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| The Duxton Hotel in central Ho Chi Minh City |
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| Menu from the Zebra Restaurant |
We had a walk around the area which is near the centre of the city, and finished the morning with a nice ‘business’ lunch at the Zebra Restaurant. It had everything we liked - cheap, cheerful and excellent food.
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| Torrential rain outside Fanny's ice-cream parlour |
Earlier that day we'd arranged to meet the family of Ken, a Vietnamese student who lived with us in Sydney earlier in the year. We only made it back to the hotel just in time to meet them.We met Ken's dad, mum and daughter of a friend who had studied in the US for 4 years – they'd invited her along to translate. It took 30-40 mins to drive to their house which was not a great distance away but the traffic was horrendous. Theirs was apparently a ‘typical’ house for middle class Vietnamese, very kitch and ornate to our taste, and kept spotlessly clean, with the assistance of a live-in housekeeper.
After some chat, especially about Sydney real estate, we headed back to the city centre for an excellent seafood dinner with their friends in a Chinese restaurant. This was by way of a treat, as they felt Vietnamese food would be too common for us, when in fact we would have loved to go to a Vietnamese restaurant instead.We presented them with a bottle of Australian white wine which was promptly drunk, and then we started on red wine. Nyoung started to get tipsy as the conversation and wine flowed, and we ended up in a long cycle of ‘cheers’. When they dropped us back at the hotel, I gave Nyoung the second bottle that we’d brought with us in thanks for the night out.