode well…
We have breakfast and ponder what to do with our day, to replace our planned morning at the beach. We decide to optimistically hope to spend Monday morning at the beach instead, and pretend that today is Monday. The girls get their school books and computers out, and suddenly Social Studies time. It’s extra hard to do school work on a Saturday, when all we really wanted to do was play in the sand and the sea. Joe goes to get some groceries, and picks up some rambutan for a mid-morning snack.
Our struggles stretch all the way from breakfast until lunch, when we slam the computers shut and call it all a day. The taxi brings us to the Gold Coast mall, with all its glorious air conditioning and smoke free environment. The mall is fully decked out for the celebrations of Year of the Horse, and of course we take the opportunity to get a family photo!
Inside, we find four floors of well known stores, and I learn that Aldo is Canadian! Proud Canadian moment there. All I need now is a Helly Hansen store or something else Norwegian, but not really likely to happen here. We are on the hunt for lunch, and Joe reads the directory, finding restaurants on the 5th, 6th and 12th floor. We decide to take a look at them all, and then decide.
But we only find 7 floors. Having inspected the options on the two floors with food, we decide on a Korean buffet restaurant. There’s a seafood buffet here as well, a famous one called Poseidon, but we’re saving that for another day. It’s an expensive outing, made more affordable by going during a weekday lunch instead of weekend or dinner. We’re fortunate to have all the time in the world, and can choose our timing for that one.
The Korean buffet is called Dookki, and specializes in hotpot cooking. There’s a pot of stock placed in the middle of our table, and they bring thin slices of beef on request. The rest is all available on the buffet, and we choose our favourite noodles, fish balls, mystery ingredients and vegetables. There are also plenty of cooked items available, and the girls enjoy fries, sweet potatoes, dumplings and all sorts of fish balls and other bite sized fried snacks.
After lunch, we head straight across the hallway to the rolled ice cream vendor! Téa has been wanting to try rolled ice cream for a very long time, and as we watch the vendor chop chop chop the mango into the cream mixture, we marvel at how fast her surface freezes the ingredients. I don’t know why the vendor speaks Russian to me though, I tell her twice that I don’t speak Russian. She looks Vietnamese, but won’t reply to me in English, so maybe she’s the Russian one?
On our walk through the building, we found the entertainment floor. I mean floors, there are so many games that they had to put them on both the 6th and the 7th floors! We purchase our tokens on the 6th floor, but soon move upstairs. Joe heads off to sit in a massage chair for a bit while the girls take on a VR experience.
Joe bought so many tokens, that the girls get to try absolutely everything that they want. In the middle of this pogo stick game, Joe returns and then it’s my turn to go zone out for a while in a massage chair. The massage chairs are surprisingly good at what they do, and I’ve never really appreciated them before, seeing them as expensive and unnecessary in Canada. Here though, getting 16 minutes for $1CA, I will totally take the tiny time out and have a chair bump my stresses out of me.
When I come back to the others, Téa has had a big win! She pulled the jackpot on a “spin the wheel” type game, and out came 500 tickets! (The most we’d seen in a single game before this was 42.) She’s beaming! This also means that all together, we have 956 tickets to bring back to the desk and exchange into prizes. You’d think that was a lot, but it results in two tiny plastic trinkets, two fruit leather candies and two lollipops. The “good” prizes start at 4000 tickets, and I can’t even start to think how much time and money goes into getting one of those…
With that all done and over with, we then descend through the mall again, and realize we haven’t really explored the mall at all. We do make a quick-ish stop at Miniso, and Téa picks up a couple more of the sticker scenes that her and Maylin worked so diligently on the other day. We also pick up nail polish, still hoping to get some colour on my toe nails and Téa’s finger nails. Joe explores the grocery store while us girls are shopping, and is amazed at the tea and local specialties available in this store. Like artichoke tea, I consider myself above average interested in tea, but I’ve never heard of this one!
When we get back home, we see the building staff busy setting up the Tet decorations. It’ll look so nice when it’s all done!
We have a lot of leftovers in the fridge, there’s curry from Thursday and pasta from yesterday. I am itching to go for a walk after dinner, and Téa comes with me. I finally get to try a coconut ice cream from the coconut ice cream cart lady! She tries to sell us two of these, but we’re good with sharing just the one. We find a bench, and sit down to enjoy a local delicacy with some very local views.
The beach is teeming with life. Dogs and kids are being walked, games are being played, we almost get hit by a flyaway volleyball, food is being cooked, sold, bought and eaten. I could totally be out here every night enjoying this atmosphere, but when I feel like I’m being eaten alive by bugs, I know it’s time to head inside.
Back home, we grab some popcorn and watch another episode of the gameshow “All the Sharks”. I’m still hoping that we’ll be able to go snorkeling while we’re here, but showing the girls all the scary sharks before taking them on an underwater adventure, might not be the best idea in the world… The snorkel tours that we’ve been looking into seem crowded and rushed, so we’ll see if we actually find one we want to go on. Wish us luck, please!