Ho Chi Minh City

I've just finally been doing my every-six-months update of my scrapbook and was going through all the 'scraps' leftover from my Spring Break vacation to Vietnam. Receipts, currency conversion tables, tickets, business cards . . . so many little bits pointing back to what was an amazing trip.

Ho Chi Minh is my kind of city - just enough chaos to keep you on your toes; packed with people, and yet full of quiet avenues; gritty and welcoming - like Cairo and Bangkok, only with its own special quirks. 

Quirks like motorbikes dancing around traffic circles in a choreographed symphony. I spent two mornings on the second floor of a Starbucks positioned over a big traffic circle, watching the motorbikes, lorries, busses, cars, and pedestrians whirl round and round.

Friendly faces were in every cafe and on every street - men smiling and laughing, sitting on tiny plastic chairs in groups on the sidewalk sipping sweet coffee much like men sat on plastic chairs in groups in whatever space was available sipping tea in Cairo.

As Vietnam is so big, and I'm getting too old to deal with the chaos of city bus terminals - of which I have never been a fan - this trip I booked a few day tours to mix in with the city wandering.

Les Rives took my friend and I on a fantastic tour of the Mekong Delta. The boat took our small group of 15 or so people down wide and narrow canals to a few temples, a market, a snake farm, and a few villages. The tour operators were especially keen on supporting the local people who live in the delta - passing out extra sandwiches from our breakfast to local children and families, paying delta families to show us into their homes or buying food from the families for our lunch or snack. The tour even included some local moonshine (which I sadly had to decline due to being sniffly) in a tiny shack-bar run by a little old woman.

Saigon Cooking Class took us on a Street Food Tour on the backs of scooters, which was both terrifying and amazing and included some of the best food I've ever had anywhere.

The tour also took us to a local flower market...

We also took a cooking class with the same group...with delicious results. I have a new found respect for Vietnamese fish sauce (but I still don't love Korean fish sauce, which is made with a different kind of fish and is quite fishier). 

There was also a bit of wandering around Ho Chi Minh - which is fairly difficult to just wander around - again, like Cairo and Bangkok, you sort of have to know where you are going and take a cab or walk with purpose and a map to get there because it's just so spread out. Of course, most wandering was in markets because FOOD!

I think Vietnam was one of the best vacations I have had in a long time and I hope to make it back to SE Asia at least once more while I am in Korea.

Mini-Escape to Busan

I'm doing these posts out of order. I should be writing about Mudeungsan National Park, which is amazing and will get its own post soon, but this weekend, I traveled from my home near the West coast of Korea all the way to Busan on the East coast - and I want to write a quick little post with some photos before I forget all about it.

Let me begin with the bus. First of all, Gwangju bus terminal was crowded (I departed the day before Chuseok - think Thanksgiving, Christmas, and Harvest all rolled into one) but clean, efficient, and easy to navigate. The bus ride (45,000 wan r/t - about $38USD) on a luxury bus with plenty of leg room, reclining seats, and a television playing Korean dramas and Chuseok specials for everyone on board, would only take three hours, including a stop at one of the fancy travel plazas that are dotted along the major highways in Korea. It was a pleasant, cheap, and easy way to travel from one side of the country to the other.

Busan is a port city, so it has all the attractions one would expect: beaches, seafood, large boats, and sea air. Busan had a bit of the port city grit that Baltimore does, but with much more upscale shopping and about 1,000 times as many tourists. The city itself is built on steeply sloping hills, so the landscape is beautiful.

The food is also amazing. Busan has daily ferry service to Japan, so there is a strong Japanese influence on the cuisine. My dinner at a Japanese restaurant included a seafood hotpot that contained a sea snail (a little chewy and flavorless), a giant scallop (deliciously briny and so very different from the sea scallops I've had elsewhere), cockles, clams, shrimp, crab, and a very large, very chewy squid. The broth itself was full of rich umami flavor, with a bit of an acidy finish (from all the greens, perhaps?).

These are the shells left over from the seafood hotpot.

There is also an abundance of street food in Busan (and in Gwangju, too!). The one my friend found too irresistible to just walk by were the little fried dough pockets. The dough was partially cooked, filled with brown sugar, cooked again so the sugar melted, and then opened and filled with shelled sunflower seeds. It was like a stuffed funnel cake and it was delicious!

