Moon Cakes

Sriracha.... a world wide sensation.

I received my first teacher gift here.  The Autumn festival is coming up so I was given moon cakes: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Mooncake

Inside the bag:

I hate the flash on the camera.

Inside the box:

The moon cake:

It is a salted duck egg inside of a sweet-savory cake.  Our security/laundry guy was very happy to take three of them.

Just like the chicken at the restaurant, when they sell the whole chicken, they mean the whole chicken:

Restaurant chicken:

Up top is a foot and below is the head.

Charlie Sheen must have his own Vietnamese vodka:

The first week has been great, we are loving nearly everything about Hanoi.

Absolutes-a new personal philosophy

Before we moved to Hanoi.  I used the phrase, "I never...." to describe all of the things I wouldn't do here.  I said things like "I'll never ride a motor bike."  I broke that absolute statement on the third day of being here.  I said that I would only take taxis.  That is simply not possible or sustainable. A major life lesson I have learned is to avoid absolute statements.  Let the circumstances dictate the outcome.  You can't always control or predict what life hurls at you.

P.S.  I ran over two rats on my motor bike commute to work this morning.  DISGUSTING!

Settled in

Tomorrow is the first day of school!  I think we are ready to go.  We bought a few books today and every thing looks neat and tidy.  We'll take a taxi tomorrow, but then it is motorbike time!  I've gotten comfortable on the 110cc or so semi-automatic (shift but no clutch).  We just have to practice riding with Janet on back.  I can skip the big roads and take the road that circles the lake, so it is a nice drive.  Nice except for the cars that drive and park on the one lane road.  We can get everything we need within 10 minutes on the bike.
This is our lovely apartment:

We've almost unpacked, but we haven't spent much time at home.  Eventually the suitcases will go into hiding.

We've also been doing some shopping, both at the local Fivi-Mart and on the street.  Fivi-Mart is for middle class Vietnamese and there is one sort of at the end of our street.  The street food is much more fun to buy.
At Fivi-Mart you can get eggs, but not just chicken eggs.

Fivi-Mart also sells frozen squid and fish.

The prices aren't bad, but they don't compare to the street vendors. $1.10 bag of veggies:

or $9 for 1kg - 2.2lb of live fresh water shrimp.

A few escaped onto the side walk but were quickly scooped up and put back into my bag.  I also had a few jump out of the pot and off the counter while I was washing the side walk dust off of them.  The vein of this shrimp is on the bottom - between the legs.  Their shell is also very thin and it was a pain to prep them.  We also got some beef - about $1.50-2.50 per pound.  It was the leanest beef I've ever seen, but that also made it a little bit chewy.  There is a farmers market close by that I learned about tonight so we will be headed there in the future.

The view from our large front windows is lovely.

Along with my reflection, you can see all the lights across the lake where the fancy part of town and our school is.

Paying rent in cash is odd

So we just signed our lease and paid 3 months of rent.  Tomorrow after school we move in!  After two days of meetings, we will finally see our campus tomorrow, review our curriculum and see our classrooms.

So tomorrow we should have a more significant update.

Banh mi

We might have found the first good food of Hanoi.  Before you say anything, it is the first good food in our short experience here.  We still have many places to go, many foods to try, many foods to re-try.
Banh mi is great.
We had it in two different ways today.  The first was on a mini-french-bread-hoagie-roll that was cut apart with scissors.  The scissors made sense, I use scissors when I prep food, but I've learned that I under-use scissors.
The breakfast Banh mi was a roll filled with egg, fried onion, spicy red sauce (one of the few spicy/flavorful things we've found).  There were a few other ingredients and it was delicious.

After dinner we decided to take a walk.  There is a good reason for this walk.  Friday night was a karaoke party until 1 AM!  Tonight is Saturday (it was 9:30 when we ventured out).  Saturday is SILENT.
What did we learn:
Friday: Party/Karaoke fiesta.
Saturday: Recover from singing all night.

