Hanoi: Delicious Food and Dangerous Streets

We got in from Sapa at 4 AM, and after declining a street peddler’s proffered cigarettes and marijuana, we ditched our bags with the sleeping bellboys at our hotel, and took to the streets.

But first, a confession. I came to Vietnam for one reason really, the food. My hometown Austin has fantastic Vietnamese cuisine. And I’ve been to a few Tran clan Bar-B-Q’s and made my own spring rolls while chowing down on the family goat. When we arrived in Hanoi, I knew what I wanted most of all was to eat, eat, eat.

But alas, at 5 am, nothing was open save a French looking hotel on Hoan Kiem Lake. We sipped 

A pig on it way to market, if it survives the ride

strong coffee made with sweetened condensed milk and watched the city come to life. When it’s awake, Hanoi is a nest of crocodiles on caffeine. People zip by on motor bikes carrying ladders, bags of rice, even live pigs. Pedestrians have no stoplights to protect them, so must say their piece with god and wade out into the street if they wish to leave the block of their hotel. Street peddlers effortlessly brave the traffic to wheedle money out of tourists with offers of shoe shines, bad donuts and delicious bananas. All the while people are buying gifts, selling silk and eating on every corner.

 

My hunger aroused, we went off in search of street food, a simple task in Hanoi. Walk ten paces. Look around. You’re inside of a restaurant. Look at what everyone’s eating. If it looks good, get a bowl, if it doesn’t, keep walking. It doesn’t matter. You’ll find another place to eat soon enough.

We started the culinary rollercoaster with pho (flat rice noodles) beef and a generous handful of fresh basil, lemon balm, mint, and cilantro (coriander to those outside of Texas). We seasoned everything with hot chili paste and vinegar flavored with garlic. After breakfast we found a bahn my stand (as they spell it in the North) with a glistening gelatinous brick of pate. The chef—her sandwich was good enough to warrant the title—smeared the pate on a short baguette, then added chili sauce and fresh cilantro, toasted the bun, and voila, I was in sandwich heaven. On and on we ate, my mantra became:

“Babe, you know what I could go for? A bahn my and a cup of coffee.”

Everything was delicious and cheap except for the one ‘classy’ restaurant we went to, that tasted like Asian fusion food the world over. Blech. I’ll take my pho served out of a motor bike repair shop thank you very much. Trip Advisor is great, but when it comes to Hanoi, just follow the crowds.

You’ll find more than those two most famous Vietnamese dishes. We took a food tour in Hanoi, something I recommend arriving at hungry. We tried (I apologize for my lack of accents): Bun Rieu Cau- a noodle and tofu soup served with crabs found in the rice fields and Raquel’s favorite dish, Bun Cha- BBQ’d pork in fish sauce with papaya slices, eaten by dipping noodles and herbs into the soup and then devouring; this dish was my favorite and rather different from Bun Cha I’ve tried in the states, Banh Cuon Nong- Vietnamese rice flour crepes stuffed with pork and onions, Hoa Qua Dam- fresh fruit served with coconut milk and the dish we kept coming back for, fried spring rolls and finally a cup of strong coffee served with eggwhites whipped into thick cream. The experience was delicious and oh-so-satisfying, and I cannot recommend it enough.

 

But not everything in Hanoi was food and coffee. We met our Ukrainian friend from Japan at Ho-chi-Minh’s mausoleum and explored the bars of Hanoi together.



Guard Chicken

The first stop was a bar we’d been to earlier simply because they had a chicken that patrolled their front steps. I was instantly in love with the place because they had a keg of homebrewed beer they had to finish that night. This meant a glass of beer was going for 6,000 Vietnamese Dong, or about thirty cents. I had a couple before our rendezvous with Ho-Chi-Minh, and a dragged our friend Alex there for a couple more.

It was a lot of fun traveling through Vietnam with a former Soviet because Vietnam still flies the red flag.

“You know only Vietnam, Lao, China, and Cuba are officially communist?” he said with a grin, then shrieked with excitement and ran off to take pictures of a statue of Lenin.

