Food alchemy

Nha Trang was not high on our list for places to go, but now we've been here 6 days and don't have a plan to leave yet. A big beach, low crowds, and the first sunshine we've seen in awhile has kept us here. They also have insanely good, crusty, fresh baguettes, which doesn't hurt.

Ryan's chin is inflamed, and quite swollen. Back in August, he fell off his bike onto his face and the only thing left was his '2nd chin' of scar tissue under his mouth. Something has happened, and now he has a chin that looks like the victim of elephantiasis. We're both hoping that this doesn't cut our trip short, or that we have to be rushed to the hospital by this guy, in which case it might take about 3 hours.

At the cafe where we've discovered the perfect baguettes, we've also befriended a Quebecois gentleman who lives here with his Vietnamese wife. He rolls up on his motorcycle around 8:30am every morning and has started saying 'hello yanks!' each time. He told us that he hates the rest of Vietnam and only wants to stay in Nha Trang for the international food, the beach, and his wife. I'm fascinated by the expat scene beyond young holidayers - how do folks live abroad with such apparent luxury and no committments? We've met some jewelry designers that travel to China and SE Asia every year to source their gems, lots of older male retirees (and often with young, beautiful Asian wives, hmmmm), and a guy that runs an incense factory in Thailand. There doesn't seem to be a formula for figuring out a way to incorporate international travel and living, each person seems to find their own way.

So far our favorite meals have been the roll your own springrolls. We went to a traditional restaurant and were the only people there, with an overly attentive waitress who monitored our every move. We ordered something, which turned out to be goat (surprise!). They first served pickles, puckered little figs, leaves that looked like they had been plucked from a bush, and unripe starfruit. Gingerly eating everything, we concluded that this was the worst meal we had been served. Finally the goat was brought out, and we were taken pity on. Ah! You roll everything in the unsoaked rice paper and dip it in the sauce! The most amazing chemistry comes about when you combine all the sour, bitter, savory tastes in the roll, defying our previous judgement. Unripe starfruit is exquisite when you put it with everything else. Here's Ryan, rolling up a good one.

Suited up with no turkey

Happy t-day! We celebrated over curry and noodles with a fellow Seatte-ite on the road, followed by an icy cold beer on our balcony.

We came to Hoi An with no intention to get clothes made, but heard it was the tailoring capital of Viet Nam. Some Aussies gave us the address of a shop in the Old Town and we walked by. Quickly, the idea of suits took hold of us - I've never had one and Ryan has only had a few crappy ones. Once the shopkeepers realized that we were tempted, they wouldn't let us leave and we found ourselves fingering wool and cashmere fabrics from Italy, pinstripes from Viet Nam, and poring over design books. They hustled us around the store aggressively, measured us and sent us away in a matter of 2 hours. The shop only needed 5 hours to make these gorgeous suits, and requested we come back that evening for a fitting.

The shopkeeper got mad at Ryan for awhile because he insisted on his suit coat being taken in around his torso. She said, 'but you too skinny! look like girl!' and looked at me as if to back her up. I agreed that it made him look skinny, but told her that that's how Ryan rolled. She also got mad that he wanted his 2 shirts shortened, but again, Ryan insisted, despite the other bystanders she pulled into her side of the argument. We do look dapper though, no? Now I just need an interview...

Com hen

Trying to avoid seafood has been too hard. I love fresh seafood and Nam has it in spades. I've heard terrible reports of people getting ill from seafood in flood prone areas (which we are currently in), and yet I can't resist fresh shrimp spring rolls, fish hotpots, etc. Just the other night despite my best intentions, we walked into a streetside eatery with the intention of eating whatever looked good. The proprietor spoke no english, and myself no vietnamese, so I just pointed over to the table next to us and held up two fingers. The woman brough us two bowls of flavorful rice soup that was really briny and delicious, and about halfway into it realized it was eating com hen, rice soup with a specific variety of river mussel that is described in our book as being 'dredged up from a bank of the perfume river'. The perfume river runs through Hue and is swollen, brown, and nasty looking from the flood. There are weird things floating in it, ranging from plastic bags, styrofoam blocks, oil slicks and more, (plus all the faeces that just dissolve right into it) and immediately I lost my appetite. I was nervously awaiting the golden 12 hour rule this morning - the approximate hour that food poisoning makes itself known within your system and was rewarded with not so much as a cramp... for now.

