After a delightful cup of coffee in an unfathomably beautiful surrounding, we headed out for breakfast. It's as absolute of a rule as any that you don't eat breakfast and drink coffee at the same place anywhere in Vietnam. The coffee shops make coffee, the food carts serve food. Seems reasonable enough.
As is the norm around here, most streets are dotted with women selling bun, pho, and banh mi from their small carts. So we picked one at random, sat down in a tiny plastic chair, and hoped for the best. And like every single meal we've had in this country, it was outstanding. It didn't hurt that a customer had fallen in love with our baby, and took it upon herself to translate and order on our behalf. Whatever she asked for was amazing.
As an aside, in the US, I rarely taste my food before adding copious amounts of hot sauce. Not so in Vietnam. Here, I taste the food three or four times, think very carefully about what I'm about to do, and taste it again. Then, if I'm feeling particularly adventurous, maybe I'll fan a little bit of the vapors coming off the hot sauce bowl in the general direction of my food. Spice is on a different scale here.
We didn't have much of an agenda that day, but we wanted to explore the city. Hoi An has three distinct regions: the historic old town, the farmland, and the beach. By no coincidence, we're renting a house between old town and the beach. Today we'd explore old town.
The calm residential streets of our neighborhood gave way to a bit more bustling as we got closer to old town. We navigated through dozens of tailor shops (more on that later), and found ourselves in the middle of another massive market to rival Saigon's Ben Tanh. It was nuts. Nearly without warning, we were surrounded by headless fish, live prawns, exotic fruits, and bushels of rice and noodles. Absolutely amazing.
But we weren't there for groceries, so we moseyed on through to a corner cafe. Not surprisingly, fresh fruit juices are big here. If the watermelon and mango juice that we ordered was the only thing we could drink for the rest of our lives, we'd be ok with that.
Dinner was at a small neighborhood restaurant, one of many near us that the owners live above. It's not at all uncommon to see grandma eating at a back table or a young child playing in the corner. We picked one of them at random, and again had one of the best meals of our lives. It was based around cao lao, Hoi An's take on the ubiquitous rice noodle soups of Viet Nam. Cao lao is a bit more savory than traditional pho, and reflects the Chinese influence on the region.
Also, not surprisingly, we had free babysitting service during the meal.
That's the owner's four year old daughter showing Mimi one of her videos. Seriously, Vietnam, too much.
As we were wrapping up our meal, we met a family from New Zealand with a couple of young kids of their own. We made the international traveling-with-baby head nod and introduced ourselves. They were going to be living in Hoi An for nine months. The mom worked for an online company, and could work remotely from anywhere. They chose well.
There are actually quite a few Expats in the region doing the same thing. Despite having a Unesco World Heritage declaration and one of the planet's nicest beaches nearby, Hoi An has a very livable feel to it. We picked this city after about ten minutes of online research, but couldn't have found a better place to live for the next seven weeks.
As we were walking out, the NZ family invited us to join the Hoi An Expat facebook group. We had arrived.