We wandered deeper and deeper into the old quarter, crossing deadly streets, always eating and drinking, eating and drinking. We ended up in an alley crowded with tables serving pork, chicken and vegetables cooked on a sheet of aluminum foil over a chunk of sterno. We piled our plates high and nibbled away until midnight, when the diners all around us left, and the servers unceremoniously folded up and hid the tables and chairs.

A drunken man accosted us, begging the three of us to come drink with him. We laughed and declined, not sure what such an offer would mean in Hanoi, and immediately regretted it. For when we turned around the entire city was silent. Only police cars and street sweepers could be seen. We turned down street after street, looking for a bar, a bottle of whiskey, turpentine, anything! But alas, nothing could be found.

 

“This is what it means to be in a communist nation,” Alex said with a smirk.

Desperate, we led him to a corner store we’d found earlier, only to find it dark and locked. Undeterred by the law of land, Alex knocked, pounded and pleaded until finally the shopkeepers let us in with their fingers pressed to their lips- to quiet us as much as to suppress their own giggles. We filled a plastic bag with big bottles of cheap beer, whispered our thanks and snuck out in between roving cop cars. We joined the other tourists drinking on the shores of Hoan Kiem Lake and sipped our beers while Alex regaled us with stories of the USSR.

“It was illegal to buy alcohol late at night, so the cab drivers always kept vodka,” he gestured to a woman selling flowers and she rode her bicycle over. He asked her for beer and she pulled out two ice cold cans from beneath her bouquets and peddled off into the night. “I like it here,” he said.

We spent the night shooting dice and finishing our beer in our hotel room. Eventually I rousted the bellboys to open the bicycle lock keeping the door shut and sent Alex off into the dead streets of this red city.

The next day we went to Halong bay, a beautiful place that—quite unfortunately—can only be experience by boat filled with tourists. But more on that next time Dear Reader, I look forward to telling you about it.

24 Amazing Hours in Japan: Part 1

The last twenty fours were filled with excitement. The English teachers we replaced came to visit, and we all went out to a fireworks show together. Stoic citizens of Takayama held 3 foot tubes filled with explosives and wrapped in rope as showers of spark rained down on them until the tubes exploded. We stayed until one of the teachers couldn’t resist getting closer for a better shot (he quit teaching to be a videographer, which is good, he’s quite talented and we wouldn’t be here if not for him leaving).We left once security escorted him back to the spectator section. That’s some footage I want to see.

We went to dinner together, but then parted ways. They were invited to a wedding dance party, but with a 2000 yen cover charge, we decided to forego the party for our regular stomping grounds, Desolation Row.

A bootleg of Sid Vicious was playing as we plopped down next to the rival English teachers in town. They were with good friends of theirs, a couple of Israelis, though one of them is from Ukraine, and joked that with him here, soon Japan would go to war as well. The other Israeli was asleep, and wasn’t woken until his German friend came to rouse him.

“We are taking a plane tomorrow at twelve. Let’s go to bed.”

We English teachers all laughed mercilessly at this and the sleeping Israeli refused to leave.

“How long was I out?” he asked, lighting a cigarette.

“6 hours!”

“A month!”

“30 years, actually this is your daughter,” the Ukrainian Israeli said, gesturing to my wife.

“Wow, you are all grown up,” he said, not missing a beat.

Sergeant Pepper started up, and the other English teachers asked me if I thought Billy Shears or Paul McCartney was singing. We tried to talk about the genius that is the conspiracy of Paul’s death, but the music took us, and soon we were all singing.

Impressed with our voices (or trying to drown them out), the bartender put on Abby Road, and later The White Album. The beer mixed the albums together as we belted out “Oh Darling,” bounced to “Obla-di  Obla-da,” and talked shit about Ringo during “Octopus’s Garden.” The Ukrainian Israeli insisted Ukraine girls really were the best and Raquel and I waited to stun them all with our flawless rendition of “Rocky Raccoon.”

At one point the English teachers we replaced showed up. One had the hiccoughs and the other had a look on his face I call the sake-stare. “They had a cask of sake and some crazy woman was pouring it down our throats. I’m drunker than I’ve been in a year!” Somehow he still managed to assemble his camera and film the Beatles sing-a-long. More footage I’m desperate to see. They vanished without getting a beer. They knew the way home, so we didn’t follow them.

