Exotic dinner at home, familiar food in an exotic place March 5, 2008
Posted by Kristen in Asia, Food, Travel.add a comment
Another pair of adventures: an exotic dinner at home, and familiar food in an exotic place.
For my birthday dinner a few weeks ago we decided to make Shabu-shabu, which is a sort of Japanese fondue. I bought a special tabletop portable gas burner just for this purpose. Having an open flame on the dining room table is, like many other things in Japan, it is a little alarming in its lack of American-style safety mechanisms. Yet you can get a good rolling boil in the pot that lasts a long time. Into the pot goes water and a piece of kelp, which is removed just before the water boils. Then you dip in paper-thin slices of meat (often beef, but we used pork) and a bunch of other things: Chinese cabbage, leeks, tofu, chrysanthemum leaves, shiitake mushrooms. The meat you can just swish around a bit, but many of the other things are dunked in and left to simmer. When they seem done you fish them out with chopsticks, dip them in a sauce, and eat. We had one sesame sauce and another made with rice vinegar, soy sauce and mirin (sweet rice wine). For such simple ingredients, it was really outstanding!
Following our homey Japanese weekend, we set out on another adventure abroad. Mark had an extended business trip to Hong Kong which straddled a long weekend for Isabella’s school, so we decided to join him for a few days. I’ve now travelled alone with the girls several times internationally and I think I’m getting a handle on it. There’s no getting around the fact that it takes a very long time to get anywhere from here. We took the subway to the train to the airport, leaving the house about 4-1/2 hours before our flight. It turns out that the train is a good way to travel with children because there are interesting things to look at, they can get up and move around, you can buy snacks from the cart, and (I learned later how very important this part is) you don’t get carsick. Check-in and security are wonderfully civilized here in comparison to U.S. airports. Sometimes (and this was one of those times) I’m even taken out of the regular line and escorted to the front because I’m travelling alone with children. The flight is 5-1/2 hours. Amazingly enough, that no longer seems to be such a long time. And so we arrived at the hotel about 11 hours after leaving home. The room at the Landmark Mandarin Oriental, where Mark stays for business, had a huge round tub. The girls were delighted to frolic in there together at the end of the long day.
Hong Kong is an interesting place. This was our second visit, and I still don’t quite know what to do with the kids there. There don’t seem to me to be any obvious tourist things to do. After living in Tokyo, the city doesn’t seem so exotic to me. A great many people speak English, and it seems you can use English in any of the shops and restaurants in the Central part of the city. Many signs are in English, and products are labelled in English as well. Going to a drugstore here makes me feel a bit like a kid in a candy store: I can finally read the packages, so I want to buy everything! This time we took a ride on the Star Ferry to Kowloon again. At about 40 cents for adults, it’s one of the best tourist bargains anywhere. While there, we also visited one museum and spent some time in a children’s English language bookstore. The city is always changing, making it continually new and hence less foreign. I was astonished to see how dramatic these changes can be: Mark has told me that they keep adding landfill to extend the waterfront, and the shoreline has moved quite some distance out since he first began visiting in 1989. Here’s an example of the expansion in action, as we watched from the walkway to the ferry. Next time, this walkway will go over solid highway.
Here are the girls posing in front of giant inflatable models of the mascots for the Beijing 2008 Olympics
We also visited Stanley Market on the South side of the island. En route there in the taxi, I was reminded why train travel is so much better (see above). And I was reminded of the conflict between travelling light (I was wearing my only pair of jeans) and being prepared! After cleaning up and calming down a bit, we enjoyed a nice walk around the market and beachfront. It was much prettier than I expected. I think it wasn’t the case even 10 years ago, but now in addition to the market filled with very inexpensive shops, the waterfront is lined with several attractive restaurants. Mark and the girls climbed on the rocks for awhile and we enjoyed some very welcome sun and warmth.
Mark and I had dinner one night with a couple of his former colleagues from New York, who moved to Hong Kong in January as expats. It was a lot of fun to have a regular dinner out with familiar people from home. We ate at an Italian restaurant which felt as if it could have been in New York. The menus were all in English, the waiters spoke perfect English, the portions were large, and they insisted on continually assaulting us with enormous pepper mills! How strange it felt to travel further into another strange and exotic country and yet feel closer to home.
