nakji

Thanks! I'm burning ancestor money every night out the street to maintain it!

The power was out when I woke up this morning, so that meant breakfast on the street. I went across the street to my local pho shop. Not the best pho, but at 7,000 VND a bowl (roughly 50 cents), a good value. The pho pots on the stove. (Which is essentially a concrete block with coal burners underneath) The big one is the Broth of Tomorrow; the little one, The Broth of Today. The other pot holds boiling water to dip the noodles. I ordered tai (raw beef) again, so the shop son chops it up for me. Dad is in the back somewhere, wrangling vegetables. Pho! No leaf plate at this place, the herbs are pre-added. Limes, chili sauce and pickled garlic are all available for your convenience. I use lots of pickled garlic.

That's true - a lot of my TOEFL students are competing for those scholarships. It breaks my heart when they tell me the score they need, and I know they just don't have the English to get it. They always give themselves ridiculous targets, like giving themselves three months to "learn English". I always say to them - "Did you learn to speak Vietnamese in three months?". Unfortunately, there aren't a lot of avenues to practice English here, and class fees remain out of reach for many Vietnamese people. The Kimchi is the best part! This is the sort of thing I try not to think about. But truthfully, most places are as clean as they can be, under the circumstances - people are always out on the street, scrubbing dishes, pots, glasses, and chopsticks down. But floors aren't ever mopped, and rubbish is often thrown right on the floor. Like I've said, I never get sick, but I occasionally suffer from an overdose of MSG! Oi Xoi! Sorry, I sometimes forget that not everybody spent those three years in Korea with me. Gochujang is chili pepper paste, as Pan described above, and baekseju, the bottle in the picture, is a kind of Korean wine. Its name means "One Hundred Year Wine", which is supposed to mean how long you will live if you drink it; not how long its aged. Not all kimchi is inferior, just the kind I bought here. Even that's not bad, but if you're going to make kimchi bokkum, you need a lot of the dregs from the bottom of the bag - the extra chili, ginger and assorted other seasonings from the cabbage. It helps flavour the rice. As for the Vietnamese coffee cheesecake, I'm afraid I can't help very much. I don't have the language to communicate a request for a recipe to the lovely people at Highlands coffee, and even if I could, they would think it pretty strange, as nobody bakes at home here. If it helps to describe it, I will: it's a fairly standard cheesecake, although I would say that it has been set with gelatine of some time, as there's not a lot of cream cheese available here. Many places use Laughing Cow cheese as a substitute. The top layer is intensely flavoured with Vietnamese coffee; and the bottom, white layer is mildly sweet. It has a standard cookie crust.

As an amuse-chef – you know – the snack you eat as the cook, as you’re contemplating the mess that your kitchen is in, and how much you’ll have to do before you get the kitchen into decent enough shape to actually start cooking in…I had a slice of that great break from Stop with slices of cold President butter. Kimchi is delicious, but kimchi cooked in pork fat is one of God’s gifts to humanity, as far as I’m concerned. Dinner tonight was solo, as my husband was working later than me, so I took the opportunity to make one of my favourite Korean dishes, kimchi bokkumbap. My husband doesn’t care for kimchi, so it was a good opportunity to stuff my gullet with the stuff while he wasn’t around. . Whenever I did food lessons with my students in Korea, where we discussed favourite foods, kimchi bokkumbap always came up. It was a favourite of many of my younger students, the kind of dish they’d ask their mum to make for a special treat. It’s widely available in food courts everywhere there, and in small bunshik restaurants – the kinds of places we’d call cafes, specializing in one-plate meals. Open all night, cheap, and invariably orange in colour, bunshik restaurants are a haven for students on a tight budget, and beacons in the late night to people stumbling home; in need of a grease hit before sleeping off the soju. (Or maybe that was just me..) They always have names like “Gimbap Heaven” or “Gimbap Country”, and serve gimbap, jigae, bibimbap, bokkumbap; doncasse/tonkatsu; shin ramyeon (500 won more to add American cheese!); and ddeok bokki. I like to make it because it marries pork fat; kimchi, sesame oil, and crispy rice – all the flavours I love from Korea. I took steamed rice (cold) Some onions and bacon – normally Spam is used, but a) I don’t like Spam, and b) you can’t get it here anyway. Chopped kimchi – chopped with red handled scissors, of course, in a dish that keeps in the “juice”. Local kimchi brand – not as good as the stuff that I used to get from my boss in Korea, but any port in a storm. A little extra gochujang, to make up for inferior kimchi “juice”, cut with a little baekseju. Fry it up, and season with some sesame oil and toasted seeds at the end. This is usually served with a fried egg on top, and piercing the runny yolk and letting it flow all over the rice in molten rivers is the best part...but considering the amount of pork fat and eggs I’ve already consumed today, I decided to give my heart a break.

