Today marked the final of the Southeast Asia Graduate Conference Masterchef Vietnam special. We are still waiting for the votes to be counted but from my own biased opinion I think I had the competition covered.

If my skills in making traditional spring rolls weren't enough my masterfully crafted a rose out of a tomato skin was almost flawless. We each made a sauteed Beef sauteed in black pepper sauce and the Fish simmered in fish sauce was a combined effort. The cooking wasn't all that different to cooking at home with the exception that instead of using a spoon or tongs, we had to use double sized chopsticks. Over the last 2 weeks we have become semi skilled at eating with chopsticks, but cooking with double sized chopsticks, well thats a different story all together.

After eating a huge lunch we had a very slack afternoon just chilling at the hotel. Karina and Koskey went to see the water puppet show again, I didn't hear too much about it so I am assuming they were both much happier with their seats and fingers crossed they got some good photos too! On a side note, we found out from one of our tour guides that crossing your fingers such as we do for good luck is a very offensive gesture in Vietnam.

We had dinner at Highway4 tonight, this is the restaurant we took our cooking class from this morning. Despite our best efforts we struggled to put a dent in the remaining Vietnamese Dong we had left in our wallets. The meal was really nice. We were a little bit disappointed when they had run out of crickets but we did try some different local cuisine such as, frogs legs and water buffalo. Frogs legs were nice, but fairly flavourless and water buffalo pretty much just tasted like tough beef. Our other dishes included pork, squid and duck each with really nice spices and all that.

We each ordered a entree and a main and had a few drinks each. Even though we left the restaurant so full we had to be rolled out we failed to spend more than 200 000 VND each which is approximately $10.