Anyways, we had a great Banh mi.  It was a quarter pita,  So not the Banh mi roll.  But it said Banh mi on the sign, and I'm not going to argue with them.  It also says 'Donar Kebab' and the meat was shaved off of a spinning pole just like Donar Kebab.  The pita was filled with the meat, sweet-pickled red cabbage, and pickled bok-choy.

At this point, all food of Hanoi needs to live up to Banh mi.
--Jeff

Fruits of Their Labor

Every day, a nice Vietnamese person delivers fruit to our room.  We don't know if it is included in the price of the room or added on later. Never the less, we aren't concerned with the details.  They also deliver water, which is much appreciated.  I tend to not ask many questions when people deliver things to our room without asking.  I see them as free.  For the past few days we got two yellow plums on a plate.  Today we go this.

The same two yellow plums and what the what???

I have no idea what the armored fruit is. We had seen it on the streets in the baskets of the fruit sellers.  I was curious then and I am more curious when they delivered it to my door.   So I decided to cut into it.  Fun fact, some seeds in fruit are poisonous.  Did you know that?  Anyway, I cut the armored fruit open to see what we could see.  All I could see was this.

Giant seeds aren't boding well for not poisoning me.  What part do I eat?  

I had Jeff Google it.  Apparently, this is a Sugar Apple which is high in calories and iron.  I need iron but I don't need calories.  You eat the white part. Do not eat the seeds! They are in fact poisonous! 

This is how it tastes.  Super duper sweet.  Like, I can't believe it is that sweet...sweet.  To try to recreate the sweetness at home, dip your fingers in water, then in sugar, and then in sugar again.  You will not even get your finger sweet enough.  I have never tasted anything like this before in my life.  I heart sweets to the max.  I could only eat two bites of this fruit.  I believe I will leave this to Vietnamese people who need the calories and iron.  They should eat these for their health.  I should not eat this fruit for my health. I will get DIABETES!

-Janet

Finding a Place

I hope our blog readers haven't gotten hooked on Janet's natural phrasing and humor.  Jeff is still here and I'll keep my sarcasm and and poor jokes to a minimum...

This morning we met with some HR people from our company and gave them our requirements for an apartment.  First of all, it is odd to be renting an apartment.
Why?
Oh, thank you for asking.  On the first of this month we became landlords.  A lovely couple is renting our home in Oregon.  So we have traded places, or taken a step in a ... direction.  Anyway, we are home-owners and that doesn't mean squat in Vietnam.
So, we got a call from an estate agent a few hours later and it turned out great.

A few hours later...
So what did we do in the mean time?
Went to the French quarter of the old quarter (At what point do they just call it the Tourist quarter)?
This is what we saw today:

The ladies still cart food around on their shoulders.  Now they just have to be nimble-footed.

BTW: We wanted to take a picture of a fruit seller in automobile-peril to share the anecdote of how much their jobs is crazy.  We thought we might take a few pictures to capture this... but we took just one.  One picture.  All of them are in constant near death experiences.  They need to conference at the airport Marriott with the coal miners of WVA and come to the agreement that both jobs are hazardous.

For our dear friend Erin, we took this picture.  Janet will have something to eat in Vietnam.

We didn't go in, but we are sure that the Vietnamese are jealous of the secret spices.

I need something...Do I go to Target, Rite-aid, CVS, Wal-greens, K-Mart, Walmart???

Problem Solver:

Totally Legit.

The "Propaganda Poster Museum" was very interesting... I was asked to stop taking pictures since it is a store.  It sells posters from the 60's-70's and re-prints.  A lot of stuff was anti-American but pro-Interesting.  I would like to go back and buy a piece or two in the future.

All you Mosin-Nagant fans can ID the rifles.

There were some posters propagandizing/celebrating the death of Americans.  These were published during the war.  The most striking of which I didn't get a picture of, it showed a fist busting through a B-52 and said that the Vietnamese crushed 3200 B-52s.  I don't know that the US even had that many B-52's.This poster could have been the only source of information for many people.

Information dissemination is one of the most under-examined pieces of war.

Okay, it is 2012 and let's explore a few places in Hanoi

Sidewalk?!?

Who ya kidding?  More motorbikes!!!

This is in the Old Quarter.  The sidewalks near our hotel (a whole 5 blocks north) are parking lots.  You walk in the street.

