AO show

To start our day we went to another market right after breakfast at the hotel. This one is smaller, and has air conditioning. Because fewer tourists end up there, the sellers are less aggressive. I searched all the stalls for a leather passport cover and had to pay a lot more than I thought I should - more than my wallets, but they all had pretty consistent offers. Leia haggled skillfully for some nice clothes. Since this is our last day in Vietnam, we bought some more clothes and gifts along our way throughout the day. There are many people selling pop-up greeting cards on the street.

We walked to the Notre Dame cathedral and saw the inside of it when it was open - it's worth skipping. Cathedrals all look alike. Leia sent a couple more postcards from the post office. We stopped on the way at the Saigon Opera House (another French building of course) to buy tickets for tonight's AO show. The people there were sweet: it started raining while we were buying the tickets so they took the ticket booth inside, let us use their WiFi until the brief shower calmed down, and gave us umbrellas to use until the evening.

For lunch we mostly had bits of street food like spring rolls here and there in various alleyways or courtyards, which wasn't as easy as it sounds, as the opera house and post office are in fancy tourist districts with expensive French or Italian restaurants. We looked at them and then found where the locals eat nearby. For dinner in one such alley we went to a restaurant so exclusive it doesn't exist yet. It was a vegetarian place upstairs at the end of the alley doing its "soft opening", and all the staff looked shocked that anyone was in there asking for food. Leia had strawberry juice out of a jar, and Guy had ambarella juice, which is a sour unripe mango-like thing. We had a couple of tasty dishes and I gave them comments on how to season tofu so it would add some more flavor to one dish. Since they aren't officially open they have a discount which made the bill reasonable. From there we went back to the opera house.

At the AO show they don't let you use cameras, which we thought was great. They do advise you to come a little early to photograph the interior of the opera house and get free tea and dried ginger snacks. The show waS really good and interesting; it's a modern dance and music performance with acrobatics and juggling like a circus show. Some parts of it were pretty funny and most was very technically impressive, though it's not on the level of world-class shows like Cirque de Soliel. Our seats were at the side but I don't think we missed too much. They do a lot with big beams of bamboo, moving them around and assembling them into structures that they climb and perform on. It's supposed to be about Vietnam's history from ancient village times to the modern day, but I think most of it went over my head lacking any kind of guide leaflet to explain the context. It was still a very enjoyable show to cap our trip to Vietnam. After the show the cast posed for photographs with people.

On the way back we stopped into a Trung Nguyen coffeeshop to taste the "Legendee" - their top-of-the-line coffee, processed in a synthetic enzyme bath to taste like Kopi Luwak or civet coffee, with no palm civets harmed in the making. It was delicious and complex and I'm glad I tried some, though I am not enough of a coffee connoisseur to declare it better than any coffee I've ever tasted: the Mountain River Cafe's chocolate coffee still holds that title. We bought loads of coffee there but one cup of this was almost as expensive as a bag of the priciest one we took back with us. I felt a little guilty about stepping into a cafe to buy coffee right after haggling with a pop-up card saleswoman.