I hoped they made it alright, but currently the Israelis were beating their stomachs demanding food.

“You are not hungry? How can this be? We are so hungry! Come, join us, we know a place near the train station.”

Well, that is on our way home.

“Spoken like a true American! Come, eat with us!”

We left, but not before the resident Hungarian grabbed my arm.

“Tomorrow we will go to see my meteor in the morning. You have car?” He had already described his meteor to me. It had crashed sixty-five million years ago and the aliens had repurposed it into an underground bar. Really he had built it out of sheet metal and covered it in faded ink, but that’s not the kind of description I can walk away from.

Uh… what about Monday?

“Tomorrow is better” he gestured to his friend from Myanmar.

Ok, fine.

“Great, ten am? You have car?”

Uh, how about eleven?

“Yes fine. You have car?”

“Good. See you here, tomorrow at eleven. Bring your car.”

The Israelis dragged us through the empty streets of Takayama. Fortunately it had stopped raining (the first time in five days) because someone had stolen our umbrellas. We stumbled into a basement near the train station, then through halls of private dining rooms, each filled with patrons and hidden behind sliding wooden doors. This seemed like a great place to conduct business unseen.

The waitress led us to our own private alcove and the Israelis plopped down. I carefully folded my legs and lowered myself down to the low table, amazed that our friends had sat so quickly. I tucked my legs under me, cautiously sat, and…

CRASH!

I knocked the sliding door/wall behind me into the hallway. Raquel and the waitress held it up until a team of Japanese came to my rescue. Convinced that I’d just destroy the door, they removed it, and we ate in a three sided room.

“This place is normally so quiet!”

“I’ve never seen it so open!”

I turned red while the Israelis laughed and laughed.

They ordered a huge amount of sashimi and pizza and began to shovel it in their mouths. Raquel watched in horror as I kept up.  

“We are out of soy sauce, tell the waitress to bring some or you will destroy more of this place.”

I laughed, pretended to call for her and almost bowled over another waiter. The Israelis stopped laughing. “How drunk are you?”

Raquel came to my rescue, “He doesn’t need to be drunk. He’s just clumsy. Ridiculously clumsy.”

Thanks babe!

As we feasted we talked of the Japanese who ate quietly in hidden rooms all around us.

“They make noises to be polite.”

We all chimed in, with our best attempts at conversational Japanese: “So, so. Hai. Hai. Dozo! Eto… Eeeeeto,” which roughly translates to: “Mhmm. Yes. Yes. If you please! Um… Ummm…”

Filled with delicious sashimi and pizza (how one place can do both so well boggles my mind) and quite sure we had offended the locals, we left. The one who’d slept thirty years, Raquel’s father, waived away our pathetic attempts to pay as effortlessly as her real father would have.

We left, carefully dodging the puke on the stairs, and parted ways. The rain had started up again, so I stole an umbrella as we passed a convenient store, hopefully adding another link in a chain of umbrella-theft that goes back decades. Raquel gave it away the next day, but that’s another story, for another post. After a week of rain, the sun is out. We need to go warm up before the typhoon returns.

24 Amazing Hours in Japan: Part 2

Joe Darris lives in Japan with his darling wife, and would it if you shared his blog with your friends!

Learn to speak Australian! (very EXPLICIT)

CAUTION: This post has Australians in it, so there is gratuitous use of the word cunt. Sensitive cunts are advised to tune out.   

Our first few hours in Nagoya were spent driving around in a sweltering car listening to our GPS yell Japanese instructions on how to get to Immigration. Somehow, we found the place, and got our residency cards.

Yay! We get to stay. Time to celebrate.  

We arrived at the hotel ravenous and headed out in search of food without showers. Bad idea. We found a restaurant in a basement and were served dumplings by the Chinese chef’s children, who were raised in Japan and spoke English. Energized by the globalism of the experience, we pressed on.

My wife wanted to go shoe shopping, and after 2 days of festival drinking, I was obliged to go with her. She thinks the women’s fashion in Japan is lame except the shoes. “It’s all tan and pastel pink, but the shoes are boss.” Unfortunately she was a half an inch too big for every pair of shoes she found. She doesn’t even have big feet. She’d squeeze into some sweet spiky platforms, stand and pout. Too tight. Eventually Raquel’s stench overwhelmed her and the salt flats growing on my shirt betrayed my misery, so we went back to the hotel.