Weekend in Hanoi September 25, 2007
Posted by Kristen in Asia, Travel, Vietnam.1 comment so far
Last year we didn’t manage to do nearly as much travel in Asia as we would have liked. So we decided to start this school year off with a trip as soon as possible. The third weekend in September was a long weekend, and we decided to go to Hanoi, Vietnam.
The decision was very deeply thought out and scientific. It went something like this:
Mark: “Let’s go somewhere interesting in Asia for the long weekend.”
Kristen: “Okay, where can we get to in 3 days?”
M: “South Korea, China, Hong Kong and Vietnam.”
K: “Vietnam sounds cool. Let’s try Vietnam.”
M: “Should we go to Hanoi or Saigon?”
K: “I don’t know, which one do you think we should go to?”
M: “Hanoi is in the North and so it may be a little less hot; it’s also smaller and less spoiled.”
K: “Okay, let’s go to Hanoi.”
One of the reasons we didn’t travel very much last year was that every time Isabella had a day or two off from school, Mark had to go on a business trip. And lo and behold, it happened again. Mark had to be in Hong Kong for 10 days spanning the weekend we wanted to travel. It was time to take the leap and try out traveling separately. On Friday night, Mark flew from Hong Kong and we flew from Tokyo, arriving a few hours later. On Monday night, Mark left us to return to Hong Kong and we headed home by ourselves. It was a tiring flight of nearly 5 hours each way, and the return flight was a very short overnight. But it worked, and nothing went awry, and now we know that we can manage a family trip to an
exotic destination even if we can’t travel together.
It helped a great deal that traveling within Japan is easy and comfortable. On Friday afternoon Juliet and I picked up Isabella at school and went to Ikebukuro Station to catch the express train to the airport. Isabella and I go through this station every week on the day I pick her up from school, so (though it’s big and can be confusing) we know it well. The train was exactly on time, comfortable, and a nice lady came by selling snacks. Juliet was happy to be able to get up and move around. We had no suitcases with us because I had sent ours ahead by takkyubin, a wonderful delivery service in Japan that allows you to send pretty much anything, anywhere. When we got to the terminal, we just went to the appropriate counter and gave them the receipt, and they handed us our suitcase. We then had to roll it only a short distance to the check-in counter. And here in Japan, they still treat mothers traveling with small children nicely: we were even allowed to check in at the Business Class desk.
We arrived in Hanoi at around 11:00 pm local time, which was 1:00 am Tokyo time. This was when we hit our only real snag of the trip: the hotel did not have adjoining rooms as we had requested. So Mark bunked with Isabella and Juliet and I shared a room. Not ideal, but it worked. Our hotel was the beautiful and historic (Hotel Sofitel Metropole), built in 1901. Our rooms were in the old part of the hotel and still had many beautiful original details. The lobby was decorated with items such as an old Louis Vuitton steamer trunk, and the house phone was a working antique. After about five minutes of ooing and ahhing at the elegant furnishings, we all collapsed into bed.
We spent the next two and a half days exploring the city and gazing in awe at all the new and surprising sights. Here are some of the things we found most interesting:
Most everyone rides motor scooters. My very non-scientific survey put the ratio of scooters to cars at about 30:1. It was very common to see two or more people on a scooter, and parents often rode with small children standing up. This boy is standing on the running board, but we saw many toddlers standing on the seat between their parents.
Much activity takes place right on the street. Here is a typical local restaurant: the kitchen is the table on left, and the diners sit on small plastic stools on the sidewalk. There is an indoor part as well, but no one uses it; they prefer to be outside.
And here is a restaurant in transit: the twin baskets hold both food and stove, ready to be prepared wherever she chooses to set it down.
Stores as well were often little more than a display case at the edge of the sidewalk. I guessed that this was a convenience store.
The city is lush and green. This large lake is right in the center of town, surrounded by trees.
