Vietnam, A to Z

I got back from a trip to Vietnam with my friend Liz and her grandmother Karen a couple of weeks ago. I'd planned to do this post with photos, but I've been a bit slow on toning them. (Surprise, surprise. Some are on my Flickr site, though.) I'll add pictures to this post sooner or later, but, in the meantime, I'd like to share some highlights of my trip.

I'm using the same format I used for my trip to Taiwan several months ago. It takes the pressure off – You get the highlights relatively soon after the trip, and I'm not worried I'm boring you with all the details.

So, here we go: Vietnam, A to Z

A is for áo dài, the traditional Vietnamese dress. (It's said kind of like ow-yai, at least in the north.) We saw lots of women wearing them, though few were walking down a Hanoi street.

Mostly, we saw them in one context: it's the uniform for Vietnamese schoolgirls. They're white – shockingly, so. They do an amazing job keeping them clean (especially since, one of our guides told us, the boys do what they can to mess up the girls' clothes…) It's a nice change from the school uniforms in the U.S. (khaki or black or navy pants; school-color polo, etc.). It's also quite fun to see flocks of girls riding their bikes to or from school – and just as fun trying to snap a photo of them from a moving vehicle on the same road.

B is for bread. Really tasty bread. In fact, it's the first decent bread I've had since I moved to Asia. It's got a thin, crackly crust – like the best baguettes I ate in France – but it's also lighter. The secret (as I understand it) is a combination of rice and soft wheat flours. Another bonus: It's still soft the next day! We bought a loaf on the way to Halong Bay, and then left it in the car. We gave it up as lost, thinking it would be as hard as a rock when we got back to it the next afternoon. It wasn't!

C is for coffee. Really tasty coffee. In fact, it's the first decent coffee I've had since I moved to Asia. It's strong, good hot or iced, and brewed perfectly at a street stall. The most popular way to drink it: iced, with a dollop of condensed milk. Perfection in a glass.

D is for durian ice cream, which Liz ordered at the Rex in Ho Chi Minh City. I had hoped it wouldn't have that awful smell durian has, but it did. And it tasted like rotten onions. (But Liz ate it all!)

E is for embroidery. Liz bought a giant one that the woman at the shop said took about five months to complete.

F is for funeral rites. It's complicated, but part of it involves burning paper things that the dead will need in the next life. This includes things like money and food, but also things like bicycles and cellphones. Karen, amazed by this, had to buy a paper cellphone to take home. (She really wanted a paper BlackBerry, but they were sold out.)

G is for a glass of frog-egg tea, consumed at an organic garden in Hoi An. (Our cooking school guide, Susu, explained: "In Vietnam, we eat everything.") Actually, the "tea" – a mixture of frog eggs, ginger, mint, sugar and water – was quite refreshing. And it only reminded me a bit of seventh-grade biology.

H is the letter of the trip! It stands for Hanoi, Halong Bay, Hoi An, Huế and Ho Chi Minh City, the places we visited. In 10 days.

I is for iPhone, which Liz was never without. Also, when our cooking school instructor saw it, he told Liz he'd cook for her for life if she'd buy him one. She thought it'd be a pretty good deal… It's also really, really making me want an iPhone.

J is for … just go on to the next letter for now. (Maybe I'll fill this in later.)

K is for kayaking, which I did for the first time in Halong Bay. (I even got to steer!)

L is for Lan, the worst tour guide ever. We knew things were going to be bad when we arrived at the Danang Airport at 9:30, hot and exhausted, and Lan was far too cheerful. The woman was useless! And we all wanted to strangle her at one time or another. She has two insanely infuriating tendencies: rushing us through things and disappearing. Our visit to a museum of Champa sculptures was one of the fastest museum trips I've ever taken: It wasn't a big museum, but we were in and out of there in 20 minutes. And I lost count of how many times one of us would look up from taking a picture or studying something to say to the others, "Where's Lan?" Never have I been so glad to see someone go.

