A Vietnamese Moment

Scene: I am in the posh Kim Do Hotel in central Saigon. I am sitting in the restaurant with my colleague Thuy. Classical music plays in the background and I can hear the soft trickle of the intricate waterfall at the back of the open-air restaurant.

Thuy sits with a grilled tomato on her plate. A slice of gently melted mozzarella cheese clings onto the softened tomato.

Thuy: What is this?

She pries the cheese off of the tomato and flips it around on her plate

Me: I think it's cheese.
Thuy: Cheese?
Me: Yes, you know, phó mát (the word for cheese in Vietnamese)

She pricks it with her fork

Thuy: It looks like tofu
Me: No, it's definitely cheese, Thuy. It's a grilled tomato.

She pops it into her mouth, and starts to chew. With a blank expression on her face, I can see the cheese poke out of her mouth as she chews it.

Thuy: Well, it kind of tastes like tofu.

Welcome to Saigon

I've arrived safely in Saigon. I'd been back from Malaysia and Indonesia nearly two weeks, and I'm already on another 2 week trip. This time it's a business trip to Saigon (aka Ho Chi Minh City) and the Mekong Delta.

The organisation I started my new job with is organising an awareness campaign in the south, and they've sent me along to help coordinate it.

Saigon is a crazy busy city, not unlike Hanoi. Though there are similarities, there is definitely something different about this city. The traffic is slightly worse and it is much bigger than Hanoi, but there seems to be a lack of street life in comparison. I spent about 25 minutes walking around the centre trying to find a cafe where I could just sit and enjoy a ca phe sua da (iced coffee with milk). I settled for the lifeless Highlands chain where I spent a good 50 minutes chatting to Jeannette and using up all the credit I had just charged to my mobile.

In between meetings I have quite a bit of time to spend exploring the city. I was able to eat at two really good and cheap vegetarian restaurants. Even though the organisation gives me quite a sizable per diem while I'm here, I just can't bring myself to spending a lot. I did get the extra fancy coffee (and most expensive) at the Trung Nguyen cafe, but that still only set me back 45,000 dong (2.50 USD). Also I sent all my newly tailored clothes as well as some old ones to the hotel laundry service, even having them iron them. There's nothing like having crispy-dried clothes when you've been hanging your clothes up to dry for the last 5 months. Plus the shrinkage was definitely needed on some of my pants and shirts. Splurge as I try, I'm just not a natural big spender.

I'll try and post some more of my experience here in Vietnam's largest city, the old capital of South Vietnam.

Gratuitous Video Scene #4: Hanoi at Sunset

This is the route between the tailor and my place.
This road separates West Lake from Truc Bach Lake, and connects to the Tay Ho neighbourhood.
You can hear my friend Zed oozing on about how she wants to watch the sunset with her boyfriend.

Romance is a farce
(yes, maybe that is the stage I'm in now)

Food Tourist

I just got back from a trip to Bali and Malaysia. A trip whose main feature was food. Food food food. I saw a program at my aunt's house about a year ago on Penang Island in Malaysia and the place has since been in the back of my head. When I was presented with an opportunity to stop in Malaysia on my way back from Bali (due to awful scheduling by AirAsia's Kuala Lumpur-Hanoi route), I just had to take it. Even though the island was five hours by bus from KL, it was well worth it. I jumped from food stall to food stall and pounced on every opportunity to savour the unique cuisine of Penang: Baba Nonya.

This mixture of Indian, Malay and Chinese has resulted in the perfect balance of spice. I had a plate of Pasembor Rojak which was a mixture of different food items, strangely enough, chopped up and thrown together with shredded cucumber and doused in a sweet and spicy peanut sauce. My vegetarian version had tofu, potato, rice dumpling, some sort of croquet-like object, and a lentil-based cracker laden with peanuts. Together with a glass of freshly made carrot juice, it cost me about $1.50 USD.

The thought of going back to Penang is making me drool. It will definitely be on my travel itinerary again. Other than that, it is back to reality, as I start my new job on Monday.

