Summo’ Hue-Happenings & My Favorite Snackums.

I'll call this... "Symmetrical Perfume River Cow Urination"

So, listen here.  I’ve come up with a plan.  If you haven’t noticed from my blog, it kinda seems like I live a double life here… one inside Xuan Phu shelter, and one outside of it.  Well, to a certain extent, that’s true.  I’ve been very fortunate this year to find a great group of expat (derived from the Latin words, ex (out of) and patria (country, fatherland)) friends here in Hue.  I’m finding that it’s been really important to have a good support network of people who are going through the same things you are, at a relatively similar age.  There’s a lot that I can experience and learn from them, that I definitely couldn’t do so inside the shelter (Like when I feel like I need to start speaking English again before I forget it.)  This month has been especially difficult with my friend Andy’s death, so it’s been a miracle to have them around.

So, I decided to keep my two stories, my two dimensions, my two pig-tails (leave room for a breathe here), separate unless they mold into each other, which occasionally they do.  With the pictures and stories that I have in mind right now, this way just seems like it’ll work best for everyone, including my internet travel blog homies…  I swear, it won’t affect any of your conservative, blog-reading dinner parties.  Yeah, you can stop biting your nails.  I found you guys out.  I know you’re all having your fancy-schmancy, black & white, dress up parties, just crowding around the computer reading my blog and spilling wine on  the leopard skin rug when you accidentally laugh above the appropriate dinner-party decibel level.  Don’t worry, you have my full support.

Let me talk about boats.  Who doesn’t like a boat?  There you go, your dinner party topic for the next half hour.
Well, I’ve been on several lately.

The whole city of Hue is more or less centered around the river… “The Perfume River.”  Doesn’t it sound soap-opera-ly romantic and/or remind you of a difficult level on a Bratz Dolls CD-ROM adventure shopping game?  Well, actually there were a lot of famous, old poets and singer/songwriters who always wrote romantically about this river.  My momma always tells me about the poems and songs she hears about Hue, and they always always talk about that river as a symbol of love.  Taken out of context, you should remember for math class that river = love.  This will help you with your proofs.

The first boat trip I did on the Perfume River was for a joint birthday party, Graham and Jo’s to be exact.  That was a long time ago, and there was a lot of Huda beer on that boat, so I guess I’m limited on details.  Let’s see… I forgot to eat dinner before, so I ate 4 bags of knock-off lays potato chips on the boat.  Then, we stopped riverside, and one of our great local friends, Phu (one of the owners of that bar Brown Eyes), ran off and got us boxes and boxes of to-go banh cuon!  I ate over 25 of them in 10 minutes.  Let’s just have a moment of silence for that.

It’s really windy on the river, and at one point the electricity was going in and out making the lights dim and flash.  The boat wasn’t shaking or anything, but for about 20 minutes everytime this occurred, I held onto the nearest wall and shouted, “Oh mah Lord, JUMaNji’s comin’! JuMaNji!!!! Aww nooo!!! Not Agaaynn!!!”  I couldn’t stop laughing about how dumb this joke was and at the thought of how infrequent I’d be able to use the joke in life.  Consider it out of my system.  Jumanji’s not really that funny, I guess.

Hue Help's very own Mr. Khanh and Graham

We enjoy a silky conditioner.

throwin' out their "endearing" faces.

The second time I went on a Perfume River boat, I was actually with the current students of my former study abroad program, S.I.T., the program I did when I first came to Vietnam two years ago.  I decided to meet the group and see how different the program was since I did it, which also gave me an excuse to finally go to some of the tourist attractions in Hue (before that, in the 7 months I’ve lived here, I hadn’t done a single one of them…)

I tagged along on a dinner cruise boat on the Perfume River, and then afterward we were told we would have an authentic, traditional Hue musical performance.  So, here’s where the smell of my overprotective, expat in Hue- blood should start to reek, and then I usually would say something generically snarky about tourist traps.  But, what happened on the boat just kind of, I don’t know, left me with no words.  Well, in the middle of our musicians’ performances, we started drifting towards two other boats… only to see them doing the exact same thing as our boat.  I mean, they were actually using the same props/instruments with the same amount of musicians/singers, and were most likely on the same exact set list.  It was so funny to me.  Couldn’t they have tried to drift away from the other boats at least instead of let us watch them do the exact same things in unison from our windows?  I guess it was just another one of those Vietnam moments where it’s impossible to decide what emotion to express is right at the time.  Then, you think- wow, robots are complex and awesome and you kind of want to be one when you grow up.