After my afternoon class, I had a snack. One of the other teachers had bananas, so I snagged one of those. You can never just buy one piece of fruit here, you have to buy it by the weight – if you want just one or two of something, the vendor will curse you and call you crazy. Plus, you won’t have enough small change anyway. And your Vietnamese co-workers will demand to know what price you paid and then mock you mercilessly when they find out. Buying fruit is fraught with anxiety. So anyway, she had about a kilo of bananas, so we all sat around and had one, as you do. Eating fruit is a major time-passer in the non developed world. I also went down to the Star-Mart, the supermarket below where I live- I mean work, and bought a “pain chocolate”, which I understand is a French translation of : “Chocolate for your pain”. It’s not the best chocolate croissant in town, but it’s the best chocolate croissant in walking distance, if you know what I mean. Imagine my utter joy upon moving here to find pastry untouched by red beans. Hurrah! (Although – it’s not like red beans are bad, it’s just that when you bite into a pastry for the first time thinking it’ll be chocolate, and instead it’s red bean … for me, a little disappointing. I understand that there are whole countries out there, full of people who prefer red bean to chocolate, to which I say: More for me.) Where was I? Star-Mart: I could only fire off a few shots before the security guard came after me, but here you can see the roast pork and duck stall in the front, where you can by roast meat by the weight. Also a steamed bun stand, and some Chinese preserved fruits. You can get goat’s milk yogurt and crème caramel here, as well. Inside – canned drinks. Our pipeline to Orangina. Coffee! Note the hideous incursion of Nescafe. Instant noodles. Fuel for the younger set. Couldn’t get the dairy aisle, as the staff were eying me suspiciously. There’s no meat aisle, like all supermarkets in Hanoi – just some bacon and pate, and if you’re lucky, frozen shrimp. This limits my ability to cook at home as well, since I’m never awake early enough to buy the meat sold on the street or in the wet markets. When I got back upstairs, I remembered my students had given me a tangerine, so I ate that as well.

We had some time after meeting our French teacher to have lunch in one of our favourite restaurants, Stop Café. It’s hard to say why I like this place so much…it looks utterly unprepossessing on the outside, but inside, it warm and cozy, with terracotta floor tiles and wrought iron chairs; and photos of the hilltribes people in Sapa on the walls. They serve French and Vietnamese dishes. Now, I’d never really had “French” food growing up in Halifax. My parents were keen on Asian home-cooking and restaurants, and to tell you the truth, I’m not even sure that Halifax had a decent French restaurant as I grew up. (And even if we had, my parents would have been unlikely to take me there!) Stop has really great bread, the kind that you don’t take for granted when you’ve lived in Asia for any length of time. It’s billed as pain au levain, and as you walk by the window outside, you can see it cooling on the sill. We often buy one or two loaves to take home, as we did today. They make steak frites, omelettes, simple sandwiches; and Vietnamese dishes like Cha Ca, braised pork and fish, and some salads. I think the owner is Alsatian, because they have flammenkuche on permanent rotation. I find it hard to resist. We were with our classmate, and he ordered a lovely looking Caprese salad. Peter ordered the daily special, listed as tournedos of beef. I resisted the flammenkuche and had “Le Hanoienne” – a platter of nem, green papaya salad, and their amazing honey-braised pork. I need to learn how to make this! Completely full, I went to work.

No doubt. Most of the vegetable vendors hose down the produce with water periodically to make it look more appetizing, to, so it's hit by a lot of dodgy things. I try not to think about it. Thanks! That seems to be a common theme....

