Vietnam: Ho Chi Minh City, Part 2

Our first day in HCMC felt packed! The rest of our time in HCMC didn't feel as busy. We started our next day with a trip to the Ben Thanh market. It seemed like you could get anything there. We saw food stalls, tea, fresh meat, live fish, veggies, shoes, all kinds of clothes, purses and they were all crammed into one building.

For lunch that day we went in search of The Lunch Lady. This "restaurant" was featured on one of Anthony Bourdain's shows. We have tried other places that he recommended and haven't been disappointed yet. The Lunch Lady serves soup from a couple of carts, we were lucky that it happened to be near our hotel. There is only one option every day. I'm not sure what our soup was called but it was good. I also ordered a milk tea, well I thought it was just a milk tea I was surprised with my first sip that it also had bailey's (or something similar) in it as well.

We sat down and they just started bringing food over. In addition to our soup we got fresh and fried spring rolls.

After lunch we went to the Ho Chi Minh City Museum and to a local park. Baby O loved the park, and he didn't even play on any of the play equipment! There were a couple of teenagers playing saxophone, so he did a little bit of dancing. Then he slowly walked past all the people sitting on the park benches enjoying an afternoon coffee and chat with friends. He did not wave or say hello, just looked at them and slowly walked past as he usually does. Then he found a group of girls practicing a dance routine and he walked right up to the front and joined them. The girls were very cute. You could tell they wanted to stop and check Baby O out but they also needed to finish their song. As soon as it was over there was a lot of oohing and ahhing, and he promptly ran away.

The next day we had a tour planned to see the Cu Chi Tunnels. The Cu Chi Tunnels are a huge network of underground tunnels. The tunnels were used by the Viet Cong soldiers during the Vietnam War. They were quite interesting to walk (really almost crawl) though some of the tunnels. They were very hot and humid and there were bats. Ick! When our tour guide brought us back to the city he helped us order some delicious banh mi sandwiches.

That afternoon we went for a tasty Vietnamese coffee (we had Vietnamese coffee every day, usually twice) and it started pouring. It was crazy! It was a nice sunny day and all of a sudden torrential downpour. So we had two coffees to wait out the downpour. Once it had stopped raining enough for us to get a taxi we headed to the hotel to get our luggage and head to the airport. Up next Hanoi.