They were wearing beautiful, contemporary ao dai's though.

There's the other boat. Getting the same show.

Just for future reference, I’m planning on having a birthday party (April 18th weekend) on one of those boats… only, I’m gonna try to prepare it early and turn it into a super-disco-party-boat.  We will dance and dance, and many a jam will be pumped on that Perfy Rivz.  (I was just thinking about how I really hope I’m the first person to ever call it “Perfy Rivz.”  I wonder how we can find this out.)

That day, I also leeched along with the SIT group to Emperor Minh Mang’s tomb, about a 30 minute drive from my place.  Quite a beautiful area, and for some odd reason it’s still beautiful while knowing that he had 40 wives  and 142 children there.  Maybe it’s because I’m a family man.  Yeah, that’s probably it.

Minh Mang Tomb

This semester's SIT Vietnam group.

And then we ventured to Tu Hieu Pagoda, which I later found out was the “root pagoda” of Zen master Thich Nhat Hanh…  This is also about 25 minutes from where I live.  I just think it’s incredible and kind of insane that I live so close to these beautiful places and I hardly ever go to them.  This will hopefully change once I start getting my permits to sing crooning-karaoke at the entrances of every Hue tourist attraction.  Just imagine that overwhelmingly cultural greeting.

Ahem.  The cicadas are out now.  There’s quite a lot of them.

<Insert some poetic and romanticizing observation about cicadas.>

<Example: Standing in some lush, green field with my eyes closed, hearing and feeling nothing but the chirping song of the cicadas.>

I guess you can get the cicadas fried here if you don’t like the noise.  Oh, I’m sorry, did I just ruin that moment?

Well, ONWARD!  Now for my own contribution to food blogs!

If you are an American expat living anywhere in Vietnam other than Ho Chi Minh City, you probably will not be able to find all the ingredients needed for those meals you’ve been pining for… for example, goddamn Mexican food.  God, everytime I used to see a Chipotle, I’d have to go eat there, even if I wasn’t that hungry, but just because I’d think hey, this might be it. Well, we’ve had two Mexican food cooking nights so far this year, and both of them have huge successes.  If only we had sour cream, cream cheese, Frank’s red hot, and Garcia’s creamy guacamole…

This last time, we made fish soft tacos and made the tortillas from scratch once again (we used warm milk insead of water this time- so they didn’t taste mealy.)  And then, I did something really out of the ordinary and ate a massive amount of food.  Every time I do that, I think, “This is the closest I’ll ever get to feeling pregnant.”  For some reason, fish soft tacos made the connection a lot more imaginable.

Men at the table. Brurr. Garrgh. Vrumm.

Jung, a Laotian who can speak Lao, Thai, Vietnamese, and English.

My kid Nhat's first tacos. Wait, that doesn't make sense as the caption...?

Graham and Alberto. From Eurovision.

Oanh biting joy to the world.

There it is. A fish taco in Vietnam.

Go tell it on the mountain that JC was born.

Now onto the Vietnamese foods!

There are three foods that I regularly snack on here in Vietnam.  Are you ready for these pictures?  Oh, I hope so…

ONE.

Banh chien (basically just fried goods.)

There’s this one area of Nguyen Hue Street that sells all this fried food… they’re all kind of like American donuts, only with a Vietnamese twist?  There’s an assortment of them: fried pate chaud, fried banh bao, fried bot loc, fried banh tieu (don’t worry, you probably said all those Vietnamese words right if you were trying, since Vietnamese is phonetically spelled), fried sesame balls, fried banana, and fried potato… and you can get a huge assorted plate of them for less than a dollar.  Most of them have a mix of parsnip/mushroom in the middle, or sometimes they have some pork loaf or quail eggs in them… oh, mung bean too!

