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!