Vietnam!

So, before I get to Vietnam, I thought I would show you some of the delicious food our cook, Sraat, makes us. I spend a lot of mornings just watching her and writing down what she does because I want to know how to make everything. Hopefully, now that we're back from Vietnam and can go shopping with her she'll start to cook real Khmae food. Lately she's just been doing a lot of fried meat and mom and I aren't loving that so much. For example, yesterday she basically just did hamburger meat with a couple slices of peppers to put on rice. Mom and I were hoping for a little more authentic food. Anyway, I shouldn't complain because it is good. She cooks us lunch, so that's kind of our dinner and then we just grab whatever we want for dinner. 

She always buys and cuts up these exact same fruits. It's kind of up to us to get a variety of fruits. The fruit here is to die for. I hated mangoes at home, but here they are my favorite fruit! 

 This is a chicken and ginger dish that we put over rice. So so so delicious.

 ...And this is Sraat's infamous CARROT salad. I almost started laughing when she made it. She puts barely enough lettuce on the bottom to be even with the bowl. Then she puts a ton of cucumbers and a ton of tomatoes on it, and last of all a mountain of carrots. She's very into presentation. It's basically a 4 layer salad. I always avoid being the first one to dig into it, because then you only get carrots!

 Now to Vietnam. This is the famous Pho noodle soup of Vietnam. And let me tell you, I now am in love with it. It's broth with rice noodles, chicken or beef, onions, bean sprouts, etc. I had it for breakfast both days because I loved it so much!

 These are just some overhead wires. We decided it would probably be a bad idea to be under one those in a storm.

 This is a video of traffic. No words are necessarily.

 Some pretty nice apartment buildings. Ho Chi Minh City and Hanoi are a lot more advanced and modernized than Cambodia. They're really big cities, with a ton more people.

 Mom and I went walking around a park right across from our hotel one morning. I decided all parks should be like this. There were people doing the waltz, people exercising with big long poles, a huge group doing zumba/jane fonda, badmiton, people waving there arms randomly, and last but not least, some elliptical type things and some ab workout machines (both shown below). I felt like I was in a movie or something (the new Karate Kid).  You wouldn't think the things below would do that much, but my abs were burning and my legs were tired!

 In Hanoi, we stayed at an extremely nice, 5 star hotel. I'm talkin' like the nicest hotel I've ever been in.

 The one interesting thing about the rooms was that there was a window from the room to the bathroom. Hmm. Yea, kind of awkward. There was a little shade to pull down, but even then you could still see the shadow. Kind of funny!

 This was the view from our window. The motos and cars look like ants. It's complete organized chaos. It's like there's no rules and yet everyone just meshes together perfectly.

 This is the Eiffel Tower of Vietnam (the red and white structure). I love that!

 We noticed that in Vietnam people only sit on baby chairs. It's really quite funny. There are grown men sitting on these little stools eating lunch.