Met up with Tracy for lunch today and afterwards she went back to work and I decided to go for a bit of a walk around and take a few shots of Saigon. This is such a diverse city with its mix of Western and Vietnamese influences making photographs all the more interesting.

Most of the photos were taken today but some where taken about a week ago.

I headed into the Pho 24 restaurant on Mac Thi Buoi Street in District 1 yesterday for a late lunch. I ordered combo 2 which included a bowl of pho noodle soup, beef balls and a fruit shake for 50,000 dong (USD$3.10). I chose the pho with the thinly sliced beef (pho tai) and the mango fruit shake.

The food was on the table within minutes and I wasted no time chowing it down. The pho was hot and tasty and the mango fruit shake was ice cold and full of flavour. So yeah, that was my quick and simple yet satisfying lunch at Pho 24.

Man, what a night. Got home, laid on my bed and before I knew it was morning. It was Tram and Nguyen’s birthday yesterday so we had a few drinks to celebrate at the Shadow bar on Dong Du Street in District 1.

Lots of good food and plenty of booze always makes for a good party so after a few hours I was pretty much totalled. So yeah, check out some of the photos from the night.

I headed out to meet up with Tracy today and decided to bring along the camera and take some random shots of Saigon since I haven’t taken many photos of the city for you all to see.

Anyways, we decided we’d have Japanese for lunch but couldn’t find a restaurant that had power since the power company dudes shut off power across a big chuck of district 1 to do some maintenance work. No power means no air conditioning and I just couldn’t have that. After walking around a bit we ended up at Sushi Express which thankfully had power.

After a hearty lunch of sashimi, sushi, jelly fish salad and teriyaki chicken we just did a bit of walking around and some shopping. Check the photo on the bottom right of the supermarket isle dedicated to instant noodles. That’s just so full on!

Tracy also makes an appearance in one of the photos. See if you can spot her.

For Bien and Le Thuy’s second last night here in Saigon we decided to spoil ourselves with a lavish buffet dinner at the Saigon Cafe, a buffet restaurant on the 1st floor of the Sheraton Saigon Hotel. Man, this place never disappoints! Everything was so good. Bien and Le Thuy couldn’t get enough of the oyster mornay which was totally delish. The mud crab was also totally amazing. Between the three of us I think we downed a total of four or five crabs. We should have taken more photos of all the other amazing dishes that we ate but we were all too involved with eating we didn’t want to make time.

Anyways, check out the photos. And we were only able to make time to take the dessert shots ‘cause we were all pretty full by then. Haha, we sure did stuff ourselves that night.