We showered, napped, and went out to a bar called the Elephant’s Nest after hitting up the arcade next door.

The Elephant’s nest wasn’t very crowded, so we sat a table next to a group of gaijin. We caught them glancing at us, and not knowing how else to make friends, we glanced back. After a few sips of beer they asked us to help settle a bet. They wanted to know where we were from. “America?” We nodded. Their friend lost the bet, but he left before buying the next round. “Where do you think we’re from?” the two remaining gaijin asked, sidling closer.

“England?” I guessed.

“England? Do we sound like a couple of English cunts to you?”

That makes two times we have switched the Aussies and the Brits. They both hate it. We kind of love pissing them off. 

They guessed what part of America we called home by asking what kind of food we liked.

“Cheese steak?”

No.

“Pizza?”

Uh-uh.

“Bar-B-Q?”

Bingo!

“Texas! You cunts are from Texas? We fucking love Texas! You cunts like the Rangers yeah?”

We pretended to care about baseball but the charade quickly fell apart.

“So you’re saying this cunt here’s been to more baseball games than you?”

We nodded, but explained that we were going to the Sumo tournament the next day, so it’s not like we didn’t like sports or anything. They were going too, and that somehow convinced them we were sports aficionados “Oh yeah, what sports do you like? Rugby?” No. “Cricket?” Nope. “You cunts would love cricket!” They showed us videos of glove-less catches while I tried to think of something else to talk about.

The beers set in and we talked of travel tips to our homelands, of kangaroo steak and the beauty of Sydney, of the pros and cons of 6^th street and the Bar-B-Q hierarchy in Austin. They explained the rankings of cunts in Australia (Good and bad cunts are both good, as is sick cunt, in fact cunt is a compliment unless you’re called the dreaded annoying cunt). The conversation only grew heated when it turned to the metric system.

I agreed with them mostly, the metric system is superior in a lot of ways. I mean, who really knows how many feet are in a mile? What’s the relationship between gallons and tablespoons? Why are their two kinds of ounces? But I would not budge on my love of the Fahrenheit scale. Fine, use Celsius for science, but for the weather, Fahrenheit is ideal. Each degree of the Celsius scale covers too much sweat. Fahrenheit is more precise. Why does Celsius use negative temperatures when it regularly gets that cold? Zero degrees in Farenheit means you’ll lose a toe, plain and simple. And why only use numbers up to 45? In Fahrenheit, if its triple digits, you know it’s damn hot or you need to go to the doctor. The Aussies didn’t agree.

“In Celsius it’s hot if it’s over 30.”

“But that’s not really that hot.”

“Yeah but in Celsius 30 degrees is 30% of the temperature of the water boiling on your stove.”
Right because that’s what I compare shorts-weather to: a pot of soup.

“Why bother have days that are negative?”

“Well we got a right smart cunt here don’t we?” One Aussie asked the other.

They tried to talk to us about politics. It’s mandatory to vote in Australia, so it’s probably mandatory to talk about politics, but I deftly changed the subject.

“Whoa is this 1-Direction?”

“This cunt likes 1-Direction! You fucking cunt, you!”

We all laughed and finished our beers and agreed to visit each other’s countries once we got home. We hoped to meet again at the Sumo match, but being sports fans, they had much better seats than us, and we didn't see them again.

“I can’t believe these American cunts are going to’ve seen more Sumo matches than Baseball games.”

 

Yup. That’s me. The American cunt at the Sumo Tournament.

Joe Darris lives in Japan with his darling wife. Normally he lives in Takayama, but sometimes the schools close down for a week to give the teachers a break, and he gets to travel. If you enjoyed this story, please +1, and share with any Aussies you know. SUBSCRIBE if you want more!

Tune in Thursday to hear about the Sumo match that almost ended our marriage!

Gion Festival: Eating, Drinking, Collecting

Kyoto holds a false glamor. It’s a tourist town, filled with expensive cameras, sweaty foreigners, and overpriced souvenirs. I’m sure this is unfair, but that’s what I experienced. Kyoto’s power emerges, like a cicada from its mystical slumber, during the festivals.