On a side note, we've seen a crazy number of little babies peeing into the gutter. They are too young to pee themselves, but are held by grandmothers who aim them far enough from the curb so they don't soil themselves, but passers-by really have to be careful! Their trajectories are quite high and arching, you can easily be a target. How this got to be a common practice, I guess I'll just have to keep wondering.

P.S. Cort - you should come down south from Hanoi, we can go in search of weirder and weirder things to eat!

A day at the beach

Despite fears of giant reptiles, we stumbled off a terrible night bus ride from Ninh Binh to Hue this morning. It was such a long day yesterday, that I didn't have much humor left in me for what turned out to be a terrible overnight bus ride with an erect seat that didn't recline, a driver with a heavy hand for the horn, and an asian style toilet that you could smell anywhere in the bus.

The day itself proved to be a gritty, fun, and bizarre experience. We hired the guide we met the day before to drive us out to a beach for the day, which he quoted at a reasonable price. It was only on the back of his 'motobai' without any handles and a sore bum only 20 km into the journey that I found out the full length each way was 90 km. To make things more uncomfortable on an already worn through seat cushion, our driver, 'Gung?' had taken a liking to me and used the extensive journey to slowly work his way back, eventually pressing me toward the back end of the bike and eventually him. We played the name game on the way out, pointing out cows and chickens and horses, learning their vietnamese names.

I was already a nervous backseat rider as we swept around huge trucks in the face of oncoming traffic, and Gung's high pitched maniacal laugh from time to time didn't help at all. He seemed even more unstable as, during the middle of our name game, he stopped the bike in the middle of the country and pointed insistantly at a farmer ploughing the field with her cow and young son. I took a distant photo, because that usually seemed to appease him, but he dragged me out toward the field. On the quick jump off his bike I also managed to give myself a second degree burn on his red hot motobai exhaust pipe. Feeling like an idiot with my huge tourist self traipsing through someone's rice paddy and interrupting them in the middle of what looked like hard work, my leg also started throbbing. Gung pointed at the cow and gestured for me to take her plough. Like an idiot, I stood there while he took this fabulous shot...

We finally made it to Sam S'on Beach, started walking and stopped to get a cup of highly sweet coffee. Gung poked his head around the corner and with a sneer, told us that we were paying to much money. He then sat down and broodingly smoked a cigarette without speaking to us for the rest of our coffee. The rest of the day included him - no opportunity for lounging around on the beach, Gung had some plans for us. We went up to an unexciting rock formation and he took a picture of us. A peasant woman led her small pony up to us she had painted to look like a zebra and harassed us to take a photo with it. We left to go back to the beach and Gung waited to see what we were going to do. We started playing frisbee and he began in with us, shrieking and falling in the sand after tosses. It was kind of fun because it was obvious he had never played with a frisbee before. He oddly disappeared and Ryan and I took the opportunity for some beer and gin rummy. He showed up after half the restaurant had gathered around to watch our card 'skills' and was in a terrible mood, saying, 'we go... now!'

Suffice to say the way back was even less comfortable and even more stomach clenching. It just isn't right for a whole country to disobey traffic laws, AND to have enormous dump trucks swerving with the best of the motorcycle drivers. As if to drive our potential fate home, we witnessed an enormous blood spot in front of a semi on the peaceful country road from the beach to the next town, with the requisite crowd of people. I guess people are morbid the world over.

Ninh Binh

Ninh Binh was one of our favority cities yet in Vietnam. The tourist population is minimal and mostly made up of backpackers so we had plenty of people to talk to when we wanted company.

On Thursday the hotel rented us a motorbike for about six bucks, gave me a 20 second lesson on how to drive and we were off to tour a boat village and nearby cave. Most of you probably know that I'm directionally challenged and hate driving, so this was a perfect chance to scare the hell out of both Audrey and myself. We followed another couple who had paid for drivers along with their bikes and, thankfully, they went slow enough on back roads so that we could keep up. After I got the hang of it I had a lot of fun but Auds had white knuckles the entire time on the bike.



The river was beautiful and quiet and everything that Ha Long Bay wasn't.



We were able to explore the cave by ourselves, but the real highlight was these two kids (~5 and 8 year old) that we met afterward.



