Sep 21: Jumping in

After half an hour of wrangling, we upgrade our teeny room to something bigger and having joined the Sunroute travel club, got a free upgrade again and will get 10% off our future bookings in October. As we hadn't unpacked much, it was an easy move down a level, overlooking a garden at the 3rd floor. Not quite the tropical paradise in Hue, we are still staring at more buildings, but a much larger more comfortable room (they quote you sq.ft. on the Internet booking site and it's hard to imagine the 15 sq.ft of the original room til you see it.

  Here in the business/tourist end of town (Prada and Coach abound)) Ted steered me to the shopping and restaurant area. There are hundreds of restaurants but strangely not a lot simply Japanese. It's very affluent, lots of families, like Singapore, it appears they don't eat at home. Lots of groups of young women, I guess the men are all at the bar together...

   We had lunch at a French Crepe Bretagne place - fish soup (like lobster bisque, excellent), pea soup and Bretagne cider. Must go back for crepes. $40 Cdn.

  Later to a pizza place, so efficient, lineups everywhere esp just after people get out of the offices at 5pm. You line up and they bring the menu on the street. Pull in customers as fast as they can serve, not necessarily to fill restaurant then keep you waiting. Good philosophy. Pick your base (green: pesto) then choose from a huge selection arrayed in front of you (prosciutto, sun dried tomatoes, exotic looking mushrooms) into the wood burning stove for 5 minutes max and away you go. Washed down by their own tasty brew of beer. Again $40.

  As Ted says there were 8 greeting customers ad making/serving pizza and service is amazing here.

  In the reception they have a robot named Pepper. I need to go talk to it tomorrow. See how it compares to all the lovely young people looking after us here.