Saigon has been struck by a trà chanh epidemic.
Anyone with a bare plot of sidewalk has set out a few wooden stools, a chalkboard and a black light advertising cups of green tea infused with lime juice and plenty of sugar.
These spots also tend to sell fried cheese stocks and pork pie nuggets. I’d avoid any such snacks.
The tea is indescribably refreshing—the perfect antidote to the heat.
The one place I’m happy to see the police is wherever I’m eating.
Cops don’t make much money, they always drive around and their meals are the best part of their day.
I’ll take a cop’s recommendation over a food critic’s any day of the week.
There’s no place like Saigon,
There’s no place like Saigon,
There’s no place like Saigon…
I’ll say it now and I’ll say it again. One day most men are going to look back on the way we dressed during this time and be goddamned ashamed of ourselves. It won’t be funny or cute and no one will be nostalgic for it.
We’re all just going to lie and say we dressed like this guy—the same way all the French claim they were part of the underground resistance.
Before trusting a man in Vietnam, you must always have a look at his socks. Undercover cops and intelligence spooks sport green ones. Honest folk usually wear none at all.
I’ll leave Saigon when they turn the city’s last rice paddy into a poorly constructed apartment tower that no one can afford to live in.
I give it another two or three years.
Helmets that effectively cover and protect your entire head are disparaged as “rice cookers.”
The more fashionable prefer jet-molded plastic baseball caps.
Recent murmurs in the National Assembly about introducing helmet standards met with the fiercest public outcry I’ve ever seen. Most people still believe that helmets hurt children; current laws exempt kids from wearing them.
Whenever you want to understand these sorts of things in Vietnam, you have to take your brain back to the days when America irrationally feared seat belts and everyone daydreamed about owning a muscle car with razor sharp dashboards and an ashtray in every door.
Sure, everyone died a lot more easily back them.
But wasn’t it a shit ton more fun to be alive?
Nguyen Thi Kiem is probably the most famous street food vendor in Saigon.
There’s probably more ink on her than any other cook in the country, and rightly so. Her sticky rice (infused with boiled peanuts, corn or mung bean paste) may be the most perfect beginning I’ve ever eaten—a delicious, carbohydrate grenade that energizes the palate and the body.
Imagine a bowl of beautiful Irish oatmeal elevated not by milk and butter, but a rich mung bean paste and elegant fried shallots. Like all good Vietnamese food (and all good oatmeal) it walks a pencil-thin line between salty and sweet.
Her fame and location allows her to charge a whopping 75 cents per serving.
During a recent visit, Kiem was gone. According to her daughter, who will take over her mother’s business at the base of an electrical box on Le Tan Ton, she’s very sick.
Food like this is dying, fast. It’s only hope is a downward plunge in the economy or some sort of visionary—someone who can provide a home for a cook like Kiem without corrupting the integrity of her product.
This seems like an impossibility or a lie on the order of “sustainable development.”
Every Friday, a tingly bliss settles over me the instant the sun goes down and the lights come on. I don’t quite know how to describe it: something between a reflective calm and what I’d imagine a werewolf feels at the beginning of a long night
#biscayneworld #cannonball #hobo #trainhopping #southbound
May 15 |
Epitome of BAD
yêu!
Storm coming
lalala new shoes lalala 💕
Spa session
