Very short post before I go to bed take a shower and catch up on very very overdue email.

It was awesome. We crawled our way through scrumptious food, hung around with relatives, and I got to show off some (very limited) Vietnamese skills; and we visited Huế, which is so totally worth the trip! The H looks fine (I was worried he’d be a little frightened off by all the strange stuff); and he liked the trip I also have a few gripes about clueless guidebooks and clueless tourists, but I’ll get to those when I’m fully rested.

We’re also the proud owners of: 1kg of chả lụa, 2 grapefuits, and four green mangoes, one Vietnamese-English/English-Vietnamese dictionary, one cookbook (this one, chosen at random off the shelves, and which is an encyclopedia of dishes from A to X [1]), and one book of fairytales (this one, which had the merit of having tales I could recognise, and illustrations, always a handy thing for linguistically-challenged people like me). And a couple other things like 15 chopsticks rests with a lotus shape–from this shop, which basically had me go “oh…” all the while we were in there–their designs are a smart cross of East meets West (with a purely Vietnamese aesthetic): they have both a Western-style table ie plates and forks, and an Eastern style one ie rice bowls and porcelain spoons, and all of it is so pretty! Moments like those, I wish we didn’t already have a complete set of plates and rice bowls at home… But alas, the cupboards are bulging with stuff, so we stuck to the chopsticks rests, which should be put to the double use of chopsticks rest and knife rests, depending on what the meal’s like…

[1] Vietnamese has no Z, and very few words that start with Y.