Hanoi, Morning

This is the very first shot I took of Hanoi, our first morning there, just as we stepped out of our hotel. If it isn't clear, those are bundles of lilies loaded onto the back of the woman's bicycle.

Unfortunately, what few remaining pictures I managed to snap before my cell phone battery died did not turn out very well--mostly due to insufficient lighting.

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The End, Sort Of

As I stepped off the very last train today, so my three-week-long journey finally came to an end. And as I tugged my trolley bag down the narrow road home, I was welcomed back with the scent of yaki tori hanging in the air and a grin of recognition from the big guy who works at the corner fruit and vegetable shop.

I already miss the heat terribly and am only realizing that cold weather makes me sluggish. Whereas the warmth beckons me to race outside, almost antsy to enjoy the day (I've even been known to skip), even a slight chill in the air has me reaching for my pajamas and glancing longingly at the bed and its thick covers. It's funny but not only does my body--my muscles, my movements--grow somnolent, even my thought processes seem to be motoring through molasses. Or maybe I'm just tired from the flight, though it was only seven hours, and I hope I haven't become that much of a wimp.

I came home to the apartment looking neat as a pin--thanks to my fastidious husband. I do wonder if he doesn't relish these prolonged absences of mine, even a little, if only for the relief of being able to enter the front door after a long day and know that the place won't look as if it's been ransacked by desperate criminals. As I'm still in the midst of unpacking, that's exactly how the place appears right now. My poor, tidy husband.

To ensure a warm welcome, I saved exactly half of the space in my travel bag solely for twelve bak chang, which are these pyramids of sticky rice stuffed with seasoned pork and steamed in banana leaves. My husband is crazy for bak chang and it's the only thing he requests when I visit Singapore. Unfortunately, one leaf-bound package is about the approximate size and weight of a mini boulder, and twelve of them adds up to a freakin' heavy bag. One of these days, I'm positive immigration is going to demand to know what those things are and then promptly whisk them away. I mean, if even beef jerky isn't allowed through anymore...

Damn, was supposed to go to the supermarket and pick up some things for dinner. But that 10-minute walk in the cold darkness is impossible in my current slack-limbed, pajama-ed state. I guess I'll just have to go hungry. Or curl up in bed and go to sleep. But no! I must first clean up the explosion that is my clothes and toiletries littered all over the floor. Okay, better get to it.

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Still on Holiday

I'm "in transit" in Singapore for a few days, before I fly back to Japan. Am feeling utterly relaxed right now, lulled by the delicious tropical air that my skin, funnily enough, always responds happily toward. It must be the residual Singaporean in my blood. Yet, if I were a true Singaporean, I'd be frowning ferociously and bitching about the heat and the humidity, but, weirdest of all, wearing jeans regardless. I really noticed that, this time round: Southeast Asians somehow find donning long pants on a juicy, 35'C day tolerable. I have no problem with juicy, 35'C days, but the whole joy of this kind of weather is the freedom to shed all those cloying layers, to rejoice in Le Summer Wardrobe.

Ah well, whatever makes you happy.


The battery in my trusty cell phone died and refuses to be recharged, so I've been forced to borrow my mother's super-duper camera, which is so damn good, I swear to god, when I took a picture of a leaf and blew it up on screen, I actually witnessed photosynthesis taking place. So any inferior pictures in this post are entirely due to my own preposterous photography skills and Hello's (or Blogger's) refusal to allow too high a resolution of images to be uploaded (they blurred my photos, damn them!).


These lush jungle shots are actually just of the sturdy plants sprouting from a narrow string of dirt on my parents' balcony. Add a little breeze and sparkling sunshine, and I can practically hear the coconuts thudding to the ground and the ocean swooshing in the background. Unfortunately, my pseudo tropical vacation has been marred by the fact that it's rained every single day since I got here. "We live in a catchment area," my dad explains, and I have no clue what that means, except that any more of this water and the whole apartment is going to one day let out a horrible creak like Noah's ark, uproot, and drift away. Hell, today it was actually sunny and blue-skied, and it still rained. It's like that episode of the My Little Pony cartoon that featured a cursed leprechaun who walked around with a fat little rain cloud permanently hovering over his head--I've come to imagine being in a catchment area to mean something similar.

My Singapore post would not be complete without a little food review, and so I give you: Hock Lam Street Popular Beef Kway Teow (since 1921)!


Okay, here's what you're looking at in this picture (above): The blue thing at the top is just a Chinese spoon. To the left are beef balls, and, just like fishballs or meatballs, they have nothing to do with testicles, although whenever there's ground-up meat involved, I guess one can never be too certain. Well, beef balls are really tasty, so, whatever. There's also a little bit of sliced beef on the right. The white-ish squiggly thing on top of the sliced beef is a salty pickle called kiam chai. And underneath the beefy brown sauce--mmmm, delicious--is your noodles.

There are about six or eight choices of beef kway teow to choose from, and you can have yours "dry" (the one in all these pictures is "dry") or in "soup." You can also substitute the ribbon-like kway teow with a round-stranded rice noodle, as can be seen below:



If you order dry, you'll still get a little bowl of the consommé-ish (in consistency but much richer flavor-wise) beef soup, and I always ladle a few spoonfuls into my noodles to lighten up the sauce a little. I also add a good dose of chilli sauce and a spoonful of cincaluk, which is a soupy, fermented prawn sauce that is a bit tangy and maybe a little scary smelling/looking for first-timers:



Those black specks are the little prawns' eyes.