Very exciting! My husband and I have Taipei on our (admittedly long) list of places we'd like to go teach. He wants to learn mandarin, and I want to save enough money for my MA TESOL. I'm watching to see what the food looks like (a major factor for me when choosing a place to live!), since we've only heard one report back from a friend who said he though the food was terrible. But he's allergic to wheat, so that may have coloured his experience. I adore both Dragon Fruit, which looks so improbable; and custard apple. My husband loves the custard apple smoothie that Highland Coffee makes here...it does taste like peach, and something softer as well...

Most foreigners don't seem to drink tap water here. I buy bottled water to drink, although I do brush my teeth and wash my veg in tap water. I go by the "innoculation" theory of water consumption. Tiny bits over a long time...I've never been sick, even after eating on the street. The water looks cleaner than the water I got in my apartment in Incheon! There, the problem was deteriorating pipes, though. The Vietnamese sensibly boil all their water up and drink it as hot or cold tea. Water coolers are common in public buildings. They use shared cups - every time I look at them, I think "Typhoid Mary!". But I guess it's environmentally friendly. I see a lot of ex-pats in restaurants questioning wait-staff probingly about the provenance of vegetables and how they were cleaned. A lot of them won't even eat on the street, especially those who work the embassies. They seem to live really isolated lives. Oh, well. More for me.

This morning was a simple omelette, like the kind I saw everywhere on tourist menus in India. Chopped tomato and onion, with some cilantro leaves. I got the eggs and cilantro fresh on the street this morning, but the grape tomatoes have been hanging around in the fridge since my sandwich the other night. Simple and delicious! The menus always described these as masala eggs - maybe because of the mixed filling? I have a meeting with my French prof today, and then I'm working the afternoon into the early evening. This'll give me time to work on another cooking project tonight - Korean! But you probably won't see me around until then.

One of my cooking reference books suggests that you can make coconut milk by dissolving 2 oz of creamed coconut into a scant half cup of hot water. I guess you could reverse engineer that, by reducing the amount of broth accordingly. Hope that helps.

Dinner was pho. Like I said earlier, due to my screwy schedule, pho is more often a late-night snack for me. Pho is one of the few foods you can get at any hour, along with “my xao” (fried ramen noodles). I like it, because it’s not too heavy to eat late at night – unless the broth is really good, and I go too far drinking it, and get a condition I call “pho belly” – the feeling of too much pho broth sloshing around in your stomach. There is an independent pho shop on my street, but a new Pho 24 just opened up in my neighborhood, and Peter wanted to try it. Pho 24 is a chain of pho shops. It’s a reliable, high-end pho shop kind of place, when you want to go somewhere that offers fruit juice, coffee, and sturdy wooden stools. There are seven or eight in Hanoi, some in the middle, and quite a few more in HCMC. There’s one in Manila, and one in Jakarta as well. (Thank-you, informative placemats). They have a real up-scale, unified look, and I hope they do well. If only more people ate pho as fast food, instead of burgers and fries! They have a wide selection of meats, but we got “tai” – raw beef. Always a safe bet until you get the lay of things. We didn’t see any pho fingers (a kind of choux pastry that you use to suck up broth, a lot like you might have bread with a European soup), but it was late in the day, so they might have been sold out. When we walked in, we ordered in Vietnamese, which resulted in some gasps. The manager said, “You speak Vietnamese very well!”, to which my husband replied, “We don’t speak Vietnamese – we speak pho!” Pho mise en place: Pho action: Stupid fact about me: when I speak English, I pronounce it “fo”, but when I speak to any Vietnamese person, I try to use the correct pronunciation, “feu”. The rising tone on this is very hard for me to say correctly, if the laughs from my co-workers are any indication. Pho table: Pho foliage (tm noodlepie): Pho glamour shot:

Lunch today was a banh mi, from the stall outside my office. I forgot to take my camera down when I bought it, so I offer this picture that my husband took a couple of weeks ago. The stall was slammed when I went down, with motorcycles lined off, each waiting for two or three baguettes. The woman making them was a stop-motion study waiting to happen. She was mechanical. One man was there, his only job to carve off the meat. He carved steadily while she took a pre-cut baguette, filled it with pickled red cabbage, tomato, lettuce, onion, shaved pork, a squirt of ranch, and a squirt of ot (chili) sauce. It got popped next to the heating element to stay warm while she prepared the others. Banh mi, and banh mi cross-section. Kem caramen, for dessert. Technically a crème caramel, another remnant of French influence, I guess. Any café or restaurant in Hanoi will offer these. It’s called “caramen” because Vietnamese has only a few consonants that it can end syllables with, “n” being one of them, and “l”…not being one of them. Don’t even get me started on “s”. The teacher’s room, where the magic happens. The whole thing runs on cigarettes, Orangina, and pork fat.

