1,000 years and a small coincidence

Ha Noi is celebrating it's 1,000th year anniversary all this week!!! Imagine that! How many cities can make that claim?

Here is a coincidence to ponder but I suggest you do not make too much of it, just enjoy it for a moment:

The celebration officially began on Friday, Oct 1, 2010 and will last for ten days. I happened to have chosen my starting date on the same day out of pure ignorance. I am not planning on staying for such a long time at this job.
I also will celebrate my B-day on Oct 4th in my country of birth and in the capital city.

Ok, enough navel gazing and onto what's happening with the celebration and it's effects.

Saturday evening as I was walking to dinner on a four lane one way street, I ran into a massive moped traffic jam and I mean jam. Every available centimeter of road surface was taken up by a slowly moving mass of two wheelers. The mopeds then all of a sudden, started jumping the curbs and riding on the sidewalk on both sides. It is quite disconcerting to have them buzzing in all around you and not knowing if at any moment now you are going to get clobbered and there is nowhere to go.

Apparently they were all heading towards Hoan Kiem Lake for a celebratory show and fireworks, so in effect all the streets heading north towards the center of the city were equally jammed.

So I ducked down a side street after deciding that I am not going to take any chances of getting run over and found a place to eat and wait out the moped mob. An hour later you could almost cross the street without encountering any  moving vehicle.  Well, ALMOST is really relative here.

Today I walked to the lake in the morning to take advantage of the breezy and cool conditions. The streets were strangely quiet, I found out, due to a race around the lake and the police were out in full force ticketing people who do not habitually obey traffic rules like: red light means no go, NOT go slow into the intersection and then speed up through while dodging cross traffic.

The cops also blocked of the sidewalk in sections so you can only walk a short distance along the shore of the lake and then have to turn around and jaywalk across to the other side to get around the barriers to continue on. By the way, they were carrying long and nasty looking batons.

The runners were mostly Vietnamese men and women, quite a few of whom were running barefooted while others were fully geared out in the latest running shoes - now made mostly in Viet Nam for Nike, Adidas etc...

I left the lake area and meandered into the Old Quarter spending quite a pleasant morning getting lost in the narrow winding streets that changes names every so often.

Tonight I will brave the streets again and go out for dinner since I gotta eat again.

 Around the lake, relatively speaking.

 An oasis of calm.

 Ok, I think I can use the sidewalk.

Karaoke anyone? Everyone? It's very popular and all concentrated in one part of the city.

 So I made it out to see the mad, mad traffic heading towards the lake for the evening festivities. Decided to turned around after a few blocks due to the noxious fumes. Will try again tomorrow night via a different route. I am determined to at least get a close up view, after all how many chances in a lifetime does one get to celebrate a 1,000 year old birthday.

Of course it's only food but....

I had a feeling it's not going to be too long before food is the subject. I would not be me otherwise.
Food is everywhere in Ha Noi, perhaps you have seen photos of people sitting on itsy bisty stools eating away while thousands of mopeds puttered by.

Well, count me as one additional stool sitter-eater. Every morning so far I have eaten beef pho, chicken pho, noodles with grilled pork, noodles with pig feet and congealed blood (sounds icky but delicious to Asians), noodles with shredded stuff, noodles with ground crab patties, sheets of noodles and roasted pork.
As you can tell noodles and pho are everywhere, yet each one is different from the next.

As a side bar the last time Essie and I was in Ha Noi we followed our noses and trailed a wonderful aroma of pho broth down an alley one evening and found a number of large pots simmering away on a sidewalk and yes, every available space is use for something in the city.

Unfortunately for us the broth is for the next morning pho. Well I found it this time in the morning without looking for it. The broth was as delicious as we had imagined but to my chagrin the noodles were mealy after being overcooked and expensive to boot.
How expensive you may ask? A typical bowl of pho, noodle soup or what have you on the street usually cost 20,000 dong, the equivalent of about one dollar and five cents. This one cost 30,000, a whopping 50% costlier and adding insult to injury, an inferior bowl.

