We are leaving our wonderful Hotel Caravel to go out for a night on the town for an extravagant
dinner.
We're in Saigon, Vietnam.
It's a very reasonable place to visit, pricewise.
You can eat at KFC if you really want to save some money.
But when you're in a country like Vietnam, as a Western traveler, you can also eat at
a sidewalk restaurant, moderate scale, very comfortable, great food, or go all the way
upscale to five-star dining at the Sofitel Hotel, one of the more deluxe accommodations
in town.
And so of course they have a great restaurant.
The prices are not cheap but by Western standards they are reasonable for this high quality
of dining, so why not splurge a little bit?
Have some French wine.
The bread is served with 3 different kinds of dips.
Oh the appetizer was a delight that I can still taste a month later.
Very quiet atmosphere here in the main dining room of the Sofitel, very peaceful, a bit
of a contrast with some of the scenes outside in the city.
Wonderful foods, great night, nice splurge - once in a while you've got to splurge.
And then next morning after a night at our great Caravel Hotel, we'll take you out for
some more food.
The Caravel is in a great location right in the heart of downtown near City Hall.
And the rooms are oh so comfortable.
Get a great night sleep and get up the next morning ready for big day.
And for hotel guests, this is where you have breakfast in the morning.
It's a big buffet breakfast so you have a wide choice of the meats, bacons, ham, cold
cuts.
Of course you can always have the eggs and potatoes.
They have an omelet station with the happy chef right there cooking up to your pleasure.
Different kinds of bread and croissants to go with it if you like, some cereal.
Or just go for they scrambled eggs, coffee service, tea, juice, any kind of other beverage
you like to order is available, and real comfortable seating, beautiful acoustics in here.
This is a nice place to start your day.
Relax have a good meal build up some energy for the big busy day ahead.
Starting out from our Caravel Hotel Now are going to jump right to the evening and show
you a bar and restaurant in the city.
We're in the busy heart of downtown Saigon and notice this very attractive sidewalk café.
This is a real popular and very modern and trendy kind of place that didn't exist in
Saigon say 10 years ago.
The city has really transformed itself into a modern world metropolis.
It has become a very classy place with a lot of sophisticated well-educated local people.
You find that there is a growing middle class here in Saigon and there are good jobs to
be had for the well-educated, hard-working people.
Across the street we found a wonderful restaurant called the Lemongrass at the top of the Saigon
Palace Hotel, most fortunately because there are several branches of this restaurant and
this is the newest one so it hasn't yet really been discovered by the public -- so it wasn't
too crowded.
The other branch just around the corner is packed all the time and you might have to
wait half an hour to get a table, and then who knows how fast the service will be in
such a crowded restaurant, very good food anyway.
But this branch of the Lemongrass had plenty of waiters and fantastic food and really good
prices.
It was only $5 for example for this wonderful appetizer of 4 items – an appetizer that
could have very easily made a complete meal for a light dinner.
And then the main entrée came along and that too was delicious and very reasonably priced,
with excellent service here at the Lemongrass restaurant.
We have a lot more movies about Vietnam covering the highlights of this wonderful country taking
you to Hanoi, Saigon, Hue, Hoi An and much more