So we did make it to a few places in Hanoi that are well visited.

St Joseph's Cathedral: 

Pax (Pacis) Regnia = Peace from my mother?  She was a big help in our move to Hanoi.

So a few blocks later, and 1 coconut water.
We ran into a fancy place.  It looks like a castle with turrets.

Up top there is a sweet looking pool.

In between all the traffic there are some very beautiful parts of Hanoi.

Just like in Bend, Oregon, they have traffic circles.  Some have the same crazy art as in Bend.  Most here are full of perfectly manicured gardens.

Stanley Godspeed approves this message.

No trumpets.  You'd drown out the sound of honking motorbikes!

You would also drown out the sounds of the opera house.

The picture isn't great, but these three shops all sell the same thing and look identical.  The shops we are standing next to sold the same items.  Everything looked like a pyramid of gifts/ little red and gold boxes.  The street parallel to us sold 2 things, lunch and "men's fashion"  but it was all for a much slighter gentleman than myself with vastly different tastes in fashion.

Yup, that is 5 power meters.  Yup they have about 400 lines going in.  Yup this is one of the most organized power lines we've seen.  Power here is plentiful and a source of humor.  We have seen many poles with nearly a thousand lines hanging on them.  The lines are a mix of gauges and a mix of attached lines, unattached (cut and taped and free wired).  We also walked past a fruit seller who had set her fruit down and was stripping the copper out of the plastic.  In Minnesota and Oregon, meth-heads did this.  In Hanoi, it is a way to supplement a hard-working fruit sellers day.  If we could only get the meth-heads to sell fruit!  I'd wash the fruit twice though.

Indonesia is Muslim, and the scene looked the same...Except: Indonesians smoke a lot more and drink a lot more tea and sugar-fruit-drinks.  They both sit on the large sidewalks and play cards or chess/checkers and hang out.  This is a Vietnamese bar.  What you can't tell from the picture is the crock-pot or sport's cooler that holds the Bai Hoi or Fresh Beer.  How foolish we are to value cask aged Black Butte Porter.  It is odd to see an open bar...not because it is an open bar... but it is 10:00 in the morning.

Which brings me to an invitation from the first day we were here.  5 guys and one lady (she was working, they were drinking) sipping something brown.  They invited me down for "whiskey, whiskey" and I politely declined.  The waved their arms and invited me again and I motioned to my wrist and their wrist and tried to translate that it was 9:30 in the darn morning!

What was intriguing was the dead snake they had in a bottle.  Janet told me that it was a bad idea, and it is.  For the sake of culture though, I might walk across the street from our hotel to meet the local drunk-snake-aholics.  I'm sure the conversation is great even if my Vietnamese isn't.

Supermarkets are great.  They save space, if the shelves are full... fill the floors!

Want "Wildberry Cherries"  Of course they have you covered.  Interested in the noodles to go with that Hunt's sauce?  You are out of luck.

So we got a call from one the estate agents.  We set up a time to meet them at 2 in the afternoon.

We grabbed lunch:

I had some fantastic spring rolls.  They weren't deep fried, they were fresh and full of veggies and prawns and the sauce was a mix of citrus, vinegar and chilies.  They were billed as "Prawn spring rolls."  The Vietnamese love pork, I love pork, certain religions don't endorse pork.  The surprise in the Prawn spring rolls is that half of it is:

Pork!  So if pork is not on your menu, be aware of what you eat in Vietnam.

We ate until 1:45, but at our 2 PM pick up time:

A 1:45 PM Call "It is raining.  So our motorbikes won't pick you up.  We will pick you up when it stops."

Made sense to us, we just hoped that they could put a 6'1" Tay(Buleh/foreigner) on a 35cc  bike and still move!

We got a call just before 3pm and had a great time.

We find out today how the negotiations went  and which apartment we will settle into for which price.  We didn't take any pictures, but the places were all lovely and the local security guys were helpful.  This experience was Janet's first time on a motorbike and it convinced us to look into buying one.

Me driving a motorbike should warrant a blog of it's own.

-Jeff