We saw them ask another traveller for a cigarette so we gave them one of our oranges. They dug through our backpack and, I think, made fun of us for a few minutes before we had to get back to the boat. Once back to Ninh Binh proper we had a few Bia Hois with another couple and their Vietnamese guides. The guides told us how to say cheers in Vietnamese and many many other useful things that we've already forgotten.

I've also been slightly obsessed with the water buffalo since we got here. It is so ludicrous to me that these huge beasts are completely domesticated and grazing on the side of major highways. Here is a photo of one that we saw on our walk.

Watch out for crocodiles

I've been trying to get more reliable information about the flooding down in Hue and Hoi An, and it sounds pretty bad. At least 80 people have died so far and more typhoons on the way. I was even more cheered by this news bulletin that details how rising flood waters have given the freedom stream to about 5000 crocodiles on a breeding farm. Now I will be not only freaking out about weird parasites in the flood water, but also about crocodiles drifting my way. I think we're being stubborn about pushing south - hopefully the loss of a limb won't drive that point home...

Ho Chi Minh Museum

Although I was sick on the third or fourth day we were here, Auds was able to get me out of bed to go see the Ho Chi Minh Museum. We walked by the Mausoleum which is closed "briefly" for the month of November every year. There were very large groups of very disappointed looking European tourists milling around the square in front of it. We overheard that Uncle Ho was off in Moscow, but couldn't confirm it.

The Ho Chi Minh Museum has two floors. The first has pictures of Vietnamese leaders meeting with every world leader. Some were as recent as September 29th 2007! Other than that the downstairs housed every scrap of paper that Ho ever wrote on. There were no translations so we mostly skipped the whole floor. The upstairs was a weird mix of post modern art and social realism. My head almost exploded and Audrey had to constantly calm me down. This picture is of a big sculptural piece is the struggle between the French and Vietnamese as represented by the human brain.















I have no idea why this was in there.



There was a big sculptural piece of Picaso's Guernica, and a big Volcano with african symbols all around it. There was also a huge pyramid with a big chain link on top of it and religious symbols on all sides wherein all of the women were busty and scantily clad. I have no idea why. I really just can't express how weird and random and cool this place was. Cort, if you are reading this, you should go here right now. Candice will never see you again because you will be hiding out every night and living there so that you'd never have to leave.

We've bought an open bus ticket heading South and are stopping in Ninh Binh this afternoon. After almost a week in Hanoi we're on the move again and it feels great.

My love affair with the Custard Apple...

Things have been a little insane over the last few days with me getting sick (finally better!), me getting Audrey sick, and going to Ha Long Bay for a slightly maddening tour with what felt like half the tourists in all of Viet Nam.

We'd heard that it was quite a bit cheaper to go to the coast via tour than to go it alone so we booked a two day, one night tour that was supposed to include sleeping on a boat for a night, kayaking, BBQ on the beach, etc. What we ended up getting was a night in a hotel, being herded around like cattle with hundreds of other westen tourists, and generally having no idea what we were doing. The highlights were the boat trip across the bay. The limestone jutting straight out of the water was gorgeous and it was one of the few times that our guides just left us alone.




We also toured a natural cave that was discovered in 1993, but that the Vietnamese government quickly turned into a disneyland like tourist trap. The walls were lit in "It's a Small World"-like blues, greens, pinks, and oranges but the natural beauty was allowed to show through a little.

Now we are back in Ha Noi and trying to plan our next move. There is extensive rain and flooding down south, so we aren't quite sure where to head. One of the main goals of this trip was to spend some time on the beach, but all of the beaches look to be rained upon for the month of November. We'll keep you all posted. Talk to you soon.

PS. Oh, the custard apple! It looks kind of like a green pine cone, but the insides are really squishy and filled with black seeds. Eating one is sort of like trying to sift sunflower seds through really thick pudding mixed with a little bit of heaven.

Ryan loves his pho

Ryan's always a traditionalist when he's sick. He eats soup, abstains from alcohol!!, drinks lots of oj, and watches the simpsons (don't know if that falls under the traditionalist label). But this picture is the most I've seem him smile while he's been ill, and maybe it's because pho is omnipresent. Aforementioned degenerate English teacher we met over bia hoi explained how soup first thing in the morning made his stomach churn; he wanted good ol' bangers and mash. At first I scoffed thinking how unadaptable this made ol' Foley (his first name which he explained as, "you know, like Beverly Hills Cop?"). But I do understand now after 4 days of pho.


