Thanksgiving

I (Jeff) almost forgot about Thanksgiving.  Well, I didn't forget about it, but I was a bit absent minded about the date.  We did not have a day off - which is fair, it is an American holiday and we don't live in or work for Americans.  I saw frozen turkeys and turkey legs at Metro.  I picked up the turkey and quickly realized that we have no oven.  Bag 'o' turkey legs, sure, we can cook them in our little convection 'oven' that I got at Metro a month ago:

Why am I cooking turkey legs on the floor in a glass broiler?  I live in Hanoi, there are no rules...and no counter space!  We had potatoes boiling (no instant potatoes - which would be great since we had to work till 5:10 tonight) and we had zucchini frying.  So the cutting board, resting halfway into the sink, was taking up our remaining counter space.

Most expensive thing we bought: 3 buck can of Campbell's gravy.

All in all, I'm just pointing out the crazy situations we get put into in order to keep our traditions alive.  We had a nice evening.

(Yeah it's a fake tree with fake snow... it makes us feel at home so we are happy with it)

Saturday we are joining a colleague at his home for Thanksgiving.  It should be a great day sharing Thanksgiving in Hanoi with them.  The best part is, because it is an ignored holiday... we get to celebrate it more than once!!!  Having Turkey Day a few days late in the USA would be a felony in certain states.  Here, we get to have our Thursday night (not evening - we didn't eat until 8pm due to cooking after school) and we get a lovely afternoon enjoying Thanksgiving at a friends house.  A friend who has a stove! Not the normal Hanoi "you are an expat-we put an oven in your house-oven"  but a real oven, big enough to cook a turkey!  Ovens like this are few and far between here.

Where ever you are reading from, Happy Thanksgiving!

We are thankful for Skype - we may be far away, but we have been able to talk to our family and friends a lot more than the old days of barely-audible, expensive Jakarta - NY phone calls and 2 month postal waits.  We may be far away, but I think we couldn't have lived in a better time to be close to family through technology.

Gracias SkyNet.

As we approach league play.... ROCK CHALK JAYHAWK!!!!

Rules?

I think I've posted this quote before.  I know I mention this quote 8-11 times a week.  In The Big Lebowski, John Goodman utters the phrase: "This isn't Vietnam...There are rules."
Although he was talking about the Vietnam War (American war as it is known here) the comment still holds true, there are no rules.

Coming home from school on Wednesday I saw two things.  One, in Ciputra where the school is (a very nice, gated community) a 4 year old girl was squatting and peeing into the fountain.  Nope, it was around the back of the fountain.  Nope, her dad wasn't shielding her from everyone watching.  He was simply sitting on his motorbike, not even pulled over all the way.  The fountain, by the way, is the center point of a round-a-bout so she was dead center in the middle of traffic.  Two, we see this everyday, but it really struck me this time.  We come home on the lake road.  All along the road lovers stop on their motorbikes and cuddle.  Enterprising women sell drinks and snacks to people who are lounging on floor mats.  And...cars think that they are tiny.   No cars should be allowed on the road.  It is often barely wide enough for 1 car.   Two cars passing each other is common though.  Both hike a wheel up on the sidewalk and at about 2km an hour they ease past each other.  The motorbike community can't seem to understand why they must go slowly so from both ends, people honk through the whole ordeal.  This happened about 7 times on Wednesday.  It is terrifying when an SUV (overkill of a car in a city where the top speed is 45km and roads are repaired quickly) and a bus passed each other.  Restrictions on where to drive: none-there are no rules.

Today Burger King opened!  After our softball games (one planned, two against a Taiwanese A/B team who happened to be on the adjacent field) I went to the new Burger King with our school's PE teacher and his kids.  Oddly enough he lived 3 doors down from me in Indonesia in the mid-90's.  I was so excited for BK that I didn't think about the price.  Whopper JR in the USA: $1 Vietnam: $4.  Large coke in the USA: actually large Vietnam: size of a US small.  Anyway, I was just so pleased that it tasted exactly the same.  So price gouging: no rules.