The Paris Bistro closed the first week I was here! I know because my school is across from the Hilton on the side street. My first week in town, I ate lunch there a couple times, went back a few days later, and they were closed! I'm not sure about the SoHo. I'll go look. I haven't been to the Hoa Sua restaurant, but I often go to their bakery, Le Croissant. They make fabulous cookies and French pastry. I've also eaten at their restaurant Baguette et Chocolat, in Sapa, which I really enjoyed. I'm planning to go to a similar restaurant this week, called "Koto". It's around the corner from my house, across from the Temple of Literature. Sure! In fact, one of the producers offers lacquer lessons, which I wish I had the time and money to take. But I've resolved to take French lessons in the new year. I used to be fluent, but I've sadly let it lapse.

All of those things were purchased locally, although some from specialty Western goods stores, with really, really jacked up prices. My husband loves jarred salsa and tortilla chips. I abhor both, but they're his special treat (ie. it's not chocolate or cookies that I'll hunt and destroy while having a sugar craving). The President product is actually butter, although a whole range of President products are available. A lot of the dairy here is imported from France, Australia, or New Zealand. (Aussies will note the Bega cheese in the fridge door. Tasty!) This reflects the overall effect France had on Vietnam. For example; in Korea, the only foreign goods available in major supermarkets were American cheese, Spam, hot dogs, and bottled spaghetti sauce. Here, we have Brie, baguettes, Normandy butter, pate, pain au chocolat, Orangina - even the smallest supermarket carries these goods. The Ortega Salsa and Tostitos were bought from a shop specializing in Western imports, although overall, these shops carry much more things from Europe. I have a suspicion things like the tortilla chips come in in diplomatic bags, as the shop only ever has one or two bags available! At Christmas, I made shortbread for the staff that work in the office with me. They seemed to like them. And I made some macaroons for some of my students - they enjoyed them, but then; they're a common bakery item anyway. Students seem shocked that I would bake at home, though, most Vietnamese homes do not have ovens. I've never made anything savory for them; perhaps I'll do that in the future! In Hanoi, there seems like there is a restaurant for every country in the world! That could be because of the embassies. I think that on the whole, Vietnamese cuisine has been influenced by French and to some degree, Chinese cooking. I'm not sure if there's enough of a middle class here yet to pursue cooking and eating as a hobby. But I see Vietnamese cooking magazines at the checkout in the supermarket, so I think it's on the way. I have a choice of American, Italian and Regional French pizzas here! But really, I feel your pain.

I teach ESL to adults, so that usually means I work in the evenings. This means I’m on a completely different schedule from most Vietnamese people. Even here in the city, farming hours are kept, and everyone rises between 5:30 to 6:30. By 11:30 it’s lunch time. I work until 9:30 at night, so that means I get up around 10 am – long past breakfast time, so my breakfast is usually everyone else’s lunch. I want lunch around 3 pm, when any sensible Vietnamese restaurant is having an afternoon nap, so I usually order into my office. When I get off work, the only places serving food are pho stalls and banh mi stalls. I usually end up having pho as a late-night snack, rather than for breakfast. Today, I was up and ready to get out of the house just at the magic hour for Bun cha. Bun cha are pieces of pork – either strips or little pork burgers here in Hanoi, served in a cool vinegar soup with pickled vegetables, herbs, and round rice noodles (bun). I’m told the little burgers are unique to Hanoi, and in other parts of Vietnam, you can’t get them. Also, the herb mixture is supposed to taste best in Hanoi. It’s usually a mix of cilantro, sweet basil, mint, lettuce, and some other herbs I can’t identify. You can also add chilis and pounded garlic to your broth. You dip the noodles into the soup, and then slurp them up, a bit like soba. The meat goes best with a bit of herb. The burgers are cooked on coals that are fanned by hand or by a little electric fan. It causes a tell-tale blue smoke to rise over the whole street where it’s being made. It smells delicious. Traditionally, the meat was cooked in bamboo tongs, but almost everywhere these days uses these metal grill pans. Progress. It can be served on the sidewalk, but we chose a proper shop on Mai Hac De street, a favourite of our friend, Vancouver Dan, who is a bun cha aficionado. The shop only serves bun cha, so the only question when you sit down is, “How many nem do you want?” We got two, as my husband is not much of a fan. You dip the nem into the soup…or at least I do. that’s probably a real “country” thing to do, but I’m forgiven a lot, being a foreigner. The meal for two cost 26,000 VND, or roughly $1.60 USD. My husband has been battling a cold this week, so we headed to a café next to get him some juice (and me a coffee). Nuoc Chanh, often translated as lemon juice, but is actually lime juice, is always a safe bet at any café. I like places that add a lot of crushed ice and sugar.

