Hanoi Gray

Hello and xin chào! Fresh off a nasty ear infection—working with children has really done a number on my immune system—I come to you with another post about food! (Here's a  link  to the first one.) As before, this'll just be a list of some of the most delicious and/or interesting things I've tried here in Hanoi. Cơm đảo Char siu pork, vegetables,  cơm đảo , and some artfully drizzled chili sauce. Cơm đảo , which translates as "island rice," has become an unexpected staple meal for me. It's really unclear to me whether it's an actual dish  in the cultural sense or something more idiosyncratic: I've only ever seen it one other place in the city, and there's scant information on the internet about it. I often grab it on my way home from work, as there's a place serving it right by my apartment. A Vietnamese article I found indicates that it's basically white rice that's fried with eggs and no oil, such that the grains become...

Hello and xin chào! Summer has decidedly begun here—over last weekend, the temperature broke 100°F three days in a row. With humidity factored in, my phone told me it felt like 121°F. At night, it doesn't get any better, given the absurd humidity. Last Sunday at 10:30pm, it was 87°F, feels like 100°F. At any rate, I come to you with a sort of odds-and-ends post about my daily life for the past 9+ months. The focus? My beloved apartment and motorbike. In a previous post, I explained the hierarchy of streets, lanes, and alleys in Hanoi—here's a recap: a "street"  (phố)  is a major road 2-4 lanes wide; a "lane"  (ngõ)  branches off of a street and is rarely wider than 1-1.5 lanes; and an "alley"  (ngách)  branches off of a lane and usually can only accommodate motorbikes. Lanes and alleys are numbered based on the adjacent addresses on their streets and don't have their own names. I live on Ngách 14, Ngõ 35, Phố Cát Linh, which means I live ...

Hello and xin chào! (While we're at it: 你好,  selamat siang,  and வணக்கம்—though English is the primary language in Singapore, nearly everyone speaks either Chinese, Malay, or Tamil as well.) I'm truly bewildered that it's already May, but at least Hanoi has been kind with the temperatures lately hovering in the low-mid 80s. It seems like adulthood is nothing but being shocked by the inexorable passage of time. April also flew by—and consequently remains a blur to me—because I spent nearly the entire month sick. I went from a cold to a sinus infection to an ear infection back to a sinus infection. (This means I've done three courses of antibiotics, the first of which only partially helped. I finished most of the last course while I was in Singapore, where, true to form, I started pounding the pavement from the moment I got off the plane. That definitely didn't help my recovery, but it's a price I was willing to pay.) In Vietnam, April 30th is Southern Li...