Today I moved to a long stay hotel provided by my company for the next two months leaving behind the intensely busy Cathedral neighborhood. This part of town, curiously, is filled with Japanese/Korean restaurants and Karaoke bars.

I found an upscale Vietnamese restaurant - Hoang Yen - Redefining  Tradition is their catch phrase. The decor is one of the most gorgeous so far in Ha Noi with quite a few private rooms where it seems the young "it" crowd have reserved. Redef...Trad...is nothing but a couple of words. The food was so poorly prepared that the cooking staff should be forced to apprenticed at one of the street food stalls to learn how to cook.
There were seven front of the house staff hoovering in the foyer working hard at looking busy, far from the actual concept of being gracious, the management can take serious lessons from other high-end restaurants.
The bo luc lac - shaking beef - was so tough to chew I wondered if it was in fact horse meat for a moment.

My version of this dish kick this restaurant's butt.

The sauteed cauliflower was prepared with so much cornstarch that I thought it came from a bad Chinese joint. It goes to show you that in a great food town there can be really bad food. On the other hand there may be something else going on in those private rooms that I am not privy to. Nah!

Ok, while the food has generally been excellent, there is not very much vegetables available at the food stalls which specialize in one specific dish each . To get my daily dose of fiber I have been eating plenty fruits and my addiction is custard apples, tree ripened and dripping with massive amount of deliciousness.

I can't get enough custard apples!!!! Don't worry, I will restrain myself.

Check out the photos and good eating y'all!

 Basket of ripe crunchy small persimmons - a specialty of the north.

 Yep, custard apples - yum yum yum.

 Noodle with fish chunks and turmeric - the yellow coloring.

 Vietnamese crepe filled with bean sprouts, pork and shrimp, notice the fresh herbs and rice paper for wrapping with.

And finally a bowl of pho with fresh hot chili. Yay!!!

Where indeed is TED?

Me! A blogger! Stranger things have happened.

Ever since I decided that in the US opportunities for architects are limited I began to entertain the thoughts of working overseas. At least in Seattle the unemployment rate for the design profession is awful and will continue for the next few years I think. For my designer friends I hope that I am 99% wrong. So much for reality.

After starting an extensive but casual search process I decided to start a blog if I was to accept an offer somewhere other than in the US. So the blog was created but no posting until now.

Amazingly I received an offer in August, 2010 for a posting in Ha Noi, Viet Nam.

It took all of five minutes before I decided to accept.

So here I am sitting in a hotel lobby in Pho Nha Tho (the Cathedral Quarter) in writing this blog.

My intention was to write a sort of love letter to the US Northwest but it can wait for a little while until I feel more settled in Ha Noi. There is so much going on here in the past two days that I feel a need to write some of it down before I forget or more likely overwhelmed.

 This is a relatively calm street scene if only for a moment.

 These women work so hard every day carrying baskets of fruits to sell for so little that it touches my heart.

And of course a bowl of steaming pho for breakfast, lunch and or dinner. The broth is much clearer than in the US with no sprouts or basil on the side but some nice and hot chilies, not the common green jalapenos.

The city is ever Buzzing, Beeping, Whirring, Roaring, humming, vibrating, jammed packed and then there is a momentary lull and then starts up again, pulsating from early morning till late at night. So many people trying and working extremely hard to earn a living and striving to make a better life for their families. I can only imagine what the unemployment rate is.

And then there is the rain, buckets of wet warm rain, I pulled on my hi-tech cap, put my hi-tech jacket over my shoulder as it comes down. It rained so hard that the choice I have is to get drenched or half drenched underneath all this gear in my own sweat since it is so humid that the gear trapped all the moisture. The Gore folks probably never did any testing in the Southeast Asian rainy season.

The flooded streets reminded me of when I was just a boy making paper boats and letting them float down the street for a few doors before sinking in the deluge.

It's starting to rain.