Hanoi Delights: Real Street Food.

When we leave Vietnam, bun cha is definitely one thing we will miss. It's a Hanoi staple. Every street has multiple bun cha vendors.

It doesn't take much to set up a stand.

A space to grill. You certainly don't need a grill. An old pot filled with
charcoal works just fine (the fan keeps the coals going and the smoke away
from the paying customers).

And a few stools and tables.

The sidewalk is both dining room and parking lot.

So here's how it works: small slices of pork belly and bite-sized patties of seasoned ground pork are grilled and served in a light meat broth tangy with a dash of fish sauce along with slices of green mango, garlic, and carrot. Each diner also gets a plate heaped with rice vermicelli and there's a basket of mixed salad greens and herbs for the table. And a plate of chopped chiles. The greens are utterly fresh and include several kinds of lettuce, cilantro, mint, watercress, bean sprouts, and a really delicious herb that we've never encountered before, probably a relative of the mint family, but with a very distinctive flavor. You throw the noodles and greens and chiles into the broth a little at a time, and slurp it down, savoring the different flavors and textures. Yum. At this point it doesn't matter that you're eating this hunched over a tiny plastic table on a noisy, dusty street corner. You notice only the deliciousness. The indispensible accompaniment is nem ran (far left), the ubiquitous fried spring rolls always sold along with bun cha. Crunchy and savory. The whole meal runs about $1.25 per person.

P.

Hanoi Delights: Celebrating Mirabel Ruby.

To celebrate the arrival of our newest granddaughter, we splurged on a nice bottle of St. Emilion and inaugurated our oven by roasting some pork. We inserted slivers of garlic into the pork, then rolled it in salt, pepper, rosemary, and anise seed. We roasted it with potatoes and big chunks of garlic.

Also okra sauteed with onion and butter, and a medley of sauteed mushrooms.

A tasty St. Emilion went very nicely with it.

A fabulous meal to commemorate the birth of our fabulous granddaughter.

Here's to you, Mirabel Ruby.

P. & O.

Donald, Mickey, and Porky: a Tragic Tale.

P.

Introducing Mirabel Ruby

We welcome our fifth granddaughter into our family.

Mirabel made her entry into the world and into our lives in the wee hours of the morning - 4:53am - on January 15th. This sweet bundle of love weighted in at 8lbs. 60z. As can be seen from the pictures below, she is gorgeous, angelic, and she is a Down Syndrome baby. We are so happy and excited to have her join our family. The only difficult part is that it may be months before we can meet her personally.

Mama, Daddy and baby are doing fine. So is big sister Luciya and bigger sister Eryn.

Newly born Mirabel Ruby

A few hours old.

Sleeping peacefully.

P. & O.

Hanoi Delights. Part 1.

One thing that is a pretty much an unmitigated delight here is the food. So delicious, so cheap. So I'm going to post a series highlighting some of our favorite places to eat.

At a little outdoor cafe not far from the mouth of our alley, O. digs into
a a steaming bowl of canh bahn da ca ro, the fish soup that isn't fishy
because it's made with meat broth. The small fish are deep-fried and crispy,
very mild. They're added at the last minute almost as a garnish.
The broth is light, but complex, probably a combination of chicken,
pork, and beef. Deeply flavorful and satisfying, especially on these cold days.
BTW: you can tell this place is upscale by the fact that they have a
trash basket under the table. Most street places you throw your napkins
and other trash on the ground.

Lots of greens and thick fettuccine-style noodles. Gotta love the Avril Lavigne
table protector. Very common at these little cafes.

A few squeezes of lime, a big spoonful of chile paste. Yum!
The puffy sticks of fried dough make great croutons.

Of course, mere chile paste is not enough, so there are fresh chiles, and
a staple condiment everywhere here: garlic and chiles marinated
in vinegar. All these tastes come together to make a lovely meal.
For about a buck apiece.

P.

Still Under Construction. The Penultimate Update.

The structure next door is still coming along.
Lately they have been working around the clock. We hear them pounding and hauling
all night long. Our landlord says that everyone wants their construction done
by Tet, so it's not unusual for the workers (they live on-site during the
construction, remember) to work pretty much 24 hours a day as the holiday approaches.
The good news is that there's an end in sight.

