We decided to just use one of the taxis advertising near the exit of the airport, even though it was a bit expensive compared to average rates, we paid $9 for about a 30 minute ride to our hotel. Once out of the taxi, this guy tried to convince us to stay at his hotel instead (not notable because of the occurrence, everyone on the street harasses tourists to spend money), but when we said no he helped point us towards our hotel. After we had dropped off our luggage inside and went back outside, he was waiting to talk to us more. We mentioned we were going to lunch at a vegetarian place (one across the street had a note that they had veggie options) and he offered to show us a better one. We agreed, and he led us over a couple streets to a cool little shop. His name was Bamboo, and he was very friendly.
Alex and I ate lunch at the store. I *tried* to order fried okra and a cabbage blossom with a garlic sauce, but the waiter didn't speak much English and when I pointed at the menu he messed up and brought me fried onions and a vegetable plate instead. The plate had cauliflower, carrots, and onions, so it was edible anyway although it had a light sprinkling of a peppery peanut mix on some of it that I wasn't super fond of. While we were eating, a guy from Spain sat down at the restaurant and amazed many locals by playing an accordion. After lunch, we originally planned to go to this tourist park thing but when we had looked it up in the hotel earlier it was a bit too far away to go to in just an afternoon. Since we didn't have any plans, and we liked the guy Bamboo who had helped us out some, we asked him for some recommendations of where to visit.
He offered to take us around and show us a few places (not as sketchy as it sounds - a lot of people sell rides around the city on their motorbike). Vietnam traffic is pretty nuts, way more motorbikes than cars and tons of honking because that basically seemed to mean "I'm going to drive past you now, please don't hit me." It was really fun riding through the city that way. Bamboo took us first to the War Memorial Museum, which was really interesting, obviously way biased against the United States, and incredibly depressing. We stayed a while reading through the exhibits, then he drove us over to a Buddhist temple. It was super pretty, and had two ponds filled with turtles and fish. Next was a handicraft factory where they made lacquered plates and art work (they were either hand-painted or in-laid with mother of pearl / eggshells), and I accidentally fell completely in love with a small piece of art made of eggshells and had to buy it. Finally he took us to see these two cool buildings, a Notre Dame Catholic church and the very historic post office.
After that back to our hotel, and then of course we had made the very silly mistake of not negotiating rates upfront. For some reason even though both of us knew that piece of advice, we had assumed that Bamboo not mentioning anything meant we would just pay him whatever we wanted to for his help. We had planned on just giving him about 100k dong ($5) and he wanted 600k ($30). His reasoning was based on an unspoken rate of $5 an hour per person for three hours. Whatever, it was a little pricey when compared to the average rate of renting a moto driver, but he was nice and it wasn't really that much money and we'll remember to negotiate upfront definitely in the future.
We went inside for a bit, then managed to summon up the energy to feed ourselves and find Alex a phone. He wanted to get a prepaid one so he could be reachable. We found one partway down the street for a decent price, and also bought some outlet converters (conveniently unnecessary in our first hotel, but will be probably needed in later ones). Then we went to dinner, and I ordered a vegetarian crispy noodles + veggie/tofu dish but the sauce on it tasted really bad so I didn't eat much of it. I had some of the bruschetta we ordered for appetizer, and part of an avocado shake which was fun to try but made me realize that avocado and sweet things really don't go together well. Had some of Alex's rice, too. We also picked up a motion sickness medicine from a pharmacy next to our hotel, which we might end up needing for either our boat tour tomorrow or possibly our budget airplane rides coming up internal to Asia.
Totally time to sleep, now.
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