Creme Caramel and other Christmas food adventures

Our Christmas eve festivities filled us with a new sense of joy and belonging that eased us nicely into Christmas day. Cuddles and kisses and wishes of merriment were exchanged in the not too early hours as well as phones calls home to speak with loved ones. We ambled through traffic to the cathedral where people were spilling out the doors for the Christmas service. After lounging at a nearby cafe we set off again for a visit to the Hoa Lo prison museum. Seeing the guillotine used by the French to execute the Vietnamese independence fighters was not the cheeriest of Christmas activities but interesting none the less. The Women's Museum was a less gruesome ordeal and a wonderful tribute to Vietnamese women past and present who have sacrificed so much and given greatly to this country. Particularly interesting was the story of the women street sellers who sell everything from plastic containers and buckets to flowers to fruit to fish, usually carrying heavy loads over their shoulder on bamboo poles. They often leave their home towns and families for months at a time and live in communal boarding houses to bring in extra income so they can feed their kids and send them to school. They are in every street in Hanoi and I looked at every one after that wondered what her story was and where her family was.
Lots of other information and stories at the museum and I can't think of another place that formally recognizes and celebrates the hard work of its women folk. Impressive.
Ready for a feed again we had our Christmas lunch at the street stall next to our hotel. Again, it only serves one dish, a Hanoi specialty and it's rightly famous for this dish. It's a beautifully balanced combination of noodles, quick fried meat, herbs, nuts and a dash of aromatic broth hiding under all the goodies. A squeeze of lime and a squirt of chilli sauce and we gobbled it noisily and happily.
I remember eating superb Creme caramel when I was here last so I did some research about where to get the best the city had to offer. Certain ankles and knees were aching so we paid $1 for the cab fee and found ourselves at a small, plain bakery with a few spongey offering in a glass case at the front and thousands of Creme caramels stacked up behind the counter and into the small alley to the side of the shop. They threw down some small plastic chairs for us and we put four fingers in the air indicating how many we wanted but not even having to say what it was we were ordering. A glistening, wobbly mound of silky custard covered in a perfectly burnt caramel sauce was delivered to us on plastic plates and for a second we were all too excited and gobsmacked to eat them. We felt like we'd followed a treasure map and found gold where x marked the spot. We devoured them greedily, gulping occasional mouthfuls of motorbike exhaust when a throng of bikes surged past us. We did deliberate on whether we should get another round to take away or just get another one each right then. Being Christmas day and considering they only cost thirty cents a pop we threw caution to the wind and ordered and gobbled one more each with as much enthusiasm as we had eaten the first. While we were gorging ourselves people pulled their motorbikes up outside the shop, yelled out their order, quickly exchanged money and drove off with bags full of caramel treasures.
We squeezed into a taxi and rested at our hotel, blissfully full and satisfied. We found ourselves back at the cathedral this evening visiting an Italian restaurant located in a street next to the enormous church. We enjoyed our house made pasta while we listen to the not so dulcet tones of Christmas carols, interspersed with Vietnamese pop songs, being belted out from the cathedrals impressive sound system. So it may not have been a traditional Christmas for this gypsy family but we have kept the one tradition of ending the day being utterly and thoroughly stuffed.