Another full night’s sleep, better living through drugs! After breakfast we walked to another Hanoi park/lake. Today we could see blue sky which was the first time since being in Hanoi! ☀️ Pretty much every street looks the same, lots of motor bikes, lots of street vendors selling product and serving food. They were roasting pigs on the side of the road which was unique. We also saw them killing a couple of chickens, but I’ll spared you that picture.
The park turned out to have a little carnival for kids. I think it was permanent. So we enjoyed watching the kids.
We walked further to the lake and sat to enjoy the sun and the sights. Here are a couple more pictures from the park.
By this time we were getting hungry. We have been very uncertain about food. There are lots of street food vendors but the hygiene is very questionable. It seems that meat can sit out cooked and uncooked for a long time, the dishwashing often seems a little sketchy, and for us anything uncooked should be washed in bottle water which they definitely aren’t doing. We want to eat street food but don’t want to get sick so we have been avoiding it. Our plan for lunch was to find a western looking hotel and have lunch there. We ended up at a Hilton Garden Inn and had a lovely safe lunch.
We got back to our hotel around 2 and had a brief time to relax/blog before getting picked up at 2:50 for our cooking class. Cheryl and Dave accompanied us. We were picked up first and then proceeded to pick up 8 more people. We were a very diverse group; we had people from England, Australia (originally from South Africa) and Washington DC. Our chef/guide was a lovely animated young woman who really made the evening fun. We started by going to the market and she showed us fruits and vegetables that we were not familiar with. She also had us buy/negotiate for some the food. Here are some pictures from the market.
Then we headed to the kitchen where we donned aprons and she set us to work. We made banana flower salad, spring rolls, pork meat balls, and egg coffee. Everything was delicious.
Overall a wonderful experience! We went back to the hotel in a taxi with Dave and Cheryl. The traffic was terrible. There was a little roadwork being done so everyone had to squeeze left. It took about driver about 10 minutes to go 0.1 mile because he had to inch forward to push the motorbikes over. Crazy!
I got a better picture in my mind about the food situation from this post. For some reason I was thinking “you” were eating all kinds of strange things, I guess not. You are being more sensible! But getting brave as you learn more. The cooking class was a great idea!