In yesterday's expensive taxi ride back to our road, we passed a fair few shopping malls. One of them had an Armani Cafe. Neither of us have ever seen such a thing, and decide that today we shall go to it. We also want to look around the shopping malls, because we haven't seen one on this Southeast Asia trip (other than the one in Danang, but that one hardly had anything in it and certainly no Armani shop, let alone an Armani Cafe). It's not that we want to buy anything in particular, we only want to window shop.
On setting off, we have a general idea of the direction to the Armani Cafe, but not a perfect one. It's a hot day and walking is tiring. We get about a third of the way when Rachelle breaks her flip flop. It's unfixable and she can't walk anywhere with one flip flop, so we have to pay for a moped ride back to the hotel, where she can put on her other pair.
There we are again, making our way through the heat, on foot, in search of the Armani Cafe. It took a lot of walking without any sign of the Cafe, nor the mall, but eventually we found a couple other malls to look around. The air-conditioning felt so good, but we still specifically wanted to visit the one with the Armani Cafe. On our search, we found an Indian Restaurant called Tandoor, which we had looked for yesterday, but couldn't find: Yesterday was a navigational disaster after all. It had a 'Business Lunch Special', and we made use of it, despite having no business to discuss. We were idiots and thought the soup was dip for our Chicken Aloo, and the owner had to come over to put us right. I found that embarrassing. The soup was bright orange and looked like sweet chilli sauce. How were we to know?
We wanted to visit the History Museum today, and failing to find the Armani Cafe in good time, we had to give up our search. We took a moped to the museum. The building's architecture was traditional and it was full of old things. It didn't take more than an hour to walk around and the exit was right next to the zoo. We hadn't really thought about going to the zoo, but as we were already there, and the cost was around 30p, we didn't see why not. It had giraffes, elephants, monkeys, leopards, pigmy hippo's, dear, gazelles, and various birds. All the cages and enclosures seemed too small for the animals and it made me sad. The animals needed more space. The strangest part of the zoo experience was when an Asian woman stopped taking photographs of monkeys to take one of Rachelle. She wasn't even subtle about it. She did it once at the monkey cage and when she saw us 5 minutes later, she took another of us both, face-on. I think of us, randomly in her photo-album of zoo animals. We set off to walk back to the guesthouse after the zoo.
It was on our return journey that, low and behold, the shopping mall with the Armani Cafe appeared out of nowhere. What luck! We went up the escalator to go for a drink, only, when we got to it, it wasn't a cafe at all. It was a restaurant, and a very expensive looking one at that. We decided not to go inside. Instead, we browsed the Armani shop where I managed to fake looking like I might afford to purchase something, such as the 100 pound tie, but lost all my dignity when I walked into a very clean pane of glass. It looked like you could walk straight through it. You couldn't.
At the food court we bought some bakery snacks and ordered two Coca-Colas. When the Cokes arrived, they weren't Cokes at all, but coconuts - more language barrier problems. Neither of us like coconut milk, but we drank it anyway. When we wanted to leave the mall it was raining very heavily. Too heavily to walk in. We went to waste some time in another mall across the road. The rain didn't stop and so after browsing our fourth mall, we gave up and took a taxi. The night ended with Rachelle buying a book from a woman walking the streets with a meter and a half stack of books to choose from - something found commonly in the city streets. It was a good day.
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