The fresh ones were really hard to make, first we took two circular rice papers which, at this step, were very hard and felt almost exactly like plastic. We then got those wet so they would loosen up a bit. After that we put lettuce, bean sprouts, herbs, rice noodles, and placed some shrimp on the paper so that when it would be rolled they could be seen through the rice papers. That was the easy part. The hard part was rolling the wet, sticky rice paper around all this. The rice paper really liked to stick to everything, especially itself. Needless to say, our spring rolls were not quite as beautiful as the ones made by the chef...
Wow, when did Jiro get here?
Okay so my fresh spring roll doesn't look all that great, but i promise it tasted great, and I promise that my fried spring roll came out looking much better, it was also much easier. The chef had prepared a mixture of raw pork, mushrooms, taro, and some herbs that we just put inside the bean casing and rolled that up, it was preposterously easy compared to the fresh ones.
After we learned how to cook, we were cut loose on the lunch buffet at the restaurant...trust me, it was as chaotic as it sounds. Twenty college students let loose on a five-star buffet. but wow was that delicious.
some super fresh dragon fruit...nice
I bit into this little fish and it was filled with eggs...apparently that is a "delicacy"
some fruit and cheese
those fish, some nigiri, some sushi, a steamed pork bun, and a steamed shrimp bun.
Yeah, needless to say it was a very nice lunch.
After lunch we went back to the hotel to change and the "shipped out" to the Saigon Newport Corporation (SNP). Basically what SNP does is they handle all the logistics of the ports in Vietnam and some in Cambodia. They are backed by the navy so they are government monitored, and because of that there is no real local competition. The visit to SNP was really interesting because I had never thought about how complex of an environment a port really is, and managine it is extremely complicated.
After our briefing we walked over to the control tower which was really cool to see.
The SNP control tower
From the control tower, we could see almost the entire port of Saigon and we could see all the control tower workers dealing with all the different logistics of the port. There were also live feeds of all the different shipments and everything displayed on the wall, I didn't know what any of it meant but it was still really cool.
We then did a short driving tour of the docks which was super cool because we were driving around with all the container trucks and cranes and everything.
For dinner that night we had banh mi again (the banh mi was really good) and headed back to the Ben Thanh market for more shopping. We left pretty early and then I fell asleep because I was exhausted.
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