Day 35 - The Start of Matt's Christmas

It's Helen back again. From today we lose Matt to Cheltenham AKA 'Matt's Christmas'. I made the grave error of not negotiating exactly what I'd need to give him in return for the cooking classing and now I have my answer - being home for 8pm every night so he can watch it.

We started the day skipping the hotel breakfast and heading out for a Banh Mi at a place nearby that we'd heard was good. On the way we saw a group of men knocking down a building with sledgehammers and by the time we came back later in the morning it was completely gone. I imagine the building partly melting as I certainly was. The Banh Mi place was a typical small seats on the street experience and had 2 options on the menu. An already constructed sandwich or a baguette which came with the contents plus a couple of eggs and some strange fish cake things in a bowl. Matt had the former and I the latter. It was pretty decent, I reckon it ranks at number 3 in my Banh Mi league so far. And all in all cost less than £4 for the two of us with drinks.

After breakfast we went to the Museum of Traditional Vietnamese Medicine. As you do. We went round with a guide called Ho and a small group which included a Western doctor taking notes in a small note pad. We learnt about the history of traditional medicine, the key pioneers and the tools and ingredients. I liked seeing all the ingredients and what they supposedly helped with, including some scary looking ones I'm pretty sure in my chemistry learnings we were told were very toxic. Apparently in many hospitals in Vietnam you can still chose whether you want to be treated by traditional or Western medicine. Plus as a treat we watched a hilarious propaganda video which randomly had an instrumental of the Christmas song Up On The Housetop (made famous by the Jackson 5) as the intro. Ho tried to guess Matt's job - no idea why - and started at soldier then engineer then clearly wanting to hedge his bets (no pun intended) went for businessman. There's been several times here that men have taken an interest in Matt's size (plus a woman in a coffee shop who told him he had a nice smile and asked if he was married, I should have left him with her).

We had some meatball/meat noodle soup for lunch. Here in HCMC they provide wet wipes at the start of a meal but if you open them they charge you. (There's no warning of this in the restaurant) and as I'm affectionately known as 'Cut Price Coxy' I refuse to succumb despite having half a bowl of noodles on my face. Luckily we were near the hotel so I went there to wash my face - 10p well saved!

In the afternoon we took an Uber to the Bitexco Tower. I LOVE that they have Uber here. It's very very cheap and no getting scammed on price or the driver taking a long route (I've been watching on google maps and seen them do it then they argue a street is one way when you pull them up on it - lies!). CPC strikes again and I refused to pay 200K each (about £8) to just go to the viewing platform on the 68th floor when you can just buy an overpriced jug of draft beer for 200K and get a free cheapy garlic bread on the 51st. Once you get past the 20th floor surely it doesn't make much difference to the view anyway? The views were pretty good, fun to see where we've been but there's not a lot of distinguishable landmarks here that you can see. Though maybe you could from 68.

There's a cinema in the tower so we went there to watch Logan in the air con - much better than John Wick 2. A quick dinner at the sanitised hipster street food area and we Uber'd back with seconds to spare for Cheltenham. I read my Lonely Planet and Emma - cinema and Austen is what being in a different city is all about eh?Read more