M is for motorcycles, the transport of choice for most people in Vietnam. (When we arrived, Zum, our guide, said: "Welcome to Hanoi: a city of six million people, and three million motorcycles!) And people load them down with everything…

N is for Naruhito, Crown Prince of Japan, whom we saw at the Tu Duc Tomb in Hue after two days of missing him at various places. We also saw his motorcade in the Mekong Delta. (The man was stalking us!) It was my first (and probably only) brush with royalty.

O is for the Old Quarter of Hanoi, through which we took a cyclo ride. At rush hour. I'm still amazed that we shared the road with as many cars and bikes and motorcycles as we did without getting so much as a bump.

P is for pagodas, of which we saw many. (We often said, only half joking, that we were pagodaed out.) The best one by far was Thien Mu pagoda in Hue, where we saw a Buddhist prayer service.

Q is for the quest for the ultimate pho. It's a noodle soup that's pretty much the national dish of Vietnam (it's even on the stamps!), and every place makes it a bit differently. It's hard to beat a good bowl of noodle soup, but I love pho for the things you add in it: pickled garlic and onions, crispy shallot, fresh cilantro and squirts of lime juice. It's heaven in a bowl…

We even learned how to make it ourselves at a cooking class in Hoi An – from broth to noodles. It was delicious, but I think I'll leave it to the experts.

R is for rice fields. The country grows a lot of rice.

S is for the shape of Vietnam: an S! (It's also said to be the shape of a dragon). Zum told us there was a reason the country is shaped like an S: to remind everyone that Vietnam is small, but strong.

T is for tailors. They can make almost anything in 24 hours. I got a dress made in Hoi An that I'm planning to wear to a wedding later this year.

U is for Unesco World Heritage Site. I think "Unesco World Heritage" is Lan's favorite phrase. Granted, a lot of things in the center are Unesco sites (and six of the seven in Vietnam are in the center; the other is Halong Bay), but we didn't need to be reminded of this, oh, every five minutes…

V is for Valentine's Day, which we spent in Ho Chi Minh City. It's a big deal in Vietnam, and that totally took us by surprise. We wanted to have a great last night in Vietnam, but, because we didn't have a reservation, we were turned away from three restaurants. The motorbikes carried young couples, with many of the women holding onto bouquets of flowers. We wanted to end the trip with a drink on the rooftop of the Rex Hotel (it had been closed the night before), but even the hotel was in full-on Valentine's mode. We skipped the roof, for which you needed a ticket, and went to the lounge on the first floor instead. It was packed, mostly with Vietnamese, and featured what Liz called "the Asian version of Barry Manilow." He sang things like "Endless Love" and "Unchained Melody" and "My Valentine." It's enough to make you want to vomit. (Hey! Another "V" word!) We laughed so hard that we cried.

W is for water puppets, which we saw in Hanoi. The farmers from the Red Delta area invented it in the tenth century as a form of entertainment, and it's a lot of fun. The puppeteers stand behind a screen and control the puppets using long bamboo rods, while a traditional Vietnamese band provides background music and sings out the stories being acted out.

I got a kick out of the dragon puppets, which spit fire and water, and the goofy water buffalo.

But the highlight of the show for me: when the hunter cut off the tiger's head.

X is for "Xin chào!" Repeat after me: "Sin chow." Now you know how to say hello in Vietnamese!

Y is for yin-yang. Because there's an S at the center, it's considered another symbol of Vietnam. We saw it on a drum at the Ngo Mon Gate, the main entrance to the Citadel in Hue.

Z is for Zum, the best guide in the history of the universe! I am not making this up. If you're ever in Northern Vietnam and in need of a tour guide, let me know. I'll send you his info.

That's it! Well, that's not it. It's barely the highlights. There's so much more I could say, but I'll end with this: 10 days was not nearly long enough. I know there's more to see and do.

But honestly, I'd go back just for the coffee.

Environmental evils

The Keep Hong Kong Green! campaign totally cracks me up, considering how insanely polluted the place is, but things are getting out of hand, people.

In the grocery store the other day, I heard the following announcement: "Please do your part to protect the environment, and don't use a plastic bag!" To encourage shoppers not to use plastic bags, it has set up special lanes for people who don't need them, which is cool. Of course, there's like, two people in line for those lanes and 22 in line for bag-dispensing lanes. (Another store offers a refund of 10 cents if you bring your own bag. That's slightly more than a penny U.S., but I guess it adds up. I mean, if I remember to take my own bags 69 times, it's bus fare home from the office...)