Janet's motorbike ran out of gas on Friday (gas gauge doesn't work).  It was a surprisingly easy problem to fix.  I took a large water bottle, went to the gas station, and they filled it.  The attendant's only question was: "full?"  and "How long you live here?"  It was not the least bit odd to him that I was getting gas put into an unapproved container that would actually melt if I left the gas in it overnight.  He also asked if I spoke any Vietnamese, his English was good, good enough that he should have asked: "Why the hell are you bringing a water bottle to get filled with petrol?!?!" and "You crazy American, you are going to start a fire!"  Nope, I just strapped the green liquid (petrol is yellow in the USA, green here) to the rack on my bike said "Com-un" (Thank you) and zipped off.  There is a rule against this everywhere else in the world!!!!  In Vietnam, there are no rules.

Cooking Vietnamese Street Food

We had a fun weekend of playing tourist again.  We took a class at the Hanoi Cooking School with some fellow teachers and some tourists.  The menu was Vietnamese street food which was makes sense.  We started off with some iced-...tea(?) made from a licorice tasting fruit that smelled like figs.  It wasn't bad, it wasn't good, it was unique.
First, we went to the local market in the Old Quarter.  It is a big version of the market that we shop at with a few more animal parts available.

How we buy our veggies if we don't go to Metro - we stick with cucumbers, tomatoes, onion, potatoes, peanuts and cabbage.  We don't bother with the muddy greens or tofu.  The veggies are fresh as ever, but you have to wash a lot of dirt off most or them, especially potatoes and onions.

Bored of chicken eggs that have been laid?  No problem, we've got chicken uterus and un-laid eggs.  They are... fresher(?) than laid eggs?

We also had some eggs that were on the other end of the spectrum, but we'll get to that later.

Could one of these toads escape?  Of course!  One was hopping along the ground just seconds after I took this picture

In the market that we shop at, the toads aren't in bags.  They are tied together with plastic string and left to hop around.  If they could only hop in the same direction, the could escape, but alas, toads don't cooperate with each other.

Plastic string is used to tie up these crabs.

Tripe being made into sausage.

Chickens.

Prawns!!!!!  Not to cheap though, 7 bucks a pound.  Still less than half of what it would be in the US though.

If you're tired, just sleep next to the fish.

Escargo.

 Fish.

Clams in large flat shells, not sure what kind of clams they are.

Goose eggs in the closest basket.  Chicken eggs to the right and fertilized duck eggs in the bag in the second basket.  (we'll see the inside of those eggs soon).

Piggy ears.

Quail eggs are cheaper than any other type.

Lungs, intestines and everything else you find inside a pig.  I've never seen lungs for sale but everyone here had them.

Squirmy eels.

This pig is missing his eyes.

Pig face, should your recipe call for it, it is available in Hanoi.

If you're not into everything else.  You can also get normal cuts of meat.

We went back to the cooking school.  The class was a mixture of demonstration and preparing our part of the meal.  Everything was in dishes (sugar/fish sauce and such) and we did a bit of cutting and mixing.  It was fun and informative.  We had looked at other menu options that may have taught us more about cooking, but this was the most appropriate menu to learn even if it was quite easy.

 Rice vinegar with sugar dissolved into it.  Then add fish sauce, diced chili and garlic and fancy green papaya and carrot.

Those eggs I mentioned.  The fertilized duck eggs were weird but delicious.  It was boiled for about 15 minutes.  Long enough to cool the yoke and the tiny baby duck.

 

See the little duck guy in there?  With a dash of dried chili and salt it tastes like hard boiled egg and duck.

We also made some normal food.  Spring rolls:

Vietnamese green papaya salad (with the same sauce as the dipping sauce).

Flambeing some bananas covered in sugar.  These were later simmered in coconut milk with nuts.

West Lake Prawn cakes are a batter that is mixed with sweet potato strips.  Stick two prawns on top and deep fry  - eat without peeling the prawns.  The exoskeleton just adds to the crunch!