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!
-----------
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!

very very dark

today there was a blackout that must have lasted for about 14 hours, the rumor was that there was some kind of accident at the power plant (ala vietnam's homer simpson?), well the 5pm time that was set for when the power was supposed to come on came and went so i canceled my plans to make pasta tonight for the first time (after i was finally able to assemble enough vegetables, with the help of bing, quy thanh's wife) and reverted to grilled cheese, here is the artsy photo taken on my new light-less camera:



and here is the end result, under candlelight!!!



not bad either (the cheese is edam!!! ha!), but the power came on just 20 minutes afterwards, if i had just waited a little longer ...

ramen redux

so before i started this blog thing there was an afternoon where i had a bowl of this:



which is also what i had today for lunch as well, i have been clamouring for vietnamese lessons which would enable me to go hunting for something much more interesting than ramen for lunch, since there are so few places to eat here so for out of the center and none of them speak uh ... english, thai, or malay (although if you look closely at the wrapper below the "mi" is actually a word for noodle that is not suprisingly in both thai and malay), but there is some kind of "blockage" preventing this possibility ...



the ramen was purchased from a big c, which is the southeast asian
equivalent of a target, and on the right side of the package
you will see that i purchased the veggie version that luckily is
filled with vitamin e and tons of betacarotene, no really ...

but the meal was supplemented by this:




that la vache qui rit stuff is so good it's like candy, i mean in a kind of ramen kind of way, it was such a random meal i thought i would give that vache something to really laugh about.

the real ha noi!!!

after four full days of life in ha noi's hazy, deep suburbs, dinner with judith was my first chance to make a break for downtown ha noi! ha noi viewed solely from the suburbs, is a ha noi of wide dusty streets and eastern european (or singaporean, take your pick) style housing blocks, and noticably few restaurants ...

judith, however, acted as the perfect guide, taking me to some of her old haunts, including Quan Com Pho, which was a great place where we started our meal of side dishes with red cabbage salad:



this was guuuuuud, and i was totally oblivious to judith's efforts to "de-naturalized" the salad by claiming that it was, in fact, "not vietnamese!" (Note the glorious cauliflower on top!)




:we also had some of these puffy "globs," which turned out to have tofu inside them (wow!),

they are dunked in a chili soy sauce mixture that is pretty much ubiquitous here, and are very good ...


finally, on her road to blog stardom, judith is seen here:



"scrutinizing" a very very subtle eggplant dish, with a soy sauce based sauce that was perfect with rice. it was a great night of eating in the real ha noi (which i still have not seen in the daylight!)

day two ...

for today's lunch we went to a pretty touristy restaurant right in the middle of ha noi, i was lucky enough to find the pho xao bo, or crispy noodles, on the menu, it was ordered vegetarian and looked like this:



it is covered in mustard greens, which is really popular in southeast asia, the crispy noodles (which is the vietnamese version of mii khrop--the brown chunky thing in the center of the plate) was really really good, i think they were fresh wide kuay tiew noodles that were deep fried together all in a sticky bunch, which means that it had a crispy outside and an almost gooey inside ... delicious or ngon ngọt!!!!

below ...




... is vietnamese style som tom, the thai green papaya uber-salad with all its overwhelming spicy tartness, this particular dish was neither really all that spicy or tart, but it was still pretty good!

crazy lunch spread

quy thanh, the sociologist who is hosting me while i am in vietnam, had me over for lunch with his extended family, they graciously had one or two veggie dishes for me, the whole spread looked like this:
















the best dish was this one:





filled with fake shrimp and fake sausage balls and morning glory and egg, pretty yummy ... (mmmm, fake meat!)

there was also a little bit of this:




which i was really stunned by, whiskey is everywhere in thailand, but here it seems like vodka is the drink of choice, i guess you don't have to spend much time thinking about it before you realize that geopolitics is really all about alcohol ... the us and its whiskey and the soviets and their vodka, you would never have local vodka in thailand ... and for lunch even, how nice!






finally, there was the new versus the old in terms of dessert, i mentioned to thanh that the vietnamese cream puffs across from bulldog news are like famous in seattle, here they face off against these rice crispy like tubes that were really pretty good, it may be colonial and all but the puffs win hands down!