Our landlord, Ha, brought some bikes over for us to use while we're here. And when I said that most of our checked luggage was diapers, that was a slight exaggeration. It was diapers and a bicycle seat.
You're welcome, internet.
Fittingly, our first bike trip in Viet Nam was to the market. Our first home-cooked breakfast inspired us to round out our pantry options. First necessity: coffee. Thankfully, our house was already stocked with the pour over devices everyone uses here. We just needed the beans, so we picked up a bag of Trung Nguyen! The No. 1 Coffee! (as per the cafe umbrellas on nearly every street corner in this country).
This is as good of a time as any to mention Viet Nam's food patriotism. We've seen one Starbucks in this country, two KFCs, and no McDonalds. It really is amazing, and it speaks volumes about how much pride the Vietnamese take in their national cuisine, as they should.
There are also no grocery stores in Hoi An, a city of 120,000. Let that sink in for a second. The city has nearly twice the population of Flagstaff, Arizona, and it doesn't have a single supermarket. Food starts out on the nearby farmland, gets tossed onto the back of a motor scooter, and is brought to one of the several community markets in town. Every. Single. Meal. Granted, the no-supermarket charm wore off a bit during hour two of our mid-day bike ride to find a goddamn can opener. But it's still a very good thing.
So we jumped in with both feet and went to the market. We traded smiles from our baby and small amounts of cash for all types of produce, recognizable and not.
We weren't brave enough to buy a still-clucking meat item at the market, but we vowed that we would before we left this town. Otherwise satisfied that we had enough food to cook a proper meal (at least in volume, if not taste), we headed back to cook our conquest. A nation of grandmothers serving up homecooked amazingness had set our taste bar impossibly high, but our meal was entirely edible.
The next day, we made our own coffee for the first time in two weeks. As idylic as our neighborhood cafe is, sipping a decent cup of coffee while your baby is still in her sleep sack is its own special kind of luxury.
Around 11am, we experienced our first Vietnamese power outage. I have no idea how freqently these occur, but I do know that not 24 hours prior, I had commented to Aimee about how nice it is that our little village seems to have a stable power grid. Why would I say that out loud?
By 11:15, we realized how different this trip would be if our house didn't have air conditioning. And how much shorter it would be.
As hot as it was outside, our de-airconditioned house wasn't much better. So we took out the bikes to complete the rest of our errands. Clothes hangers: check. Towels: sort of. Still no goddamn can opener.
But what we did find was donuts! Seriously! Baked goods are generally the first thing Aimee and I start missing when we leave the developed world. But if there is any good that came out of French occupation, it's pastries.
The power came back on around 2. Thank God. Rounding out our transition to residents, we did our laundry in some type of high-tech super contraption that might make its way to the U.S. in another 10-15 years.
Not content to fully give up our tourist-ness, we biked down to the beach for dinner. It was exactly the type of family run, thatch-roofed seafood shack that we were hoping for. The food was amazing.
And they loved our baby.