The gastronomical nerd inside of me is still so excited to be here. At the enormous market this morning I recognized enormous sticks of fresh turmeric, sugarcane, quail's eggs, really nasty looking centipedes in some kind of slime (are these eventually cooked? I hope so), lots of fresh pig feet, betel nut and more. I feel like I'm trying to take mental notes that might make logical sense for the farmer's markets back home, but I don't think folks here play the same game. Besides, it seems like these markets are borderline illegal. This morning a big police truck drove around and ran vendors forcefully off the street. I waited around to see them pretend to pack their bags, and move 10 feet down the street to spread out again. All to the tune of Chariots of Fire which for some reason was playing at extreme decibel level over the government loudspeakers at every street corner. What a way to start your day.

Ha Noi, with wide eyes

A few days into our Vietnam trip we've adjusted to jetlag and have gotten into a bit of a rhythm. Ryan's fallen sick with a cold, which is lucky, considering that it isn't a crazy gastrointestinal ailment. He's done a better job than me of slurping up pho first thing in the morning. (Up here it sounds to my ear like "fur"). I can eat some meat, but something about huge chunks of fatty beef or pork within an hour after I wake up just doesn't work for me. Luckily, there are sticky rice vendors everywhere. Glutinous white or purple rice plopped into a banana leaf with either boiled peanuts or egg, seasoned with fish flakes and salty ground peanuts really hits the morning spot. That and the uber strong coffee with condensed milk. It ain't a vivace latte (gotta love ya for that Seattle), but is some surprisingly potent and good brew.

We woke up this morning to walk around Hoan Kiem lake in the center of Hanoi and came across the entire elderly population working out. There were energetic aerobics moves, old guys splayed across benches doing bizarre leg lifts, 80s looking joggers, badminton players everywhere (including a net set up in the median of a very busy street). The coolest was this pair of dudes that were playing badminton with their bodies and a different birdie. They were incredibly flexible! Crazy roundhouse kicks, complex hopping moves and a couple times they kicked it over the net with the sole of their shoe. Just watching them made me feel extremely uncoordinated.

The hardest thing to get used to in my opinion is bargaining for EVERYthing. We've gotten ripped off a few times (ahem, Ryan's flip-flops that cost more than a night in our hotel), but most of the time it is subtle like paying a couple 1000 dong more than folks for our morning ca phe, or double for our bia hoi (cheap cheap beer that tastes like 1/2 strength pabst). But then again, this represents about 20-50 cents, which makes you feel like you can't get too miffed. You just gotta be on your toes. And, it is hard to complain about cheap beer. Our 2nd afternoon was spent hanging out at the nearest bia hoi outlet with some degenerate English teachers where we each put away 4 bia hois in an hour and a half for about $1 total. It has taken us about an hour to upload our first set of photos and now the website is down, so we will post photos soon. Thinking about poor Seattle in the depths of winter as we hang out in a sweet 80 degrees...

Packed!

With t-minus 12 hours to go until our plane leaves, I'm finally packed! This photo represents everything that I'll have with me for the next two months.

I'll try and get Auds to post a photo of her stuff a little later. Now we've got to start cleaning up Audrey's parents house before they return this afternoon. It has been a bit of an ordeal moving everything that I own into their house, living here for a week, and then having to pack everything away into a crawlspace for the next couple of months. Back to work...

Still packing...

I'm dealing with the stress of packing and leaving in less than 8 hours by taking pictures of Ryan and drinking a barely-afternoon beer. It would be an afternoon beer except that ol' G. Bush made daylight savings time a week later. So, along with drinking an illegitimate 'morning' beer I also have this voice in the back of my head that is saying 'ooh, time change! you might miss your flight!"

We had a moment of excitement yesterday when Ryan lost my plane ticket behind a photocopy machine in a Safeway. After 15 minutes of frantic searching, pulling store clerks into the hunt and getting ready to check their security cameras, we did eventually find it, myself almost in tears. Usually hyper organized Ryan has done a few things like this lately, which freaks me out because he is supposed to be my rock and holder of important documents! Once we got over accusatory statements and had the plane ticket back in our hands, we realized we had overcome one of the first truly stressful moments of our trip. Woohoo! Here is a picture of Ryan at the Lawrence abode using the dining room table as a staging area.