The internet at home had gone down this morning, so we found ourselves in i.d. café's main branch in District 1 with a perfect excuse to have breakfast. Our host had to submit a review of the show we had seen last night.
I opted for the xôi bắp (sticky rice served with sugar and sesame seeds). Not to be mean to the café, but our host's version of this Vietnamese breakfast staple is far superior.
My camera had been acting up and giving the notoriously vague Canon Err99 message when using the lens at anything between the two extreme focal lengths (25 and 200). This was most frustrating and I resolved to get it sorted while in the technological metropolis of HCMC and before we move to Siem Reap and the photogenic Angkor Wat.
On a street just south of Le Loi, which was fortuitously replete with camera repair shops, I found a place that was willing to take a look at the apparatus. Having made sure I got a receipt, I left the camera lens and body with the shop for a worrying few hours. Happily, my fears were unfounded and I gratefully picked up a fully functioning camera, paying (I suspect) a tiny fraction of the cost of repair in the UK. The language barrier did not allow me to understand what the fault had been but I was happy that it had been fixed so quickly.
I returned to the café, where the morning stretched into afternoon and K, our host and her friend fuelled our talk on coffee and juice.
Our host's friend is a TV producer, speaks excellent English (having taught it for a while) and has worked on a number of documentaries and films in Vietnam. We spoke about languages, the joy of travel, and a domestic martial art (Bình Định) practised by Vietnamese monks. These two women are the modern face of Vietnam - focused, determined, successful, internationally conversant (with both languages and cultures) and undeterred by a traditional patriarchal society.
In the evening, we had another deceptively simple yet satisfying home-cooked meal.
We enjoyed water spinach fried with garlic, faux pork cooked in a sticky sweet shallot-based sauce, a courgette and mushroom soup (called canh mướp), kimchi and lotus seed rice. Actually, what I took to be a paler, more watery, earthy-tasting courgette is in fact loofah/luffa (mướp), which is porous when dried and can be used as the eponymous sponge.
The lotus seeds had been steamed to a soft chickpea consistency, and the vegan pork sauce was moreish, although the 'meat' was not as convincing as the beef we had tried last week.
As my camera was in the shop for some of the day, this entry has been a little weak on photographs. To make up for that, here is a picture of a cat, because the Internet doesn't have enough of those.
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| Con mèo |
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