Firstly, it was not what I expected at all.

I have seen advertisements for cooking schools where the chef or the cook stands out the front and demonstrates the techniques while the students sit in a room watching and making notes, before being let loose to attempt to replicate what they were shown.

Now – forget all that, because our class was nothing like that.

Once we eventually found her home, we were warmly greeted by our teacher. Madame Ly could speak no English and although my son can speak quite well in the context of travelling in taxis and on tours, and in business conversations relating to his areas of expertise, and excels in the language required in social settings such as bars and restaurants, he struggled a little with the culinary terms and explanations.

Madame Ly was obviously quite a famous chef or cooking instructor at one point. She had a few medals on display in her home and had several large photos of herself with important-looking people. Even her T-shirt featured a picture of herself and some other people.

The first thing she did after greeting us was to secure a pad-locked glass cabinet holding all her treasured recipe books. She obviously had some concerns about us.

She provided us with pens and paper and copies of all the recipes we could select for our 3 hour class, but everything was written in Vietnamese. I could recognise the number of grams required in dishes. But exactly what, we were all unsure.

No worries.

Madame Ly soon had us all at work – slicing and dicing by hand using extremely sharp knives. Mick was very impressed by her knives and enjoyed the whole activity the most of the four of us. Mainly because he was definitely the best at making the dim sims and spring rolls.

Some of the jobs she gave us could have been done by a simple grater or V-slicer, but the only machine she used was a small blender to pulverise 2 handfuls of raw garlic. Yikes. The amount of garlic she had us use today was about what Mick and I would use in 6 months.

Some of our dim sims and spring rolls had to be rolled again under instruction from Madame Ly. But eventually she even gave up trying to have us meet her standards.

There was so much food being prepared that I started to joke that she must have a restaurant business in the evenings and any left overs were sold to her patrons. After two hours we were all getting a little tired of trying to understand and follow the instructions that my son explained that there was enough food and we would like to start cooking it.

I initially was put in charge of lighting a stick with a cigarette lighter to use to light the charcoal. Mick and I watch the survival show Alone and I readily admit I’d last less than 24 hours, but I gave up on the lighter in about 2 minutes – I kept burning my thumbs. Thankfully, Mick took over and ended up getting a great fire going. Unfortunately he hit his head a couple of times on that sign as he tried to move out of the line of smoke being produced.

Have I mentioned that all of this is being done in the front of Madame Ly’s home, and on the road. There is no footpath. Luckily it was a pretty quiet street.

While this pair was in charge of cooking the meat, I was deep frying the dim sims and spring rolls inside handicapped significantly by being given some very long chop sticks. I would have loved those tongs Mick was using, but there was only one pair of them.

Where was our son? Well he had had enough and headed off to buy some cold beers.

Eventually we were told we could start to eat, but we were sitting in full sunshine by this stage. So the table was carried to the other side of the road so we could enjoy our hard work in style.

And then along came some traffic……

The food was actually delicious. We all enjoyed the different components of the meal and were pretty proud of ourselves, but there was way too much. This has been a common thread in the meals we have had so far over here.

While we were eating our handiwork, Madame Ly had a visitor, or should I say a customer, because we saw her bag up some of our dim sims and spring rolls and hand them over to her.

Oh, Madame Ly gave us dozens of her business cards for us to help promote
her business. The activity cost 5,000,00 VND which equated to about $83AUD
each. Well worth it.

Once safely back in our apartment we all needed a rest before a swim. Later Mick and I headed  out for a drink at The Orient and then some tapas at Iberico across the road.

Tomorrow we leave Ho Chi Minh City and drive east to our next destination, Mũi Né.