Good Morning Vietnam!

It is our first full day in Vietnam. We were met at 9:30 by Tin, our guide, for a walk around the ancient town of Hoi An, a central Vietnamese town about 40 km fromm Da Nang. Tourism has saved the town and it is quite prosperous, at least compared to what we saw in Siem Reap. When Angkor Wat is discovered by more people, Siem Reap should experience a similar resurrection. I forgot to mention that Siem Reap had five hotels about ten years ago, and this year alone they are building 100 more, from guest houses to luxury resorts. Sounds hard to believe, but that is what Tek told us.

But I digress. Sadly, we were hoping for cooler weather, but it remains hot and humid. Forget the makeup, ladies, it drips down your nose the first five minutes. First we walked around the old town, which is reminiscent of Hanoi: tree-lined streets and some very pretty colonial houses mixed in with typical Asian hovels and shops. The destination today was to experience a cooking class with a local lady-makes-good, Miss Vy (pronounced Vee) whose parents had a restaurant while she was growing up. She is under 40 and now has a very successful business giving cooking demonstrations in one of her three restaurants in town. Tin walked us to the first stop where we met Miss Lu, who works for Miss Vy. Lu’s task was to take us to the market to show us the ingredients that would be used in the cooking class. She is a bubbly young lady, very knowledgeable when it comes to herbs and vegetables and we learned the names of some interesting ingredients we hadn’t seen before. I noticed in the stalls that there were bins full of teeny, tiny snails and I asked her what they were for. Well, to eat, of course, she says and takes a toothpick and pulls out of its shell the tiniest crustacean I’ve ever seen and pops it into her mouth. Can I try? says I. Of course, and soon all four of us were enjoying live snails au naturel without garlic or butter or French bread, but with the best taste ever. Kind of a cross between an oyster and a clam but so tender and more delicate. We agreed that a bowlful with a martini would be the perfect before-dinner relaxation.

Eventually, we made our way through the market to Miss Vy’s restaurant. I had asked Tin how many would be in the class, assuming (fearing, rather) that we would be part of an assembly line operation with tour buses parked outside. Not so. We were taken upstairs where Miss Vy herself was waiting with a table spread with beautiful vegetables and a table for four set with bamboo mats and chopsticks. She introduced herself and told us her story, modestly of course, but Tin had already told us that she is the epitome of the Vietnamese entrepreneurial woman who has built a business doing what she knows how to do. She is beautiful and gracious and explained all about the cooking of the region and why they eat what they do. Every Vietnamese meal has elements that are crispy, crunchy, smooth and silky, as well as those that are salty, bitter, sweet and sour, in her words—the yin and the yang. This gives the tantalizing texture and taste cacophony that Tom and I eat every week at home. They eat mostly vegetables, fish gets second place and meat a distant third and only for special occasions. In fact, when someone gets married, you might ask what kind of wedding are you having and they will respond “Two pigs and a cow.” They don’t tell you the number of guests invited or the cost of the expensive designer gown for the bride or the number of attendants in the wedding party or brag about the elaborate venue for the wedding—just two pigs and a cow. Your success is measured by the amount of meat you can provide for your family and guests. So while it is an economic thing first and foremost, it also means everyone is slim and healthy. Another interesting thing she told us was that unlike most cultures, Vietnamese people don’t talk while they eat. In fact, children are chastised if they speak during a meal. The reason for this is that if you open your mouth to talk, air will get into your stomach and spoil your digestion. Makes sense to me.

The lunch was amazing. First she showed us how to prepare Japanese (white) eggplant with some ingenious slicing, soaking and flattening. It was then fried in a tiny bit of peanut oil with garlic, onion, and red pepper and the presentation was just lovely. Then we had a mango salad that we chopped and mixed, we made our own spring rolls, and prepared a blue fin tuna dish wrapped in banana leaves and grilled. She had little lacquer bowls with all the necessary seasonings and condiments and each ingredient was added by each of us according to her instructions. What a great dinner party this would make at home. Gwenna, I can see the wheels turning in your mind right now….

I had asked if we would get the recipes for these extraordinary dishes and she said yes we will give you a notebook at the end. I pictured a couple of pages of Xeroxed recipes, but instead we received a lacquer photo album with color pictures of the various courses we enjoyed as well as at least twenty more dishes, all with detailed instructions. Miss Vy is going to publish a cookbook this year and is going to New York as a guest of the CIA (Culinary Institute of America not the governmental CIA) and I for one intend to keep an eye on her career. She could be an Asian Julia Child!