Sitting at that place is preferred, since you can sit back, relax, and bask in the oily air (and that probably makes your skin whiter or something.) You also get them pipin’ hot so that you can test your will power strength, in one of those fried-food-video-games kind of ways.  You have two options for your choose-your-ending adventure: wait patiently while fending off all hallucinations of fried food burglars, or fail miserably with all the “cooling-off methods” and still burn off all your taste buds (“cooling off methods”: blowing the steam while juggling it in your hands, or putting the food in your mouth first and then realize it’s too hot and you have to blow in a panic- as if you looked like one of those weird EMTs that practice their CPR face in the mirror every morning.)  I tend to mix it up everytime I go there.

You can also get VIP seating and choose to sit under their big, grease umbrella, which you can tell has been covering the grease/oil smoke/smells since the beginning of the Nguyen dynasty.  Don’t worry, I hear it’s 8000 Proof sun protection that way, so again- white skin!

Anyway, sometimes we get them to go and they come in a plastic bag, much like everything else in Vietnam.  But, wait- think about how cool that is.  Think about how awesome that take-out/delivery option would be in the U.S.! No need to share a pizza with 5 of your friends and then pretend you’re not hungry still afterward… instead, you could get a big bag of fried things for a dollar and get full and happy with friends!  I wonder if I sold this to any of you.

Just imagine... "Delivery's here! Everyone pitch in 20 cents!"

TWO.

I kind of already talked to you about the special cakes in Hue and how much I like them.  Well, I finally got a picture of the banh beo at the house/restaurant that I frequently go to two blocks away from my place. Sometimes my kids catch me here, since it’s on the way to their school, and then they make fun of me for eating alone/secretly- usually until they forget or I do something else that’s funny to them.

The hot spot for Hue banh's.

What an attractive food sign.

The banh's! With fish sauce!

Food tastes better when you have to scoop it.

THREE.

BUBBLE/BOBA TEA! (also known as Tra Sua Tran Chau here.)  Because I have this super-power of making foods that I like appear right in front of me, a new Bubble Tea joint just happened to open two blocks away from me.  I can get bubble tea everyday for 50 cents in this overly-cutesy, Asian-teen looking place, with carpets, pillows, lime green walls, and cartoon cat paintings.  Vietnamese teen music also comes with the package, so Akon and Avril Lavigne often make guest appearances.  It’s oh so tastey… and that’s the last of my TOP THREE SNACKS IN HUE.

My friends and I taking some of my students out to bubble tea.

I can’t believe I almost forgot to mention this.  The place is called “YUPPIE TEA.”  Yup.  It’s exactly like what you think.  When we took my students there, we asked them “What do you guys think Yuppie means?”  They said, “Yuppies… are rich, young kids who… are umm… ambitious.”

We explained that in the U.S., there’s kind of a negative/make-fun-of-constantly connotation to the word, but other than that, I guess what they said makes sense in a country that’s always striving to be more developed and Western.

One of my students, Anh-Thu, also started reading my friends’ palms.  I tried to translate and when she did Topher’s palm I thought she said, “You have and will have many, many lovers.”  Then, she clarified and I said, “Oh.  Actually, she means that you have a sort of boundless love for everyone in the world.”  Same thing, I guess.

Here’s one last picture of “Bun Bo Hue” – Hue’s specialty, spicy, beef soup.  You can get it here with either thinly sliced cuts of uncooked steak, which cooks in the broth by itself, or with big, fatty flank steak cuts that have been cooked in the broth for a long time.  The broth is sweet and spicy, and I like to make it sour too by adding way too much lime.  The good places to get this soup are only for breakfast, and Vietnamese people start eating breakfast before 6… so usually, I can only get there in time to get the first kind of meat.  Yes, if it was unclear, I definitely just talked about specific “meat times.”  Oh, they also give you a delicious, homemade crab-loaf-ball!  That’s kind of cool, right?

Bun Bo Hue.

<Insert surprise by ending this post very suddenl

~ by Hy Huynh on March 25, 2009.