Fried, stuffed dough

This vendor sold fried sweet potato sticks
and fried silk worms. I am not ready
to eat silkworms...maybe someday
when someone gives me a food travel show -
but that day has not yet come.

Because of the holiday, my friend and I were unable to eat at the Jagalchi Fishmarket, but we did peruse the stalls outside (twice, I was enthralled by the variety of seafood on display). The market is adjacent to the dried fish market - dried fish snacks being very popular in Korea. Side Note: I really want to like dried fish snacks - I mean, I love salt, I love seafood, I love snacks - but dried seafood is a taste I can't wrap my tastebuds around.

I was only in Busan for about 48 hours, and yet, in those 48 hours, my friend and I walked about 15 miles exploring the city and taking it all in - and I didn't even get to the beaches or the mountains (well, I climbed ONE hill up to Busan Tower, but that can't really count, can it?)! I can't wait to go back.

Pie Party

For my latest birthday, I invited my local-in-Mexico friends to my house and asked them to bring pie.

The awesome people I invited brought so much pie, that I had to take seven pies with bi-sected radius (radei? radiuses? circumferences? WHY AM I SO BAD AT MATH?) to school just to clear-out enough space in my fridge for my Slow-cooker Sunday leftovers (white bean & chicken chili, fyi, and it was delicious for lunch all week!).

How much is 'so much' pie? It's 19 pies...well, I made 3 pies, so it's 16 pies, plus the pie my friend brought me a week late (because an infant and a pre-schooler can hinder pie making efforts with all their adorableness); anyway, the sum of this equation is ... a lot of pie (see there, I beat you MATH!). Not TOO much pie, mind, there is no such thing - just SO much.

The winner of the trophy (of course there was a trophy!) was L with her Cornbread-BBQ pie, a pie that had BBQ chicken and melted cheddar on a cornbread crust that she had found the recipe for on Pinterest. She also took second place with Chocolate-Peanut Butter pie (and got bonus points for discovering - while researching pie recipes - that Rodney the Pie Guy - the man whose pies first sparked my pie-obsession - now has a Pie Truck in DC).

This is the trophy:

It says "Pie Champion"

These are the pies:

These are not ALL the pies, there was a second
wave of pies that arrived about 10 minutes after this was taken.

My life is so full of tasty-deliciousness and good bakers that some days I have to just kneel down and thank my lucky pie-plates for my ability to enjoy it all!

September Status

I just got back from another spectacular weekend in Merida, Yucatan for Mexican Independence Day! I even managed to stay-up past 10 pm this time and my friends and I went to the Greeto (Viva Mexico!) and the fireworks!

Street Food and Party Lights

 It was a bit drizzly in the Yucatan, but David (the proprietor of my B&B of choice in Merida) has recently built a covered porch on the back of the hotel, so our group bought a pizza at Vito Coreleone (in the Centro - so Yummy!) and brought it back to the porch and read-away an afternoon. Evenings were spent gouging ourselves on cochinita pibil, panuchas, local soups, and crepes with cajeta!

Other than the drizzles, it was the perfect temperature out and the cloudy days were really pleasant for walking around the streets of Merida, empty of people, yet crowded with a mixture of deco and colonial style homes - some restored, some evolving, some crumbling like cookies left out in the rain.

My favorite store (Minaturas) and my favorite restaurant (Amaro)
as seen from the doorway of Vito Corleone Pizzaria.

Unfortunately I've come back to rain in Monterrey. Lots and lots of rain - today, courtesy of Hurricane Ingrid. So much rain, for weeks now, that school was cancelled today by order of the local government and there is an impromptu waterfall behind my house:

This is the sky's perpetual mood these days.
That is also the hummingbird feeder I recently
had to replace due to clumsiness.

Because of all the rain, I had some time to update my travel map, so I thought I'd post it here, as long as I was posting.

Otherwise, life is school: it's teaching, it's learning, it's growing little minds into critical thinking machines. The world is just turning on and on and on and in a few days I turn older than now, which, despite all the planning, is going to catch me unawares this year, I just know it.