February 6, 2012

• Vietnam Part 7: Shopping.

  After visiting the university, we continued exploring Hanoi.

  

  This is Ho Chi Minh’s mausoleum. My dad hates Ho Chi Minh for obvious reasons, one of which were his orders for his troops to kill (and bury alive) about 6000 Hue residents during the Tết offensive (1968). There are still mass graves in Hue, my dad’s hometown. For many, Saigon will always be Saigon, never Ho Chi Minh City.

  

  

  With the rainy weather, the worms surfaced. They’re disgustingly longer than a foot.

  

  My dad used to joke about people eating fish from the same river that people poop in. Out in West Lake, all these dead fish were kind of more disgusting. We also saw people fishing out here with no bait and actually catching things. I don’t even know why a fish would be that desperate.

  

  

  We stopped by for some bun cha, a northern specialty. We went up some four or five stories of dining using a narrow one-person spiraling staircase.

  

  So it turns out nem cua is not like the nem you normally think of- it’s actually just cha gio (egg rolls) with crab in it.

  

  So this bun cha is more like thit nuong (in this case a kind of roast pork ball) in diluted nuoc mam (fish sauce). You can get something similar to this at the banh cuon place on Bellaire across from Hong Kong supermarket.

  

  This was the whole table layout- mostly unfamiliar but all delicious. I was a little hesitant to try the thit nuong in nuoc mam as I thought it would be oily and soggy, but it was neither of those and held up well.

  

  My dad saw this picture and was like, “This is awesome” and pointed at the pseudo-face on the red Honda and laughed to himself.

  

  That afternoon, we went to the various shopping districts in Hanoi- there’s like a clothing district, silk district, jade district, etc etc. We mostly waited while my mom went to look for silk goods and art for the house.

  

  This looks legit.

  

  The family waiting for the cab to take us to dinner.

  

  For dessert, we had something like banh it duong- another northern specialty. Basically a chewy exterior (I guess comparable to mochi) with a liquid brown sugar center- not overly sweet and pretty good.

  

  The third night’s dinner was with my mom’s cousin. My mom’s cousin was closer to my mom’s older sisters, as my mom was just four years old when my mom’s cousin moved to Hanoi from Saigon. My mom hadn’t seen her cousin since ’54- over half a century- when she moved to Hanoi. My mom’s cousin also had a younger brother that my mom had never met when the family moved to the north. When they all met at the restaurant, my mom’s cousin produced a laminated picture of my mom and her siblings and her when they were kids that she had kept for over half a century. Her daughter and son-in-law owned a tour agency in Hanoi (tour agencies being a highly lucrative business) while her brother had been an air force captain in the North Vietnamese army during the war. As a child, I had it in my head that the North Vietnamese were “the bad guys”, as the US media portrays it. But here around the dinner table, everyone got along like they had known each other forever. As you get older, you understand that you can hate the government and what it represents, but obviously you can still love the people who live there.

  End day three.

  • 12:05 am
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