It's not an unusual announcement these days -- encouraging the use of reuseable bags is all the rage -- but it's ridiculous in CitySuper, the grocery store I was in, because everything they sell is imported. Hong Kong imports most of its food; there's not enough land to farm here. But there's also a pretty big expat community, and us expats hanker for a taste of home now and then. To get it (or as close as we can get to it), we head for stores like CitySuper, which stock almost everything imaginable -- I've taken home good French cheeses, non-Hershey's cocoa powder, my favorite brand of French yogurt, and even the occasional bag of masa and a can of tomatillos. (And although they sell peanut butter, there are no Reese's peanut butter cups in sight.) It's expensive, but sometimes, it's worth it.

And it's totally bad for the environment. Every customer taking home their purchases in reuseable bags is not going to offset the damage done if the store continues to fly in brie from three different continents.

Taipei, A to Z

After a two-week delay, I’m finally bringing you an update on my short trip to Taiwan. I’m borrowing this format from a dear friend. I like that it’s short and simple. Besides, who doesn’t love the alphabet?

(By the way, more photos can be found at my Flickr set.)

So here we go:

A: Asparagus juice!

B: Bubble tea. I haven’t had any since my internship in New York, and, since the stuff was developed in Taiwan, I felt this was a good time to drink it again. It had milk in it along with the tapioca pearls; I’m probably getting a kidney stone as we speak.

C: Chopstick skills. Emily, my traveling companion, and I learned how to cut noodles using our chopsticks. It started at the Peking Duck place; we got soup, and the woman serving it used her chopsticks to cut the noodles. Emily and I decided on the spot that we, too, needed such a skill and promptly started practicing. (It took a bit. The waitress, seeing our troubles refilling our soup bowls, hurried over to help us several times. But in the end, we conquered the noodles.)

D: Danshui. It’s the stop at the end of Taipei’s MRT line. We wandered along the riverside boardwalk, watched Chinese flamenco dancers and saw pigs in the street.










E: Eating. I think it’s the national pastime of Taiwan; I don’t think we ate anything we didn’t like. We barely made a dent in the duck, though.

F: Face masks! The hotel gave them to us when we checked in. Emily models one.

Lovely, isn't she?

G: Giant mammoth. As we were wandering through Chaing Kai-shek Memorial Hall, we heard a bunch of people laughing. They were dragging along a mammoth balloon.

Emily had fun with him.

He was a bit deflated, though.

H: HEAT! We saw one sign with 37 degrees Celsius. That’s a cool 98 Fahrenheit. Fine when you’re inside; not so when you’re wandering around the city.


I: Ice Monster, which is where we ate giant plates of shaved ice. It’s like a sno-cone on steroids: shaved ice topped with mango, condensed milk, and some syrupy stuff. But it’s perfect for those brutally hot days -- I really did feel cooler after eating it.

Now, why don’t they have this in Hong Kong?

J: Jade in unusual shapes, seen at the National Palace Museum. Among them: cabbage and a slab of meat. (I told you eating was the national pastime, right?)

K: Kindness. Everyone we met was so warm and friendly. The loveliest person was perhaps Grace, an English0speaking guide at Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Hall. She came up to us after the changing of the guard ceremony and asked if she could explain Taiwan’s history. Then, when it was over, she gave us gifts. Again, why don’t they have this in Hong Kong?

L: Lin, the crazy cab driver. Who taught us the following:

“Taiwan tea, No. 1
Taiwan Beer, No. 2
Taiwan dumpling, No. 3.”

Chinese tea - “not too good, not too bad, so-so.” Or, in Mandarin, “mamahuhu.” (I googled it; it means “horse-horse-tiger-tiger.” But I don’t see how that translates to “so-so.” )

He also had some rather interesting things to say about Americans and Japanese. I’m glad to be the former, at least during that cab ride.

M: Motorcycles. Everyone rides them. At intersections, they all congregate at the front of the line during red lights, so it looks like a city of dueling biker gangs.


