Cooking HCMC then Nha Trang (Nah kidding)

Street scene - Ho Chi Minh City



It is now January 19th - thursday morning, 11:10 a.m. local time.

Our UK Reader will still be in bed, asleep right now as I write (unless bothered by troublesome bladder or noisy revellers).

We are now in Nha Trang, a seaside town with a population of c.315,000, about 300 miles North East of HCMC. But before we recount tales of Nha Tranmg, there are another couple of days to complete in Ho Chi Minh.

Where were we... I think it was at the point that we were having breakfast at a roadside cafe.

After consuming the spicy 'breakfast' we headed back to our hotel room. Rita was in no mood to venture forth bravely immediately, so I tasked myself with finding a travel agency (Tourist Information Offices as such do not exist in Vietnam).

A guy I was talking to on the Singapore-Vietnam flight had recommended Sinh Cafe.
I got the address from the Lonely Planet Guide and decided that it was a walkable distance.

It would have been so in normal circumstances, but once lost in HCMC it is very hard to regain your bearings. After walking for around 30 minutes under a bombardment of motorcycle taxi offers, I decided that the best option was to take one of these taxis to my propsed destination. That worked quite well. Ten minutes later and $1 US lighter I was at Sinh Cafe. Problem here was that nobody seemed to understand English. What I did manage to book though was a cooking lesson for the two of us for the next afternoon.

In the afternoon we went to a restaurant recommended to us by the hotel receptionist (we had a pretty good meal + drinks for aroumd $10 US (300,000 dong to you)).
Then we wandered off in the direction of the Reunification Palace. By this time we had begun to see a few more Western faces and came to the realisation that our hotel was not based in the tourist quarter.

The Reunification Palace was an interesting experience.
It was named as such after the Americans had finally fled Vietnam in April 1975 and the communists tanks rolled into what was the known as Saigon on April 30. Prior to this it had had an interesting history.
The original building (The Norodom Palace) was bombed by the South Vietnamese in 1962, in an unsuccesful attempt to get rid of their despised leader, Ngo Dinh Diem (placed in power by the USA). Diem ordered the Palace to be rebuilt, thia time with a bomb shelter in the basement. He did not live to see the completion of the building however as he was murdered by his own troops in 1963.
The new building was named Independence Palace and was home to South Vietnamese President Nguyen Van Thieu until his hasty departure in 1975.

We were shown around by a charming Vietnamese girl, whose English was pretty good.

The most interesting part of the tour was being taken into the basement from where the South Vietnamese war strategy was emloyed.


Next day (Tuesday 17th January), we were up and about early again and took a taxi to the War Remnants museum.

This was formerly known as the 'American & Chineses war crimes museum', so as you can imagine the exhibits and explanations do have a certain bias.
However, on the basis of the camera does not lie and having some prior knowledge of what the war was about and how it was conducted, I wasn't left in any doubt as to the horrors that were depicted here.

The majority of the exhibits were photographs taken by war photographers. Graphic and disturbing.
A particularly gruesome part of the museum consisted of mock ups of the Tiger cages that prisoners use to be kept in and instruments and tales of torture.
Taxi back to the hotel again after this, as Rita is still not fancying playing chicken on the HCMC roads.

So it's now afternoon and we're off to our Vietnam cookery lesson. Rita....

Hi peops,

Ahalf mile walk to our cookery class but do not relish the stress of crossing the road so we take a taxi. In fact I have not walked anywhere since arriving - everywhere is by taxi. Within minutes of 'reporting for duty' to the person whom I (wrongly as it turned out) assumed was our Cookery Master we were whisked away on the back of respective motorbikes, heading for the market to purchase the ingredients for our recipes. The motorbike journey was not far (but far enough!) and the only safety measure applied was a shout over his shoulder which was 'Hold on'. (Clearly, I have met my match when it comes to teaching Granny to suck eggs!). I did! This experience was only marginally less stressful than being a pedestrian. Anyway, at the market we bought chicken, lemon grass, wriggling fish, shallots, sweet potatoes and some other stuff that I didn't recognise. Then back on the motorbike only this time with loaded carrier bags swinging from the handlebars, as we merged and swerved along the road with hundreds of other bikes all put-putting and vying for the same piece of tarmac. Next we are inside a working kitchen which is in perpetual motion as the cooks are all busy cooking up meals for the waiting customers. A space is cleared for us 2 eager students, and we are introduced and passed over to a chef called Dac for the rest of the afternoon. He is half Vietnamese and half Chinese and he is 34 years old. His English is passable but boy do you have to concentrate to catch every word. I find I miss quite a few but am able to guess the gaps sufficiently. He instructs us and then ostensibly gets us to be hands on in making a basic fish sauce, vegetarian and also meat spring rolls and a chicken curry. Well, that's the general idea but in truth we are only about 10% hands-on as a moments hesitation on our part induces him to complete that particular task for us. All the other trainee chefs when not required to be in the process of cooking themselves, gather round and watch in obedient silence. He shows us how to chop limes, shallots, chillis, roll spring rolls, chop chicken, etc etc (you have the picture) and before you know it a fine feast is set before us and then a table in the adjoining restaurant is set for two. (Could that be us two by any chance?) Yup, it is. Hurrah! We start to tuck in and Dac appears pulling up a chair and he sits and watches us eat. It turns out that he is watching every mouthful. This behoves us to compliment him on the food and tell him it is 'very good'. Yes, it is, but we are all suppose to be pretending that we actually cooked it and this feels like we are being self-congratulatory. This expectation gives way to the lie that he knows that he really cooked it, and we know that too! He asks us at various intervals 'Can you hear the aroma?'. Hmmmm, we hum by way of reply whilst happily chomping. We would be chomping even more happily if he were not there. More compliments are exchanged (mostly one way from us to him) and then the meal is over. He invites us to his office upstairs for tea. Tea? But we have just eaten. He pours us green tea and then talks to us about Vietnam. He loves his country. He pulls a photograph from his wallet a picture of his wife and two children aged 7 and 6 a boy and a girl respectively. He married his wife when she was 15 and he was 24. He tells he is a Business Development Manager for Nestles and that he earns Us$30,000 per month. He pulls out his salary wage slip for our scrutiny. He insists we read the bottom line. This sum he stesses is net after all 'perks' are paid for. His restaurant business he looks after in his spare time. He tells us that the values of the Vietnamese are purely family, extended family. We look after our parents. If you do not work you do not eat. Old people cannot work and then they die due to abject poverty unless the family take care of them. He is already passing money on to his parents. He is proud to do so. He says they made huge sacrifices for his education and now he is in a position to look after them. He says that he respects the value of money and wastes nothing. (I know what you mean mate...I used to be like that until I came on this forever-holiday!). He says that what he earns from his full time job in a month takes the average Vietnamese 3 years to earn. We found out later that the average wage is US$100 a month which is about 50.00 sterling. Another statistic,65% of the population are under 30 yrs old. Only 16% are over 50 yrs old. This is the effect of war,3 million Vietnamese
were killed in the war (ended 1975) 2 million of which were civilians. So you see it wasn't just a cookery lesson as we were also treated to a history lesson and some cultural values that this society adheres to.
Emboldened by my bravery on the motorbike, I allowed myself to be persuaded to walk back to the hotel. After crossing just one road and with stress levels soaring, I quickly regretted this decision. Another lesson learned...