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Hanoi Report

Our time in Vietnam, too soon, came to an end, but I'm happy to report that it was a near-perfect vacation: no fights, fuss, or puking. In a week, we visited Hanoi, Halong Bay, and Mai Chau, but my favorite was definitely vibrant Hanoi. Mai Chau, with its stilt houses and sharp-green paddy fields, was a close second. And Halong Bay, while not what I imagined, must surely be the most languid, serene overnight trip I've ever had (maybe a little too languid and serene).

I feel guilty admitting this, but one joy of being in Hanoi was how cheap everything was, which fit my tight budget very neatly. We stayed at Classic Street hotel on Hang Be street at just $24 a night, and I thought it was wonderful: clean, air conditioned rooms, really nice people, and great location in the Old Quarter. Of course they put us in what felt like the imprisoned princess's chamber at the top of an impossibly tall tower... Okay, it was only the sixth floor, but throw in a spring-tight spiral staircase, and suddenly the whole world begins to revolve, as you climb round and up, winding endlessly higher and higher and hi-- I almost tripped and broke my neck a few times.

While Hanoi is supposed to be the most quiet and restrained of the main Vietnamese cities, I found it a seriously intense thrill for all the senses. The mere act of walking requires absolute alertness, as you zigzag between sidewalk and road, dodging squatting vendors, walking vendors, racing children, people digging into bowls of noodles while perched on tiny plastic stools in the middle of the pavement, and of course the endless tide of motorbikes and scooters quite literally moving in every direction--sometimes cutting straight across the sidewalk and coming to a stop inside a shop--with all the order of ants pouring out of a stomped-on ant hill.

Almost as numerous as the bikers are the street vendors--all of them female--from the girl dozing on a step with a little aluminum steamer (for buns, was my guess) at her feet to the old woman deftly butchering different cuts of pork on a wooden slab a foot off the ground (raw meats are commonly peddled all day long without refrigeration or ice). Then there are the ubiquitous women with the conical hats, distinct lope, and shouldered wooden pole from either end of which dangles a large platter-like basket. In Hanoi, you can't respectably sell a product unless you've got it in a humongous quantity that can be precariously stacked up, and these wandering vendors are no exception: fresh crusty bread, bitterly sour green plums (to be dunked in salt or pure MSG crystals and perhaps chased with squinty sips of home-brewed rice wine), bags of peeled pineapples and fresh water chestnuts, any of these things will you see heaped up in those flat baskets and artfully balanced on a pole, as the women wend their way through the streets and surging traffic. Hoping to make a little extra cash through a photo opportunity, one vendor pounced on me and I suddenly found myself wearing her cone hat and pinned down by the enormous weight of two baskets laden with pineapples. I was told that some of these women walk as far as 20km a day with their burdens and come home at night to pass out in a tiny room on a bed shared by as many as eight women.

Though we scarcely had more than a few days in Hanoi, we managed to squeeze in a lot of the obligatory cultural sights. But, as always when I travel, what I enjoyed most was simply wandering around (particularly where food was being sold), maybe staring a little goggle-eyed, sampling a lot of new foods, and trying out the few Vietnamese words I'd been practicing, and not being understood by anybody. Sometimes the response would be impatient or exasperated, but at other times, a smiling crowd would begin to form around us as everyone tried to guess what in the lord's name we were trying to say, adding to the overall noise and confusion--I liked that.

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First Night in Hanoi

I'm in Hanoi and blogging... but maybe not for longer than a few more minutes, since it appears my hotel is closing down for the night. Well, it was nice enough of them to supply guests with a computer with Internet access, so one should not complain. Okay, the front door is now shuttered but it seems the front desk guy will be staying up with me for a while longer, at least.

So far, I like it here! When our plane touched down, it was 5pm and the sky was black as pitch from a combination of dark clouds and thick haze. The area surrounding the airport is largely farmlands, so there was not a flicker of light on either side of the highway, and the land seemed rather lonely. But we're now happily settled in the Old Quarter and the place is positively boiling with life. The streets in this neighborhood are closely crowded by two and three-storey buildings on all sides and clotted with pedestrians, scooters, motorcycles, and the odd car.

What we instantly noticed is that honking your car or motorcyle horn in Hanoi seems more the result of restlessly twitching fingers than any truly useful purpose. Garbage is casually and liberally tossed into the gutters lining the roads and other people actually come along to sweep it all up... occasionally.

One thing about walking in Hanoi--or in the Old Quarter, at least--is that you have to remain alert at all times. No dreamy meandering or gawking about like a tourist when you've got garbage and murky gutters to sidestep and motorcycles to dodge. I already have an (invisible) battle wound from a passing scooter whose handle bashed me in the arm as he squeezed/sped past along a particularly narrow road. I'm afraid my ability to yell profanities in Vietnamese is still a little nonexistent. And I get the feeling that cursing every bad driver in this city is going to be a waste of breath.

We were starving after we arrived at our hotel, so we instantly headed out in search of our first meal.

And I'm afraid my tale must come to a halt because Front Desk Guy seems ready to call it a night. Okay, more to come later!

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