Food in Vietnam

Food is my life. Anybody who knows me well knows that I love to cook and eat things. Cooking is half the fun. And sometimes it's all the fun, especially when a recipe doesn't work out.

It's hard sometimes to stroll the streets here in Hanoi and find something that I can eat. But when I find something, I can't be happier. It's not uncommon for me to be walking completely full from a meal, and to pass by some food vendor selling some sort of delicious snack food and totally cave in. At the moment I'm in love with chè, a gloppy concoction of sweet beans sprinkled with candied fruit or lotus seeds.

Though I haven't yet mastered the art of making chè, I've been quickly trying to learn how to make Vietnamese food. I took a cooking class in Hoi An (in Central Vietnam) and Bangkok. That's one souvenir I want to bring back home with me: the art of making Southeast Asian food. I learned how to make peanut sauce, green and red chili paste, pad Thai, Penang curry, green papaya salad, Isaan, dau phu sot ca chua (tofu sauteed with tomatoes), dau phu xa ot (tofu with lemongrass and chili), banh xeo (Vietnamese savoury pancakes) among others.

Whenever I go back to Montreal, my friends should brace themselves for delicious Southeast Asian feasts.

Start fasting now.

Blowing Bangkok Birthday Bonanza 2009!!!

So I'm back from Bangkok, and now getting ready to take a 15 hour train ride to Danang in North-Central Vietnam.

I'm not rolling in dough, can I mention... Things are just so cheap here.

Thailand was an amazing experience. I think it's ruined my view of Hanoi.

There's something about mixing an elevated light rail system with coconut-based curries that makes me want to pack up everything and move there.

I'll sit on it for the weekend (sitting on the beach in Danang, is exactly what I'll be doing).

I'm Back and Here for Good!

My internet has finally been fixed! First it was my keyboard, then the internet connection.
It's like Buddha has a personal grudge against me.

The tech guy literally left 2 minutes ago. Sorry, I should call him my friend, as he said he wants to be my boyfriend (I just assume he means guy friend, Vietnam is not that type of place).

I've cancelled my ticket back home. I've decided I'm staying in Hanoi for a while. I am both not ready to go back to Montreal and also want to experience a little more here in Vietnam.

I've been applying to jobs here and there. Hopefully I get snatched up by something.

There will be more posts to come, and I promise to update more often.

Gratuitous Video Scene #3: Van Hung Commune Teaser

Sorry for the delay in posts. I've now bought a USB keyboard.
Here's a short teaser from Van Hung Commune.

Every workshop I have attended here (all 2!) has had someone come up and sing traditional Vietnamese songs during the break. Just some random participant. I was hoping they would ask me to come up and sing some Celine Dion.

Scoring Cheap Food #2

Armed with my new knowledge of numbers in Vietnamese, I decided to venture out to the street market near my house. I wanted to make a soup for lunch and I was missing some key ingredients.

I surveyed the street quickly to decide which vendor I would buy my produce from. I decided on a smiling old lady who didn't seem frightened by the prospect of communicating with someone who obviously had a loose grasp on the Vietnamese language.

I pointed to everything I wanted and shot numbers out like a rookie. After having picked a lot of vegetables, I panicked. shit. I only left the house with the equivalent of about $2.50 Canadian. I was a little ambitious about being able to haggle to a low and acceptable price. I didn't know how to say i'm really sorry, but I just realised I only brought 30,000 dong. I surely had passed that price, even if she were ripping me off. I pulled out what I and was making a face and gestures and saying xin loi to excuse myself.

She pulled the 30,000 out of my hand and then gave me some more bills back. I imagined she would then only leave me with the kilo of potatoes and I would shamefully be on my way back home. But then she dumped all the veggies I had chosen into by bike basket, and sent me off on my way.

I guess I had enough.


The damage: 26,ooo dong (2$ Canadian) for a kilo of potatoes, 4 tomatoes, 4 hot chilies, a handful of green onions, a yellow onion, and a giant bunch of some sort of spinach-like vegetable.

