Hanging with the girls

I finally got to visit Gene and give her her birthday present this morning (a gorgeous handbag I found in Hà Nội the other day). Last week she had to fly to Bangkok to see a specialist about her foot, which is healing very slowly and she got back on Saturday. We were sitting in her kitchen catching up on the latest when Becki came home and suggested we go to Maxim's for a coffee and then a Korean restaurant for lunch. So she did a shuffle run and transported us on her motorbike to the new H Tower building on Văn Cau. We sat at the table in the corner overlooking the street in lovely big comfortable armchairs and enjoyed an iced tea while we laughed and shared tales of our latest exploits. It was so cool and SOOO comfortable! Next we ducked into Maxim's supermarket which is on the same floor. It's small, but has many of the essentials Westerners like to buy. I found a tin that's the perfect size to replace the little basket I use at school to carry around my markers, sticky balls etc. from which I frequently manage to spill things on my way up and down the stairs. The fact that it happened to be filled with Cadbury's chocolate finger biscuits was quite incidental... especially when it was 40% off (and I'm sure I read somewhere that there are no calories when you buy at a discount....?). Anyway, I now have a beautiful purple tin with all my stuff in it at school and a heap of chocolate biscuits in the fridge!

It was when we were leaving there that I remembered I hadn't taken any photos. Next time. But here's on of the outside of the building. ... you can see the picture windows where we were sitting, so you get the idea.

We walked down the road a bit to the next corner to a large Japanese Korean restaurant called Arirang.

Becki ordered a couple of their favourite dishes and they were just delicious. Not nearly as hot and spicy as I was expecting, although the kimshi and some of the side dishes were hot enough to blow your head off. We started with Japanese fried dumplings called gyoza...

Second course was this delicious prawn dish and rice. It looks a bit like sweet and sour prawns but it doesn't have the sweet and sour sauce taste and has more interesting vegetables, including corn and cashews. It both smelt and tasted amazing.

As you can see, we didn't leave much!