N: Night Markets. We started at Shilin, the most famous one. It was lively when we got there, then, a few minutes later, the merchants started hiding their stuff. The street went from packed to empty in three minutes. A few stalls away, a police officer was writing a woman a ticket. We asked someone about this a bit later, and she said it happens several times a night. The police station is just around the corner.

O: Oolong tea. It’s particularly famous, though not my favorite. We had it once: at a shop owned by a friend of Lin, the vivacious cabdriver. He took us there. After all, “Taiwan tea No. 1!” We paid way too much, but it was a good story to start the trip.

P: Pepper pork buns. Perhaps the best thing I ate in Taiwan. I saw the long line at the Shilin Night Market.

Q: Question: What service vehicle sings in Taiwan? Garbage trucks. We first heard them coming up from the MRT station. Our immediate thought: ice cream! Boy, were we surprised.

R: Red bean dumplings. Yum.

S: Space. There’s a lot of it. Or perhaps it just feels that way, coming from Hong Kong. One of the first things we noticed on the ride into the city from the airport was how short the buildings were. And how much sky was visible.

Even the MRT stations had high ceilings and a lot of room!

T: Temples. Taipei has some lovely ones! The colors are always so bright, the deities so full of character. We walked through one of the largest, Longshan, at night. It was filled with people lighting incense and praying. Outside, a “cleansing waterfall.”

U: Unesco family day. Which got us into a fort in Danshui for free.

V: Very long lines. They mean good food. They led us to pepper pork buns, after all. And there was a long, long line at Din Tai Fung. Both were totally worth the wait.

W: World’s tallest building (for now), Taipei 101.


Among its cool features, the world’s fastest elevator (85 floors in 35 seconds. It takes a minute to get to the top floor in my apartment building: the 6th.); the “super big wind damper,” which stabilizes the building during typhoons and earthquakes...

... some cool mascots known as the damper babies...

... and the coolest mailboxes I’ve ever seen (you can also add your own “postmark” with Taipei 101 rubber stamps...).

Also, some kick-ass views of Taipei.

X: Xaiolongbao, or “soup dumplings.” Eaten at Din Tai Fung, perhaps the most popular tourist destination in Taipei.

They were so good, we went there twice.

Y: I’m skipping Y, dammit. I’ve done all the hard letters until now!

Z: Z’s. We may not have gotten enough, but we were back at the hotel and thinking about sleep about the time one of us would have been on deadline. The hazards of packing in so much in so short a time…

The great milk incident

Feeling the need for a latté (as I do once in a while), I wandered into a well-known coffee chain earlier this week.

A question pops into my head before I order. I ask the boy working the counter: “Where does your milk come from?”

He pulls a carton from the fridge and shows it to me. It’s an Australian brand, he says, and it comes from Indonesia. I ask how long they’ve been using it.

“Oh, six months. More than six months.” He lowers his voice. “Since long before the incident.”

“The incident,” of course, is the ever-widening scandal of tainted milk. At least four children have died; tens of thousands more have severe kidney problems. (It’s not limited to humans, either: Baby animals in a Shanghai zoo have kidney stones, too, after being fed with milk powder for more than a year.) Chinese dairy products have been pulled from store shelves here in Hong Kong. Melamine-tainted products have turned up in an increasing number of Chinese-made exports —yogurt, ice cream, candy, rice balls, koala-shaped cookies, potato-wasabi crackers.

There have been many, many food scares in China over the years. And, even though the government is promising better regulation, I’m sure this won’t be the last one. I’ve always been a bit wary of food from Mainland China, and it’s easy to avoid here. Though most of the food is imported, not all of it comes from China. Even the produce vendors in the street sell California strawberries and Florida oranges and French zucchini.

But very soon, I’m going to the Mainland for two weeks. As much as I’m looking forward to – even excited about -- the food there, I’m worried, too.

It’s easy to avoid thinking about milk laced with plastic and cookies tainted with lead, but it’s harder to push aside thoughts of and vegetables grown in polluted earth, fish from toxic waters, and pork pumped full of steroids. It’s enough to make one lose one’s appetite.

At least I don't have to worry about my occasional lattés.