...and we ended up at Elbow Room

Every Wednesday a group of teachers from the middle school go out to a new restaurant for what's been termed Pink Lady Wednesday. It originally began with a small group of ladies (plus two male teachers) who live in District 7 and have a bit of a drive to school each day. They would travel as a pack and jokingly called themselves the Pink Ladies (yes... think Grease).

My favorite was on Halloween - Donna, Shelly, and Elizabeth - three of the Pink Ladies, dressed up as such and had the principal's assistant translate Pink Ladies into Vietnamese... it turned out to mean, ladies who wear pink - so cute!

WELL... when Donna changed the font of the translation to print out badges as part of their costumes, one of the dots under a letter disappeared... which then changed the translation to say, really old ladies who wear pink, hahahahaha. FINALLY, about 1/2-way through the day, a student told Shelly and we all had a good laugh over that.

Anyway - last Wednesday we decided to go to a place called Quing - we read that it was a cute wine bar. On our way, Shelly and I picked up our driver's licenses!

...We are so legit. And we love the two ladies at this office... they just giggle and laugh their way through helping us.  :)  Now we'll need to look into buying insurance... which I hear is $12 per year... perrrrfect.

The transportation office is on the same street as Quing... but Pasteur St. is one-way... going the wrong way. It took us about 3 times circling around blocks to get far enough down Pasteur to find Quing.

We parked out bikes and thought... this is the cute wine bar? ...Not so cute. The guys inside were pretty sketchy looking and the room was filled with smoke.

Parking my bike, I opened the boot to put my helmet inside... and put my keys right with it! I realized what I had done as soon as I closed the boot... so Elizabeth and I played Charades with the parking attendant to tell her that I locked my keys inside. At the same moment, the parking attendant and 3 guys who were standing around watching us said, "Ohhhhhh!" and took out phones to begin calling a guy to unlock it for me.

Ohhh Vietnam.  :)  Within 2 minutes, a guy pulled up on a bike, he had a cigarette in one hand and a box full of his tools in the other. The tools were basically small hangers of various sizes. He had the boot of my bike unlocked in less than 2 minutes... which Elizabeth photographed... and we were on our way!

Good thing to know it is that easy to break into my bike!  :P

While all of this was going on, Shelly was able to get some Christmas shopping done... her students had told her that Pasteur Street is also "Video Game Shop Street" - she got video games for 30,000 dong each ($1.50)! Perrrrfect.

After the people at Quing were so great with helping me unlock my bike... we decided to not stay! This was not the cute wine bar we expected for the afternoon. I recommended we go to a restaurant about a block and a half down the same street that I like, The Elbow Room... but, of course, it is located going the wrong way down the one-way again! Ha!

Instead of circling around the block yet again through the traffic of Saigon, we braved the street the wrong way. (I should mention that going the wrong way down a one-way street is not uncommon in this city... I do so everyday on my way to work!)

The Elbow Room was great... good atmosphere... good wine... good food... and great company.  :)  I love the Pink Lady Wednesdays!