Ahem, yes. A note about the pictures. If they look like a blind bat took them while hanging upside-down in an alley, then they were taken by me. If they look beautiful and in focus, they were taken by my husband, who is an amateur photographer. I didn't study the language before I got here, and I still don't speak Vietnamese - most of my daily activities are conducted in English, as all of my co-workers speak English. Some of my foreign co-workers study Vietnamese, but truthfully, I don't have the time. I did learn several key phrases though - 'How much?"; "Hello Auntie/Uncle"; "Hello Grandmother/Grandfather"; "Thank you"; "Excuse me"; "How beautiful!"; "How delicious!" "Twenty copies, double-sided" and "Sorry". I'm a big believer in that you acquire the language you need to survive. I actually had to learn a lot more of the language in Korea, as hardly anyone spoke English there. Even my students would only respond to commands in Korean. When I got here and found out you could order food delivery in English, I almost died. All of the vendors who deal with foreigners (tourists and embassy staff) speak English quite well. Needless to say, you get cheaper prices in Vietnamese! The bureaucracy is hellish. It took me 8 months to get my official work permit (although to be fair, five months of that was waiting for Canadian bureaucracy to grind out my criminal check), a full medical test, countless bribes, and at least 10 colour photos of me. "Dutch Lady" is a dairy brand here. They make milk and yogurt. I'm not sure, but it could be imported, because there aren't a lot of dairy cows here. Most of the milk is UHT.

I like octopus - both to eat and look at. In Korea, saeng nakji is a delicacy - little baby octopus cut up and eaten while still squiggling. I consider it the height of adventurous eating. The baskets of flavourings are beautiful. If you walk out on my street in the hours when women are buying food for their meals, you can see ladies walking by with little baskets - kind of a microcosm of all these things. Here's a photo from a few months ago from on my doorstep.

Ha! Yes, they are the absolute best! Don't even waste my time with Chic Choc. The soft dense fudginess of Chocochip makes it the king of Korean boxed cookies. That box in the picture? Is empty. I managed to make it last three days, if you can believe that.

This has already started to happen with some of the younger children. I blame instant noodles - a lot of children eat them all the time as a snack. As for exercise - nobody but the poorest people or schoolchildren walks or rides a bicycle anywhere. Everyone takes their Honda Wave! Everyone stares at me with incredulity when I tell them I walk to work, even in the summer. It's only three blocks, and it's the best way to scope out the good fruit deals. But people still think I'm crazy! I'll try to do this. I haven't seen it around much here - I guess it's a specialty from Hue? But there's a student in one of my classes who's from Hue, she'll be able to point me in the right direction. I'm curious to try it myself! Based on my brief Google image search, I'd say they're similar to cheung fun - maybe a little thinner. I think they're sheets of what are used to cut into noodles for pho - hence the name, rolled pho (pho cuon). I can't say with certainty, though. I don't think they're the same as the rice papers used to wrap spring rolls, but again, I'm not entirely sure. It's the sort of thing that when I try to ask questions about from my Vietnamese co-workers, the conversation just goes in circles. However, my efforts are not entirely in vain, because after three or four days of these questions, they clued in that I was really interested in Vietnamese cuisine. Now, whenever they have something interesting for lunch or as a snack, they always put a piece aside for me.

