Worlds Colliding

Sunday Morning Market Run - Cho Xa Tay.

Every Sunday, we walk the 2.5 blocks to our local market to purchase our veggies, eggs, tofu, and bread for the week.  The market starts about 6 am and closes when the food runs out or at noon, whichever comes first.  It can be a challenge to start the morning in a crowded, steamy market where you have to enter through the butchering section.  However, the food is fresh, cheap, and in abundance and it makes the fact that you walk through blood and guts water (which has been dubbed street-splooge) tollerable.  We have our regular vendors that we purchase from and they always laugh at our broken, developing language skills while bagging up our purchases.

It's a meat market.

Today, after the market, we headed into downtown to CZECH out a restaurant that Adam had read about.  It is a Bauhaus that is connected to the Czech Consulate.  Walking into the place, it felt as if you left Vietnam and entered Disneyland.  The beer garden is huge and filled with dark wood tables and chairs.  There are large steins and signs in Czech all over the place. The restaurant is the first micro-brewery (and maybe one of the only) in Vietnam.  It was established in 1995 and offers two drafts -- light and dark.  After drinking 333 for a month (Vietnam's Miller Lite), the dark beer was a welcome respite (Bill Clinton must have agreed since there is a large poster size picture of him chugging beer here on the wall).  The menu is filled with Czech options, or what the Vietnamese might interpret as Czech options -- eel, snails, and salt-water fish have never come out of my Oma's kitchen!  The food was pleasant, the beer was delightful, and the feeling that for one hour we were in another world far away from the hustle and noise of Saigon, was the nicest surprise of all. 

Our plate of sausage and sauerkraut.

Do not be fooled by the texture -- the mashed potatoes were great.

To Opa and Oma.