During the day, Raquel and I went sightseeing like the tourists we were. We saw the Golden Pavilion overrun by Germans and hiked across the city to find Kiyomizudera Temple covered in tarps. The only thing I really liked was Inari Shrine.

Inari Shrine is home to more Torii Gates than any other place in Japan. There’s thousands of them, each paid for by someone (corporations included) eager to appease the gods. It might sound hokey, but I like it. Millions of dollars are spent to be part of this place’s power, and you can feel it. It’s not just me either, more people were praying at Inari than anywhere else I’ve been in Japan.

Walking up the mountain path, through the gates, is glorious. Tourists huddle here and there, and they add to the magic of the place. Because of their presence, you truly notice the moments when you round a bend and find no one. No family. No Germans. No National Geographic Photographers. All of a sudden you’re alone, with 1000 Torii Gates to yourself. When this happened to us, we’d do what any good tourists would do, I waxed philosophic about the timelessness and beauty and blah blah blah while Raquel shamelessly shot videos on her phone.

The real fun of Kyoto comes out at the festivals.

Raquel was eager for street food and I was excited to buy tallboys of Asahi “The Extra” and drink them on the street.

Crowds overflowed the Gion festival. People of all ages were dressed in Kimonos: beautiful couples, young women with exquisite hair and self-conscious men with that special look of pride and foolishness that only comes when a man knows he’s doing something to get laid. There were respectable older women taking pictures of floats, single twenty-somethings preening around for other single twenty-somethings, grandiose old men, adorable children and more beautiful women. There were so many people that one point that crowd simply stopped moving, completely, for 3 long minutes. No one seemed to know why, but we were all glad to escape the crush.

Everyone was there to see the floats. The floats are astounding. They tower over the crowds, decked in lights. Each is unique, hundreds of years old and home to the Kami, Japanese deities somewhere between a God and a spirit. Each float had a stamp, and for the low low price of 100 yen, I too could have a stamp in my notebook! This confirmed my suspicion that collecting is a deep rooted part of the Japanese psyche. Figurines, pokemon, stamps of the Kami, they collect it all. I, a former pokemaster, queued up with the locals. I got seven stamps before I got too drunk to continue, and I’m damn proud of that entire statement.

Meanwhile, Raquel was hunting for food. We bought ayu earlier (read more) but we also ate stir-fried noodles, crepe on a stick, tentacle on a stick, meat on a stick, and Raquel’s favorite,cucumber on a stick. It was lightly salted and served ice cold. She was in heaven.  

 

Other entertainment of the night included catching fish with paper nets, a task as impossible as it sounds. I am a pet addict, and could not pass up the opportunity. Drunk, I mangled my paper net in seconds. I resorted to dunking my bowl into the kiddie pool of dying fish. Victorious, the carnie (do you call them carnies in Japan?) bagged my catch and sent me on my way.

Raquel was not happy.

“What are you going to do with those stupid fish?” she fumed.

I laughed and boasted but quickly realized she was right. In my drunken stupor I believed I could get them back to Takayama without issue, but once there I’d need to buy a pump, a filter…

“Darling, do we have any big glass bowls or vases?”

“You are not putting those stupid fish in a Kitchen bowl.”

These fish were going to eat into my beer money. I needed to dump them, and fast.

Adults are for the most part, rational, sane human beings, so I targeted the exception: parents. “Sumimasen!” I’d yell to a dad already carrying a bag of fish and hold up my catch. They cursed me with cold smiles, then politely declined before their children realized I was offering them more heartbreak they’d have to flush down the toilet.

Then, I saw them. A young couple, sitting on the curb, holding plastic bags of water up to the light of a thousand paper lanterns.

“Sumimasen!” I said, and held up my bag of fish.

The woman hopped up and held out her own bag, eager to compare our catches. They had turtles. Perfect. Getting turtles at a festival is even more irresponsible than getting fish. This was my moment. I held my fish to my chest, then extended them towards her. From me to you. She scratched her head, careful not to mess up her perfect hair. I repeated the gesture, gave a little bow. Thank the Kami. She understood.

