The Rice Lady

Võ Văn Tần street in HCMC is the place to go to buy a safe. Although the old quarter of Ha Noi is most famous in Vietnam for retaining the custom of designating certain streets for the sale of certain goods, this also still happens sometimes in Saigon. There are a number of shoe streets, and there’s a furniture street round the corner from us. If you want hardware, or electronics or a gold fish, there’s 3 different, well-stocked streets you can go to make your purchases.

However when I set out for Võ Văn Tần this morning, securing my valuables was not my purpose. I had a picture of this fabulous woman presiding over her impressive selection of dishes in my mind from a previous visit. So I was very happy with this photo because it captured exactly what I remembered of this restaurant. Although this place is definitely a cut above in terms of quality and the number of dishes available, it is a typical ‘Cơm’, meaning rice, a restaurant serving every day dishes, always with rice. Sometimes these places are called ‘Cơm bình dân’, meaning rice for the common people. You will find a restaurant like this on almost every town or city street in Vietnam. The food is always displayed at the front so you can pick whatever looks good and then they’ll dish it up for you. Though the food is not usually displayed so attractively, or by a woman with such presence.

Today I went for an old favourite, deep fried tofu stuffed with pork (apologies to Vegetarians) and a very tasty salad of bean shoots, carrot and pickled cabbage. As you can see, my meal also came with an overflowing bowl of greens and herbs, and a mug of ice tea. At many places like this, your meal will be served with a light soup and a banana, just to round it off as an honest square meal. Most of the dishes you can see are fish or pork based. Notice the slabs of deep fried pork in the back left corner. A little unhealthy but balanced out if you eat them the way you should, with Nước chấm, sweet and sour dipping sauce, and the aforementioned greens and herbs. Next to that is a kind of steamed egg cake, that usually has vermicelli rice noodles and minced pork, very tasty. I had a very good look at the bowl half cut off at the front right, because it was a combo I’d never seen before, stir fried bean shoots with slivers of liver. Intriguing, but I probably won’t be trying it. Even though I’ve been living in Vietnam for a while, I’m still an offal squeamish westerner.

Don’t be fooled by the lack of customers. Good places like this can sell out everything they’ve made in a couple of hours or less. I strategically got there at 11, before the onslaught, to capture this rice lady in all her glory.

New Year in Cambodia

Though it’s a week or so overdue, Happy Lunar New Year, may this Year of the Tiger be a prosperous one for us all. We spent the holiday in Cambodia, mainly in Kep and Kampot. On the way to the airport in HCMC the taxi driver was a cheery fellow. He was very proud to tell me about his two children and wished me a happy new year several times.

The taxi driver who picked me up at Phnom Penh airport told me about the corrupt government, 50% increases in electricity prices while many are still living on a dollar a day, and rigged elections. I asked about his family. He told me both his parents had been killed by the Khmer Rouge. Welcome to Cambodia. The people are so open and friendly, small towns have a certain charm, and of course there are the temples and the feeling created by the many saffron robed monks serenely going about their business. But you see things, you get information that you don’t know what to do with when you’re in this country.

In Kampot we hired a couple of rusty old bikes from a guesthouse and hooned around this atmospheric riverside town, full of crumbling colonial shop houses. One day we followed a red dusty path that ran alongside the river and found ourselves passing through a Cham Muslim community. Most people were hanging out the front of their wooden stilted houses. The women were colourfully dressed, some with headscarves, and the kids gave us cheeky hellos as we cycled by.

The path came to an end where a couple of more substantial looking houses blocked its way, so we took a rest by the river. After a couple of minutes, a pretty young girl emerged from one of the houses. She wore an ankle length batik skirt like I’d seen on some of the other women. She was very happy to see us and we started chatting in English, using sign language or drawing in the sand when we couldn’t understand each other. She was 22 and had a 1 year old daughter. Her name was Siri, or something similar. Khmer has a different script and she was unsure how her name would translate into English letters. She’d studied a little English and was very keen to know and practise more. She also wanted to take us out on her boat, a long and narrow wooden vessel anchored a few metres away, but we declined the offer. I admired her skirt and we established through drawing pictures of sewing machines and actions that she’d made it. She offered to make me one and I thought why not. After we agreed to come back tomorrow, she skipped away with the 3 dollars I had given her.

Coffee Power

Here I am in the power line café. It’s a second floor corner café which affords lovely views, as can be seen. The owners have made the most of the aspect, with floor to ceiling windows on 2 sides. Strangely enough, it is quite a peaceful place and the attentive staff always keep your glass refreshed with ice tea. It’s also very close to my house, so I have been known to spend a few hours here. And it can be an inspiring place to write, whether that’s caused by the coffee or the electricity I’m not sure.