I'm Back!

It's almost been a months since I've posted anything. This is not due to me not having anything interesting to talk about, far from it. I have been doing quite a bit of traveling in the past month or so.

A good place to start would be my Bat Trang, a ceramics village to the west of Hanoi. A co-worker, Anh,  invited myself and Nathan to join her and her sister in a trip to visit Bat Trang, and so one Saturday morning the four of us piled into a bus and drove for over an hour to get there. Bat Trang is only about 30 Km away, which gives you an idea of how bad the road was. Because there were so many people on the bus we had to stand, which was sort of fun, but not for as long as we had to do it. The village itself was very quiet, and the ceramics they made there were actually pretty nice looking. We opted to go to a shop where we had an opporutinity to make our own ceramics. At first we were able to make some cool stuff, but over time it seemed like our skills waned and by the end we were awful. By the end Anh managed to convince her husband to come picks us up so that we wouldn't have to take the bus back.

Freshly made pottery, awaiting decorating and glazing

In the following weeks I went out of town occasionally with my host family, first to my host-father's home village, and then to the countryside for a wedding reception. Both were interesting due to the fact that they were places where I really stood out. The reception was quite fun as it involved a big dinner, people doing karaoke and meeting lots of interesting people. It was quite the party.



Last weekend I was at Mai Chau, a Thai minority village to the south of Hanoi in the mountains. This was a trip that was organized by a group at the church that I attend here. To get there I had two options: first was to go by bus and the second was to go by motorbike. I am very, very glad I opted for the second choice as driving through the mountains was one of the most fun things I have ever done. There were 8 bikes in total that went and we stuck together as a group. To get to the mountains was a pain, first driving a 125cc motorbike on a highway (I was surprised by the fact that I could coax the bike to about 75 km/h), and then a section of road that made Hanoi streets look calm. It was tough trying to keep up with everyone and weave through trucks and cars. Eventually we took a side-road that took us up into mountains that looked very much like something from a Chinese landscape painting. It was gorgeous, but we were in a hurry to get to Mai Chau, so there was never a time for pictures. The road was fairly quiet and it was a lot of up and down. Eventually we got to Mai Chau itself and had a very relaxing time. It was really nice to be away from Hanoi and be in a place that was quiet and had clean air. The drive home was almost exactly the same, albeit in reverse and for half the trip I had a passenger.

Rice was just harvested, leaving the fields looking like this

Water Buffalo grazing in the harvested fields

Notice the satellite dish? I guess cable tv hasn't made it out here yet

Finally, yesterday I went out into the countryside to look at a project that MCC is involved in. The one we looked at involved providing lunches for preschool children in an effort to get more to attend. It was a nice trip for me, due to the fact that I was chosen to do administrative and tech work at the MCC office. Nathan drew the straw that involves writing stories about the people that we meet on trips like this. So I got to spend the morning taking pictures and relaxing while Nathan interviewed people.

In the coming weeks I think I will be going on a couple more MCC trips, and during Christmas and New Years I will be spending time in Cambodia, visiting some of my fellow SALTers, enjoying the beach, and visiting Ankor Wat.

Tich Cho

A topic that I've avoiding writing about has been the food here in Vietnam, as there were some gastronomic oddities that I was alerted. However, as of last weekend I have finally eaten tich cho and am willing to talk about what food here looks like. In Vietnamese, tich means meat and cho means dog. Dog meat. It was quite an experience as it is one of only three foods here in Vietnam that has superstition around it. Vietnam uses the standard Gregorian calendar in the office, but at home there is a strict adherence to the lunar calendar. In my host-family there is a calendar in the kitchen that has the Gregorian in big font and the lunar in slightly smaller font. This all relate to tich cho in that you can only eat tich cho in the last half of the lunar month, from the 16th to the 30th. To eat it any other time is bad luck. This also applies to duck and calamari. In order to eat dog we had to go to a restaurant that serves it. The way the smaller restaurants are here is that they serve one kind of food, like phu, cho, bun or banh my. We ended up eating boiled dog, fried dog, dog sausage, and my personal favourite, dog stewed in dog blood. Sounds gross, but it was actually not bad. After eating it, I came to the conclusion that dog tastes like deer.

However, not all food in Vietnam is as strange as that. The two most important things to Vietnamese cuisine is rice and fish sauce. Everything else is secondary to that. A typical meal in a household consists of rice, a couple types of meat, a vegetable (sliced cucumber is popular), and a soup. You dish out rice into a little bowl and then just grab whatever you want from the dishes in the centre of the table. Its pretty chaotic, but fun. Most things are dipped in fish sauce before being eaten, especially things like nem (spring rolls).

The breakfast that I usually eat is called phu bo. Essentially it is eating soup for breakfast. Phu are long, flat noodles and bo is beef, and it is served in a big bowl of beef broth. It's quite the meal first thing in the morning, but nowadays it feels quite cool at that time of day. Soup really warms you up.

Other foods that are common on the street are bun cha, which is rounder noodle in soup served with little grilled pieces of meat and banh cuan, which is a rice pancake and pork. 

Lastly, I ate KFC here recently and I have to say that in comparison to most Vietnamese foods, its not very salty.