24 November 2008

A bad burger and a rusty football

We returned to Hanoi from Halong Bay late Friday afternoon and checked into the North Hotel No2. It's barely fifty meters from the Phu Vinh where we stayed a few days ago but it's much quieter as it's a little further from the road on a pedestrianised street.

Since we left Augusters in Macau the rooms have been getting cheaper but better. This time for just under a tenner a night we have a quiet fifth floor room with a private bathroom, hot water, air con, fan, fridge and cable TV. We now also have the added luxury of furniture other than the bed; things such as chairs, a table and a wardrobe. I never thought I would find the sight of furniture so exciting!

All of the food we've had since leaving the UK three weeks ago has been fantastic, not one bad meal. All that changed on Friday night.

Whilst we had been on the Halong Bay trip we had only eaten Vietnamese food, mainly noodle based stuff. Although it was all really tasty I was looking forward to having something more solid that I could get my teeth stuck into. It's not very often that I have a craving for a burger but tonight was that night.

We ended up at a cafe/restaurant in the old town that shall remain nameless (to protect the guilty) and found ourselves a nice seat on an upstairs balcony overlooking the street. We thought we would treat ourselves and have a bottle of white wine, which when it arrived was so hot you could have made a cup of tea with the contents. Not the best of starts. It didn't get any better when the burger arrived. Well, some people may have called it a burger but technically it was so thin it was more of a meat venere. Oh, and when a menu says burger and chips the word chips is plural!

After the calamity that was dinner I needed another drink to cheer me up (and to help me forget how awful the meal was). We found ourselves in a little pub called The Polite Pub where in the corner was what we have now identified is the worlds worst table football table. The unoffical rules of table football state "and thus there shall be no spinning". Well the bars holding the players were so rusty that even Arnold Schwartzenegger in his prime would not have been able to spin the men on this table. We barely had enough strenght to move the players side to side let alone turn them with enough force to actually kick the ball. The situation was also hindered somewhat by the fact that the table sloped by about fifteen degrees to the one side. This resulted in the ball spending most of its time up against the edge out of reach of the players feet.

1 comment:

  1. The table football players sound as good as the Wolves then!?

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