She slowly reached out for my bag of fish. I shoved them into her hands, desperate to be rid of the commitment and the guilt I’d feel at their eventual death.

“Arigato Gozaimas!” I yelled, and got the hell out. I glanced back and saw her boyfriend staring at the fish, terrified of all the time and money the little bag implied, of all the work and energy I had escaped, then I lost them to the paper lanterns and silk.

We stumbled back to the hotel, carefree, drunk on irresponsibility and “The Extra,” glad to have experienced Kyoto, and glad to leave.

 

Joe Darris currently lives in Japan with his wife where eats weird things, drinks too much, and generally makes an embaressment of himself. If you enjoyed this story please +1, share and subscribe for more! 

This Indepedence Day, Try "Sex Down Under!"

Happy 4^th of July America!

Independence Day is very special holiday to me. It’s a pool holiday (I was a lifeguard for years). It’s a BBQ holiday (I love hotdogs and beer!). But best of all  it’s a birthday holiday! When I was too little to understand the deep and sincere sense of patriotism that goes with the 4^th of July, my parents used to tell me they shot off the fireworks because it was finally going to be my birthday. Needless to say, it went to my head. I love the flags, the Sousa, the sparklers, and everything else America does in anticipation of my birth.  

Yesterday I found myself in Japan on this most American of holidays, and was homesick. No hotdogs, no drinking beer in a stars and stripes tank top. No fireworks. Nothing. So I did what any homesick American would do. I set out for the bars in hopes of finding fellow patriots.

I didn’t find any. Not one. There’s always Americans about in Takayama, but not last night. Instead I found the absolute worst thing an American can possibly find on the 4^th of July, a bar full of Brits. Well, not the entire bar, just a table really, but the bartender sat us down with them (At Red Hill she always sits you down with someone), not wanting to mix us with her dwindling group of regulars being deafened by drunken Englishmen.

My wife actually asked where they were from and they became quite indignant.

“We’re city boys aren’t we? Me an’ this (dis) here bloke’s from London, this (dis) bloke’s from Northern (Nor-vern) London, and these (dese) two’s from-“ blah blah bother.

They were complaining about the beer not being warm and were surprised when I told them I didn’t give a rat’s ass about the royal Family (OK maybe I didn’t used those exact words but I implied them). My forefathers fought a war so I wouldn’t have to hear about the Royal Family on the 4^th of July, and these blokes wouldn’t give it a rest! They had already cornered a poor Australian couple and a Brazilian, and were forcing us all to play a drinking game.

OK, the game was was actually the Australians’ idea, but dammit those Brits loved it.

I call it Sex Down Under. To play, you slap your knees while chanting “whee-a-whee-a-whee-a-whoop! Whee-a-whee-a-whee-a-WHOOP!” as a group. On the whoop, whoever started the round demonstrates their favorite sexual eccentricity (these are predetermined. My favorite of the evening was the fart in the eye, though the nipple twister was also quite popular), then on the WHOOP, you do someone else’s, then that person leads the next “whee-a-whee-a-whee-a-whoop!” This repeats, faster and faster, until everybody’s demonstrated their particular perversion. If you mess up, you drink, and if the round actually lasts through everyone’s eccentricities, everybody drinks.

It was a smashing good time and we were all quite stricken with it. So stricken in fact the owner of the bar had to keep asking us to keep it down and repeatedly tried to cut the Brits off.

“I’m sorry, I don’t have any more clean glasses.”

“Well just fill this one up then!”

She’d smile and nod as her bar emptied out of everyone by the table of mad Englishmen (plus the two Australians, a Brazilian, and us).

Finally we left to, careful to slip out so the Brits wouldn’t follow us to the next bar. We had a great time with them, no doubt about it, but I’ll be damned if I talk about the Royal Family on the 4^th of July.

If you enjoyed reading this, please comment, share with our friends or on your favorite social media or hit the +1 button!

Joe Darris currently lives in Takayama Japan with darling wife. He misses his parents, peanut butter, a good cup of coffee, and his cat.

#Independenceday #Happy4thofJuly #America #Japan #Takayama #TheBritisharecoming