Afterward we walked around the town some more with Tin. Artisans are hard at work in their shops wood carving, embroidering, making lanterns, painting, and creating all sorts of other handicrafts. Finally, he drove us out into the country to visit a lantern factory. It sounds so touristy when you say it and again Mary and I mumbled together that we probably wouldn’t like it, but yet again we were wrong. Talk about authentic! The so-called “factory” is actually a working farm with one of the buildings devoted to making the lanterns that the area is famous for. Lanterns you say? Who wants lanterns? Well, I would have bought twenty of them if I could have fit them into our already loaded luggage—they are that beautiful.

The workers there must have invented the assembly line because each step of the process was being performed by a different person—cutting the bamboo and shaping the pieces into the proper sized strips for the frames; cutting and making the metal sub-structures that hold the lanterns together; tediously tying rows of string around the frame to keep the strips evenly spaced; and of course gluing the colorful silk to the frame to produce the finished product. Tedious work by our standards, but the workers smiled and chatted and seemed quite content. It was fascinating to watch, and at the end we were invited to sit down and make our own! We each had a “teacher” who showed us how to apply the glue, stretch the silk, trim the edges, etc. and the ease with which they could do it compared to our awkward efforts was humbling. The guys did great, finishing before Mary and me, and with fairly decent outcomes to boot. My finished product is pictured above and I am very proud of my handiwork.

It’s Saturday morning (I think) as I write this and today we have a day at “leisure.” Hah! We plan to take a boat ride down the Hoi An River then have lunch and who knows what adventure will unfold after that?

Later: 6:00PM:

Tried to post this tonight, but no can do. The network is kaput for the moment, which I guess we shouldn’t complain about because we are lucky to have it at all. We had a 30 minute Skype with Mark and family this morning—a miracle of technology. So I shan’t be the one to kick a gift horse in the teeth…

Today we took the aforementioned boat ride and saw Hoi An from the water. Very nice and great fun, but not much to report. After, we had lunch in a little dive called Café des Amis where there is no menu. Mr. Kim, the very effusive chef de cuisine/proprieteur immediately showed us his guest book with hundreds of pages of glowing comments in a myriad of languages which in fact raised the expectations a bit more than was due. “Best meal of our trip,” “finest restaurant in all of Vietnam,” “fabulous,” “unbelievable!!!” “j’etait enchante!” “c'est magnifique”, etc. etc. While the comments were a bit hyperbolic, the meal was perfectly acceptable and it was fun to sit on the second floor balcony overlooking the busy port below. Hopefully I will be able to post the picture of the pedi-cab drivers who took us from the hotel to the Post Office and waited (a long time) while we got Sims cards for our phones (which are still too complicated to operate) and then took us to the port and found us a boat for hire. The boatman was the brother of one of the pedi-cab drivers and of course they are all in cahoots and who knows who is who. We had been told by Tin the guide yesterday that about $7 for the four of us would buy a THREE hour ride down the river, but we only wanted to spend an hour and the boatman started at $5 a person. Pshaw, said we, it should be $7 for 3 hours! Much arm waving and stricken looks, but all very good natured and the upshot was, one hour for $8. It was so fun we gave him $10. We are the last of the big spenders.

But the significance of the picture of the pedi-cab drivers is this: they not only took us from hotel to Post Office to boat, but met us on our return hoping to take us somewhere else, and when that didn’t pan out they hovered outside the restaurant (which was very near the boat drop-off) as seen in the picture, WAVED and SMILED to us from the street and then after lunch when we said we wanted to walk a bit before returning to the hotel said “But we wait long time!” We didn’t ask you to, we pointed out, and again tragic looks and something about the loss of income accrued by the wait, but we prevailed and were able to have our walk. A little while later, Tom and I saw our guys hovering yet again and so we acquiesced and back to the hotel we went. Ah, another example of the entrepreneurial spirit, alive and well in Vietnam.

Now I sit unable to post and all packed and ready to leave early tomorrow. We are meeting Tin at 8:00 and driving to Hue via Da Nang which I understand is about a four hour trip counting the various stops we will take. The day is much touted in our itinerary as one of the most memorable we will experience, with a drive through a “sea of clouds” over the 2,500 foot Hai Van Pass, a stop at a fishing village, and a tour of the ancient Citadel in Hue. The Citadel was known as the Forbidden Purple City and was home to generations of royalty. Interestingly, while Hoi An was spared any damage during the “American” war (what we call the Vietnam War), nearby Hue was the site of some of the most brutal fighting during the Tet Offensive.