Field Visit to Ninh Thuan Province

All I have to say is "wow". I just spent a week travelling around South-Central Vietnam for work, and I am incredibly impressed with the beauty and tranquility of the place. The reason for the trip was to assess the potential and readiness of the communities to jump starting a Community-Based Eco-Tourism project around a National Park. As well, I had the opportunity to spend some time in a project site where the organisation has resource management projects, and wishes to develop some eco-tourism activities.


More accurately, I travelled around these amazing fishing communities, ate delicious food, toured parks, coral reefs, pagodas, lounged out on the beach eating coconuts and iced coffee, and got a great tan. And this, all-expenses paid. Things were off to a good start when I arrived on a beach-front resort complete with my own beach-side bungalow. I spend a couple nights in there with four cockroaches (may they rest in peace) and three gecko's (the first of whom I named Jimmy). The first day the other Canadian and Australian foreigners and I had the whole day free. We spent the afternoon laying on an abandoned beach strewn with straw basket-boats (and the occasional garbage bag), drinking beer while swimming near the shore. It was great to finally get to know them, as they don't work in the same department as i do and never join the rest of us for lunch. Unfortunately, they left the next day as I continued on the trip (and this was their last week at MCD).


The National Park was amazing. It's the only dry tropical ecosystem in Vietnam. Giant rocky hills jutted with rounded and well-worn behemoths stacked on top of each other meet the ocean in a pristine-white sweeping beach. The communities in the park were amazing examples of how i imagine a Vietnamese fishing village. Bright blue and red boats swaying on the water in a bay surrounded by hills filled with cacti and evergreen-tropical plants. The village themselves were amazingly colourful, the bright houses set on narrowish streets that had only white sand as a surface. People were eager to smile at me (and stare), but not as eager as the kids were to giggle and yell "hello" to me. As if word spread as quickly as an ice-cream truck's jingle, kids flocked to the beach-front road where I had decided to take a rest on the sea-wall (I was incredibly sweaty, feeling sunburnt and had been hiking the whole day). They surrounded me on all sides and began using all five words they knew in English: hello what is your name!? I don't think they've ever seen a foreigner in the flesh before.


On top of the hill from the fishing village, was another village but this time with an ethnic minority village. It seemed like children outnumbered adults 10-fold, and this village was noticeably poorer than the fishing village below. Many houses were made of mud and straw and the houses were much smaller. We hiked our way through the village passing by groups of children cutting medicinal plants, chickens running wildly among the houses and pigs lazily wobbling about, passing through cow pastures until finally reaching a rather large stream. There were many children just hanging about on the rocks, towards the part where the stream takes a sharp jump, winding its way vertically through a maze of giant giants until forming a waterfall. One of the kids took a liking to me. He would shake my hand and give me a thumbs-up. He would hold my hand and help me jump from rock to rock. I taught him how to take a photo with my digital camera. They didn't speak Vietnamese in this community, and so they limited language I had learned didn't take me very far. He didn't understand that I had been asking him his name.

I see this post is getting long, so the second part of this trip will have to be another post. So stay tuned.

Gratuitous Video Scene #2: Van Hung Commune

Until my keyboard is fixed, this will give you a taste of my recent trip to Khanh Hoa and Ninh Thuan Provinces in the south of Vietnam.

Scoring Cheap Food #1

I have all these ideas for 'blog series', but have a difficult time going through with them. Hence the large amount of posts with a "#1" at the end...

But here's one that can be easy to keep up with! One reason why I came to Vietnam was because the cheap cheap food! I spent hours and hours in Montreal researching all the types of street food, and trying to figure out which ones were vegetarian. This one factored prominently on the list of 'must finds' and I now found it:


I apologise for the dark photo, I hate flash and this is in a rather dark market. It is called Bùn Dâu. It's basically a cake of rice noodles cut up with pieces of fried tofu. Usually it's dipped in fish sauce, but the nice lady who thought I was Russian made a small bowl of salt and lime juice to dip it in. It was really delicious, but the overpowering smell of my stall neighbour's shrimp sauce (a combination of baby-diaper and damp feet newly exposed to air after 25 hours of shoe-wearing) was hindering my ability to fully enjoy its consumption.

Important part is it only cost 10,000 Dong, about 58¢ USD!