It was funny to see shops selling Communist paraphernalia, especially for those of us who grew up during the Cold War.
We went to see a traditional Vietnamese water puppet show at the Thang Long Water Puppet Theater, which was really interesting and entertaining. Set to traditional Vietnamese music, the show is done entirely in the water with puppeteers standing behind a screen and maneuvering brightly painted wooden puppets on long sticks. We got the impression that they perform the same set of 10 or 12 scenes each time. There was a boat race, there were snakes, a pair of dancing phoenixes, sparklers, dancing fairies, and a monkey that climbed a tree. This website gives a complete explanation, along with pictures. (You may even be able to view a Quicktime video of the show, but I couldn’t figure out how to make it work.) Unfortunately, Juliet found the very first puppet to be scary and so she hid–first against my shoulder and later folded up completely in my lap–for the entire rest of the show. I was very sorry she was afraid, especially since I was sure she would have enjoyed much of the rest of the show. Here’s one of the pictures I managed to take while holding her (I love my digital camera, but I still find it a big challenge in difficult lighting situations!).
We visited the excellent Vietnam Museum of Ethnology on our second full day. We were surprised to find that in addition to the very interesting exhibits on the culture of some of the many different ethnic groups within Vietnam, there was also an area devoted to tremendous difficulties in the lives of ordinary people under the Communist regime. One area displayed a recreation of the apartment of a mid-level government official and his family, consisting of 4 children and mother-in-law. The apartment was about 300 square feet. The placard (written in English and French as well as Vietnamese) explained that the family raised pigs in the bathroom in order to make extra money, a common practice at the time not only in the country but in city apartments as well. Although we’re all raised to believe that our country is the most free and open in the world, do we have museums that are this explicitly critical of the government from the recent past? Visiting a place like this certainly gives one perspective.
Travelling with a two-year-old gave us the excuse to head back to the hotel after lunch and chill out by the pool. It was a nice mix of exploring and relaxing, especially for the girls.
We enjoyed several good meals. Although I would have liked very much to try out one of the places such as the one pictured above, I wasn’t willing to risk anyone getting sick (and it would be impossible for me to take care of the children and travel alone if I picked up a nasty bug). So we restricted ourselves to “tourist” restaurants, which were still absurdly cheap. One of our dinners came to about $14 for all of us, including two beers apiece for the adults! We ate lots of spring rolls and fried noodles and Mark enjoyed some of the local specialty pho, which is a soup with chicken and rice noodles. I was surprised to find that the rice was quite different from Japanese rice: the grains are much smaller, and it is considerably less sticky. Oh, and the coffee! I loved the coffee. It is very strong, and is served with sweetened condensed milk. On the last day we had lunch in a restaurant where you get to sit in chairs made from rickshaws.
There are still not a lot of tourists in Vietnam, and we saw very few other Westerners. The Vietnamese people were friendly and open and many stopped to look at Juliet, often touching her or even pinching her cheek. They would ask us where we were from and seem generally interested in talking to us. It was an interesting contrast to Japan where we are also very different from everyone else, but where people rarely talk to us and often don’t seem to notice.
On Monday afternoon we bade Mark farewell from the poolside and he headed off to the airport for his flight to Hong Kong. We were able to keep one of our rooms until late in the evening (that is, by paying for an extra night), which enabled me to manage the midnight flight back to Tokyo. The girls and I splurged on a hotel dinner and then they watched TV in the room while I packed. We left for the airport at around 9:00 pm and encountered our only rain of the weekend in the form of a dramatic thunderstorm en route. It was then that I realized the main disadvantage of travelling by motor scooter, as I watched our fellow travellers on the highway huddled under ponchos! The cab driver made a token effort to overcharge me for the trip, but didn’t persist when I challenged him. At $10 for a 45-minute drive, though, it would hardly have been a crime. Dressed in jeans for a long airplane trip, we perspired as we browsed the few airport shops in the barely air-conditioned small airport. Finally we found ourselves on board our very comfortable JAL 747 where Isabella soon busied herself with her individual video screen and Juliet, after half an hour of cartoons, fell fast asleep.