My refrigerator...is mostly full of condiments. And beer. I didn't bother to take any pics of the freezer, as it only holds ice. And not, you know, like Donbert's freezer holds ice. Just a couple of trays of bog-standard ice. Speaking of bog-standard, here was my dinner. Bacon and tomato sandwich (with kewpie mayo!), baked potato, and Diet Coke. Korean cookie for dessert - chocochip - my favourite! Tiny kitchen: Note the lack of hot-running water. Most kitchens don't have it, so dish soap is extra tough to float the grease off dishes without it.

I would be pleased to chase them down. I'm not really sure about the pecking order of minorities..it's not really something that I've discussed at length with anyone here. My vegetable lady is definitely disadvantaged though. She can't see correctly - I think she needs glasses, and I suspect she's not properly registered, or she would have help from the government. She always has to hold money really closely to her eyes. Everyone on the street seems to take care of her, though - all the other merchants cover her station when she's not there, and call out the proper change to her sometimes. Come to think of, I'm not entirely sure she knows I'm not Vietnamese. You don't need a teaching certificate proper, but you do need a TESOL or CELTA. A MA TESOL will be fine. PM me if you're interested and I can give you some names of schools. I live in a house - it's quite comfortable, but the kitchen is tiny, contributing to why we eat out a lot. It didn't even have the gas range when we were negotiating to take the place. The landlady seemed shocked that we wanted one. She said the Japanese lady who lived here before us never wanted one, why would we? Yes, although almost four years in South Korea helped me get used to lots of people and noise. I don't even notice it anymore. Before we moved here, we spent a month in India. We chose it on purpose, so that when we arrived in Vietnam, we'd find it calm and orderly in comparison. Short answer? Yes. Vietnam joined the WTO in November, and development has been a fever pitch for a while now. This has generated a huge demand for English-language training, especially at state-run businesses. Which explains the hours I've been working the past few months. The government has been pretty liberal with internet access - although the speed is pretty crappy. I'm uploading pictures one by one since the bandwidth can't handle bulk uploads. They've been pretty tough with print, though, and frequently reprimand papers they feel have gone too far. But my young students, the teenagers, all want Levis jeans, iPods, Vespa bikes, the fastest and best cell phones. Singapore is seen as the example to emulate, and students speak of it in hushed tones, like the promised land, a good TOEIC score and a scholarship to a school there the only barriers to the sweet life.

That's right, Chufi, although one of my resolutions for this year is to take an intensive cooking course, and learn to make some Vietnamese dishes for when the time comes that I eventually leave. Right now, though, if I'm craving some really good Vietnamese food, I just hit the street. There wasn't a lot of Vietnamese food available in my hometown either, as I was growing up. I've mainly experienced Vietnamese food here in Vietnam, although I did have a killer bowl of pho in Melbourne once.