The bad news is that they are building right over our bathroom windows.
The bathroom on the lower floor, one of the few sources of light
down there is already bricked over, leaving our kitchen area
darker than before. Now the second story master bath window
is about to go. No building codes or appeal process here.

P.

Number Five Almost Here

Just a couple short weeks for the due date. When Luciya is asked what her new brother or sister should be named, she says, " August-December!"


O.

Tanks For the Memories.

The Military History Museum, appropriately enough, is on Dien Bien Phu street. Pretty close to us, really, but we hadn't gotten around to going until this weekend. It was definitely worth a look.

The requisite MIG-21 out front.

And tank.

Inside, Uncle Ho.

Bicycle used on the Ho Chi Minh trail. Each one could transport
up to 800 pounds of food, ammunition and equipment.

Hand-made pistols made during the war against the French.

The heroic soldier is carrying a "three-legged bomb," (now we know)
a primitive anti-tank weapon that requires the wielder to run up
to an enemy tank and jam the explosive head into the wheels
in hope of blowing off a tread without blowing up one's self.
Dead-braving indeed.

Cannons from the colonial days.

The tank that stormed the Presidential Palace in Saigon in 1975.

Captured American aircraft and other equipment from the fall of Saigon.

Sculpture made from the remains of American planes shot down over Hanoi.

P.

Let's Go To the Movies!

Going to the movies in Hanoi is not a lot different than going to the movies in the US. Our favorite venue is the Megastar complex in Vincom Tower, an upscale high-rise mall south of the Old Quarter. Same stadium seating, same sound system, same programming: ads, followed by previews, followed by our feature presentation. But you can buy beer and eat shrimp chips as well as popcorn. They even have a fairly nice patisserie. Best of all, you buy specific seats, so you know exactly where you will be sitting.

Luckily, they don't dub movies, so if they're in English we can watch and understand once you get used to ignoring the Vietnamese subtitles. But if the original language was other than English, you're out of luck, because the subs are only in Vietnamese. I had a hard time watching Inglorious Basterds because so much of the dialogue was in German or French and a Vietnamese translation did me no good.

We had heard bad things about Vietnamese audiences--that they talk throughout, make and receive calls on their cellphones, etc., but I've been to 5-6 movies now and have never had a problem.

Everyone in town was excited that Avatar was opening in Hanoi on the same day it opened in the US. Usually we get US movies a week to a month after they open in the States, so that was a big deal. It was also the first 3D movie to play Hanoi. So, of course, it was sold out for the first couple weeks. We bought tickets last Tuesday for the Friday morning show, and it was already mostly full. We got great seats, though.

What we didn't know was that the traffic Friday morning was horrible because of the New Year. It may not be a holiday here, but the streets were packed. Lots of shoppers and moviegoers. It took us over an hour to make what is usually a 20 minute drive. So we missed the first 15 or 20 minutes, but we thoroughly enjoyed ourselves once we arrived.

The 3D visuals were amazing. At first the CGI is distracting and a bit cartoonish, and the floating Vietnamese subs were a bit annoying, but we quickly suspended disbelief and became immersed in the stunning world Cameron has created. Of course we didn't know what the Na'vi characters were saying, but the story was so simple that we could easily get the jist. The story is totally predictable. It happens to be a story that O. and I are partial to, but we still would have liked it to be a little less cliched. But visually it is a remarkable achievement.

I especially liked the fact that the 3D is used to bring reality to the imagined lanscapes rather than the typical "poke your eye out" visuals most 3D movies use. And as a long-time science fiction fan, I liked that, though the story incorporates many typical fantasy elements, they all have a (more or less) hard science explanation. This post about the science of Avatar by a working astrophysicist is well worth reading if you're interested in that sort of thing.

P.

Home Improvement.

We have an oven! We got tired of only be able to fry things, so we went shopping for a toaster oven. They're hard to find, but they do exist here. We found that we could buy a counter-top electric oven big enough to roast a chicken for around $35! We're so excited! It's going to be a great year.

It even has a rotisserie attachment!

P.