Explore the City by foot

At 6:45 the Canadian guy jumps up and runs out of the room... he nearly missed his bus to somewhere. He came back packed and I think made it in time. After this I was wide awake and thought, after lying around in bed for while to check out the complementary breakfast. It sucked.

I did, however find a flyer, advertising a a free walking tour for Saturdays and Sundays.
I did one of them in Edinburgh once and loved it.

I still had some time as it started at 10:45, so started my second attempt to find some good Pho.

I succeeded and the bowl and another glass of Vietnamese Iced coffee gave me a good kick start and motivation for the walking tour.

It was run by young guy, Adam from Leeds, who has been living in Saigon for the last 5 years teaching English. About 10 other tourists joined the group and Adam while walking from spot to spot told us many interesting facts, and little stories about Saigon and we also had one to one chats of where we are from and what we do and so on. All in all, very professional and personal tour.

Unfortunately, I can't remember even 10 % of the stuff he told us so I am not even going to try. I can just advise to do this tour (Saigon Trails & Tales) if you should ever visit here.
It took about 4 hours and we covered the main attractions on a 7 km circuit.

With his very last word about the burning monk (at the place where he set himself on fire in 1963) it started pouring down. Apparently this was the first time it rained in 2 weeks and loads of people already thought the monsoon was over.

We quickly found cover and when it eased down a bit we went back and found he brought us to a nice restaurant (where he surely got commission).

Anyhow, I had the chance to sample some raw crocodile Sashimi. It was not bad but did not actually have much of a taste itself, so it mainly tasted like the salt, onion and lime like I dipped it in.

As this was not enough to eat and I had seen a German Currywurst place along our tour I wanted to go back there and get a Currywurst. Unfortunately this place didn't open until 6pm.

On the way back I strolled through the old central market and a bit further down the road found a cool little coffee shop that was decorated with a T2 bus and loads of Vespa accessories. I had to get myself another one of these coffees.

It was only a 10 minute visit to the hostel after that because we were going to meet up with some of the guys from the walking tour at 6.

One of the girls knew another girl who was an expat from the US and lived in Saigon. She was going to bring us to a local place to sample some Vietnamese Pancakes.

To get there we had to take a cab and it was a very cool authentic, local, cheap meal.

I had to rush home, because Basti would have had arrived already at this time. Indeed, he just walked out of the shower when I came back to the dorm.
Ready to go so.

We went out and he had some food from the place I tried the day before.

It was great to catch up on things. Once again Bandi was on tour... This time in Vietnam.

We also started to plan a little of what we wanted to do and see the next two weeks. This was entirely neglected so far. We only knew we needed to be in Hanoi on the 6th of December in the morning.

We tried to meet the guys from the walking tour at a rooftop bar but must have just missed them.
Instead we met a bunch of Irish people. After we moved on from the rooftop bar it all became a bit dodgy though, as the young folks became increasingly drunk and the two old Germans had to head back to the hostel for some rest.