We proceeded next to Dong Xuan market, in the heart of the Old Quarter of Hanoi. I normally don’t shop here, preferring to stick with the retail ladies on my street. If you stand on my street long enough, anything you want will wander or totter by in baskets, waiting for your “Chi oi!” or “Em Oi!” to hail them and begin the bargaining process. I thought you might like to see what’s on offer in the main market. Later this week, I hope to rally the troops for a late-night eating session in the “food court” here. Meat - tongue to tail pork. Duck heads? I’ll take three… Melons? Squash? I couldn’t tell, but I loved the colour. All of the aromatic ingredients are available here – chilis, limes, ginger, garlic, lemongrass. They smell fantastic. You can pull up and get any kind of fruit, as quick as you please. Do you think we’d have the same problem with obesity in North America if our drive-thrus all served fresh fruit? This person was selling hand-made kitchen implements. I didn’t get anything here – as I said, I usually get produce from the ladies on my street. Before we returned home, we wanted to stop at the Citimart, a small supermarket catering to ex-pats. It has a lot of things that you can’t get at the market- butter and cheese, usually brought in from France or New Zealand; Diet Coke; boxed juice; all the necessities. Curiously enough, the building is built on the site of Hoa Lo prison, more famously known as the Hanoi Hilton. I often shake my head that I buy milk and bread at a place that saw such horror. I think that sums up a lot about the spirit of renewal and rebirth in Vietnam. The prison was originally built by the French to hold rebels, and was used by the Viet Cong during the war with the U.S. There is a small piece of the prison remaining, with a museum that mostly focuses on the French. There are two rooms with pictures and items from American prisoners, including one of two soldiers being marched down Trang Tien street, surrounded by Hanoians, on their way to the prison. Every time I see it, it chills my blood. Now, the rest of the site has been developed into a luxury serviced apartment building, with a bar that shows cricket to golf-shirt clad embassy and NGO staff. I couldn’t take pictures inside, but it was prosaic enough. Plus, no Pocky anyway. After stocking up, we headed back to our street. Across from our house is a dried-goods store, where we buy our mineral water. I’ve yet to actually learn the Vietnamese word for water, as everyone simply asks for “La Vie” – the most popular brand. I could have water delivered in 19l jugs, but by buying water from Madame everyday, and bringing her back the empties, I have a defender and watchwoman for the house. She always mentions if I’ve left the light on out front, and generally keeps an eye on the place. If I walk by with a bag of food purchased elsewhere, I get a verbal scolding. Her shop sells all manners of goods, including noodles, dried mushrooms, peanuts, MSG, and fresh eggs – duck and chicken. Across from her, and two doors up from my house, is my veg lady. She’s a real dear, and I don’t think it has ever occurred to her to charge me more than the going rate for veg. I can usually get several kilos of veg for less than a dollar, depending on the seasonality of what she’s selling. She keeps pineapples to the side for me, in case I miss the pineapple specialists. She also suggests which herbs are appropriate for which vegetables. Living in Vietnam, here on my street, I can really feel what it’s like to have a relationship with vendors, and know that there are people behind what I’m eating. Although I don’t shop every day, she’s my go-to lady when I want a kilo of fresh tomatoes for salsa, or some eggplants for roasting.

We woke up this morning around 11:30 feeling tired, but not too wrung out from the previous night. I made another pot of coffee, but as there was no food in the house, I knew we’d have to venture out. I liked the “girl power” motif of this coffee cup. It uses images from propaganda posters, which are still very popular here. /tone of seriousness on/ I guess at this point, I should address the elephant in the living room, and briefly discuss the war. I, like the majority of Vietnam’s population today, was born after the conclusion of the American war, as they style it here. Most people don’t talk about it, and nobody seems too concerned about it. It’s not uncommon to see people driving around in cars with American flag seat covers. (Perhaps that’s deliberate disrespect – sitting on the flag?) At any rate, outside of some official monuments here and there, Hanoi seems to have gotten on with things, and generally ignores the whole issue. Some propaganda shops in town (where I got this mug) capitalize on European and American curiosity of this period, and sell propaganda pieces from that era. If at any time I show images that are sensitive to anyone viewing this blog, I apologize. I know that people on both sides of the war suffered greatly, and I hope to treat this issue with the dignity and respect that it deserves. At the same time, I admire the way the Vietnamese people have persevered through the last century, through several wars, and I celebrate their spirit of independence and pride. /tone of seriousness off/ So after the coffee, I knew we had to find food. We lit out for my banh my man, but he wasn’t open yet. Street food in Hanoi is extremely sensitive to time, and if you want a certain food, you have to wait for the right time of day to get it. We went instead to Truc Bach lake, where many rolled pho vendors are located. While there are many proper restaurants in Hanoi, one of the great pleasures of living here, as Pan alluded to, is sitting on the side of the road and having some cheap eats. Friends get together over plates of these, and glasses of tea or beer, to chat and snack. They’re made of sheets of rice noodle filled with fried beef, lettuce, and herbs. They’re dipped in the same sauce that Bun Cha is…a kind of vinegar with bits of pickled vegetable. We also ordered Ngo Chien Bo, or butter-fried corn. It tastes like corn tempura soaked in butter. It’s a food you order with beer, which we weren’t in any shape to drink, but we thought we had enough ambient alcohol left to qualify for it. For some reason, ImageGullet is being picky and won't let me upload that pic. Anyway, imagine tempura-fried corn, and you'll have a good mental image. Finally, we got some Pho Chien Ron, which is squares of rice noodle sandwiched together and deep-fried. It’s served with stir-fried beef and green veg. Greasy and good. We finished up with a coffee at a café on our way to the market. Could this be a new low for eGullets? SCM porn?