it's all over ...

well this will be my first post in a long time and it's just to say that i am back in bangkok and i have a week of photos to post, but it will take forever ... which means that from now on you will get a dizzying culinary mixture of food here and food there until everything will become so confusing that it won't be worth the effort to straighten it all out, ah the joy of blogging ...

and just so that it's clear that i still barely have the will to continue this blog thing, this:



is a picture of the tangerine like trees that were everywhere here just before the tet holiday, the vietnamese new year, of course the most popular means of transporting these trees is on the back of one of these:



word is it that after the holiday the fruit is turned into a candy-like sweet, yummy.

fluffy goodness ...

i have been a little remiss in all of my blogging duties (whatever!), and my delay to get new pictures up has been related to a little bit of laziness, some work getting in the way, and some travel (not to mention blogspot is incredibly slow) ...

so to tide you over until i get back into the swing of things here is something sweet:



classic creampuffs, which were accompanied by two of these:



and this (which was bought as a gift, HA!):



which looks like this in the middle, i like how my camera couldn't handle its sweety goodness and focused on the background:



can you tell who has just found their neighborhood bakery, actually its not my neighborhood, i have to walk a little bit to get to it, but's in the only area where i can get real produce, fruit, and all this sweet stuff, in general it was all a little dry and the creampuffs were airy and almost contentless, kind of like blogging itself!

tak boleh masuk cina ...

today i went to china, on the way we ate this:



but i actually tak boleh masuk cina (wasn't able to enter china) instead a pretty big group of us, me and the people who work at the center where i am staying, went to this pretty big market on the border of china ... it was fun, i spent the whole day speaking malay (which is the language that the phrase above is in) with this vietnamese woman who studied at the university of malaya in kuala lumpur for a year, it was a ton of fun, but a little surreal, we would bargain in malay so that the chinese working the vietnamese market wouldn't understand our english, now that's globalization ...

anyway, she:



... came with us, she was the adorable daughter of this crazy psychiatrist who came along, he spoke perfect english and told me that he would give me free hatha yoga lessons if i wanted them while i am here, score!

anyway in terms of food the real treat came yesterday when i had some of this:



my first real plate of fried noodles made by bing, thanh's wife, it was really great, and i was even more appreciative of this:



shredded buttered potatoes, simply amazing ...

fake chicken!!!

two days ago i went to my first vegetarian restaurant, the pork was incredible and so were the sausages, and both just as they should be FAKE FAKE FAKE!!! (at least for me that is), anyway, on the way out of the restaurant they had like a little case where they were selling fake kidney and fake jowls or something like that, you know forms of protein that all good vegetarians should have in their kitchen, but when i saw this i knew instantly that they would sell all kinds of fake meat, so i took the conservative route which meant buying a "thing" of fake chicken:



i dug its fake "de-feathered" look:



hahaha!!!

but the most important thing is that it looked like this:



... when everything was said and done.

tonight i make real pasta!!!


oh and note to blogspot.com: WHERE THE HELL ARE THE PICTURES TO MY POST BELOW??? dude, i am not redoing that post!

a little bit of a delay ...

well this weekend was a little slow, and i tried to get some writing done, so the blog had to wait a little bit (god i hate this self-narration and blogs breed this kind of blather, ugh! whatever) ...

i did, though, have a chance to visit quy thanh's parent's village, which is just on the outskirts of the city (or rather on the outskirts of the outskirts, since i am on the real outskirts, whatever outskirts actually are), it was great and filled with an amazing spread of food that looked like this:



his family was so nice they made some of this for me:


this is tofu in a kind of basic tomato sauce, one thing that i can say about vietnamese cuisine is that it is totally into tomatoes, they are in a lot of food here, including in these lite sauces that you don't really get in thailand, this was really wonderful!





but this was the kicker, it came right at the end of the meal (which seems to be a pattern here to have soups with rice at the very end of meals), it is a LOTUS SEED and mushroom soup, the lotus seeds were incredible and tasted a lot like chickpeas!!! i was in awe, it was easily one of the best things that i have eaten since i got here, way to go quy thanh's mom!!!


anyway, of course it wasn't just the food that made it a great day there was also these guys:



who, in thanh's estimation, helped me drink 30 "rounds" of rice vodka, which was great (although each round was in tiny tiny glasses that thanh constantly reminded me to be careful not to eat as i drank the vodka) ...

and let's not forget these guys:


who it should be made clear are laughing at me not with me, and this guy:


he is thanh's adorable son, he think's that my name is "mr. hello," he's three and likes cats a lot ...

but luckily, this guy:



was not there, he is a crocodile, to be eaten, that we encountered at the entrance to this fancy restaurant, that quy thanh mentioned specializes in "thai" flavored vietnamese food, but when i asked him what that meant he said that he had no idea, ha! take that thais!

crazy germans ...

so today there are no pictures of what i ate, but instead on display is where i ate, namely here:



i forgot to get the name of this place, partially because i was so in awe of it, it was a massive german brewery, that specialized in serving equally massive parts of pig in some kind of white sauce with overcooked veggies (although I had great tofu there, HA!), here i am being induced to smile by two of the vats (?) where they make the beer, upstairs there were like 30 of these things:



anyway, the reason why i was in awe was not because it was so novel, but because this was the SECOND time in a month that i had been to a place like this, the first time was at tawan daeng in bangkok, brought there by two friends who shall remain nameless (but let's say a world famous photographer and a global figure in the art world), the night was total chaos, with 1000s of thais, a crazy stage show, and pig knuckles, which were the famed reason for going, all in all it was good fun, but the idea that these german uber-breweries are proliferating across southeast asia, even in vietnam is mind blowing!!!

my hosts, however, explained that the place was empty because people here hate to drink beer when its cold, which i guess isn't a problem in bangkok where cold does not exist ...

tone-oholic

so today i got my first actual vietnamese lesson, i was so enthusiastic it was scary! at one point about 20 minutes into the lesson, i just pleaded with the thuey, who teaches foreigners all the time, to just tell me the most important thing about learning vietnamese, which is found below:



that's right, the tones! in fact i knew that the key for me to learn vietnamese is not being able to hear the tones (since knowing thai gives you a leg up in that department) but simply ...




... knowing what the tones actually are (because they are different among tonal languages such as thai, various kinds of chinese, and vietnamese), in fact if you don't know how to use the tones then it doesn't matter how well you can grasp all of these other elements of the language, such as:



grammar, vocabulary, or classifiers (words used to classify things when we are counting, such as a "loaf" of bread), if you can't pronounce the tones correctly nothing will make sense, like this for instance:




tomorrow, i will be having dinner with members of the sociology department at the national university of vietnam, where i will be giving a talk tomorrow afternoon, which means an official end to my getting settled into my new kitchen, and more eating out!
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on a non-food/language related note, it was a chilly 50 degrees here in hanoi today, while in bangkok it was an equally as chilly 88!