vietnam 2012: day five.

shall keep this space as my travel blog (which are unfortunately, no fun to read as they are REALLY factual), for the only reason that most of my travel posts are much longer than usual :/

shall start with today's entry, and post the ones for the past four days tmr instead :D

-+-

woke up early in the morning after a pretty long night of insanity playing bridge and ah daidee with the girls :D had to pack all our stuff, write my postcards and check out our room. after which we headed out to tous les jours for breakfast! 

tous les jours is this awesome french-inspired vietnamese home grown bakery, which is very beautifully designed in all aspects - the environment, the bread, and the entire feel to it. not to forget we've been very tempted by the yummy looking bread since the v first day! so we headed in, grabbed almost 15 different kinds of bread shared among the 6 of us, and ordered some coffee and juices. was actually pretty cheap considered the amount we all ate! but sadly, we concluded that the bread looked better than it tasted :( and breadtalk breads are seriously yummier!

it definitely looks better than it tastes.

but breakfast was still pretty awesome heehee. it's the company that matters, right? (:

headed to ben thanh market after and walked inside there for almost 3 hours, covering slightly less than half the entire area :/ bought many many many souvenirs there for our colleagues and friends, and some random things for ourselves. headed back to pham ngu lao after to collect our suits while yangying went to change more currency and look for a post office and zyang went to fill his stomach. within an hour, we all headed back to highlands and online checked-in before heading back to our hotel to drop our barang barang.

went to saigon square after to grab some of the things we spotted yesterday, and walked a little bit more before going to the adidas and puma factory outlet store, which lonely planet claimed to be one-fifth of the original prices. turned out to be really disappointing cos there were so little things there, plus many of the designs were terribly outdated! roars. and it wasn't even close to the one-fifth, if we could get the things at half the original price it would be considered a huge bargain already. lonely planet fail -___-

went back to the hotel again and packed our stuff, before crossing the road to get our nails trimmed and painted! i went to change the screen protector of my ipod as well cos i decided a matt protector would be much better for me to play games with haha. (previously the screen could get pretty oily. eew.)

so we spent another 2 hours in the salon, getting our well-deserved rest and treatment before getting back to our hotel to grab stuff, and cabbing to the airport.

after checking in our baggages (thankfully we did the online check-in, the priority queue was so much quicker!) ying and i went on a mission to look for a post office. after asking many many people, we found ourselves at this roadside stall selling sim cards, and decided to ask the lady at the counter for help. she didn't seem to understand what we were saying though, but when we asked for stamps she managed to sell us some! so ying2 and i decided to just get the stamps first before looking for the postbox.  meanwhile we continued to ask the lady questions regarding the post office.

and while we were sticking our stamps to the postcards, i turned my head and saw this sign - right at the table we were at, less than 20 cm away - a signboard that wrote POST OFFICE. ying2 and i looked at each other in disbelief and felt so stupid asking the lady all those funny questions. she must be thinking that we're such weirdos -___-

went back to the airport to meet the rest and we tried finding some pho for our very last meal in hcmc. turned out that the only thing available that was cheap enough was bk... SIGH. so in the end, all i had was three meals of pho ): sadded.

three hours later we found ourselves back on singapore land, on chieh's family car talking to his younger bro, after distributing our barang barang among ourselves. (to my horror i had an entire backpack full of things!! and most of it were like presents to others. EEKS)

so now i'm back at home, and its 3.30am. but i'm glad i unpacked most of my things and am more or less ready to watch some drama before sleeping in tomorrow. am intending to grab some chicken rice as well - definitely miss my favourite ga! (chicken in vietnamese heehee!) 

+ guaishou's! :D