I've been playing with my video camera

Green Grass Jelly Drink

Previously on my blog I have extolled the virtues of grass jelly, the healthy alternative to raspberry or strawberry with their artificially enhanced red colour and synthetic taste.  Grass jelly was sure to be a big improvement on those with its ‘green’ environmental agenda.  But I understand that there’s a drawback and that was the lengthy cooking process that grass jelly in a packet required.  The instructions on the grass jelly sachet expected consumers to add the contents to water and boil them for three minutes.  This may well be too much for the modern consumer with their busy lifestyle.  It was certainly too much for my daughter Charlotte to whom I sent a packet ( on request I may add ).  When I asked her what it tasted like she informed me that she hadn’t even tried!  And that, after the lengths I went to to send her some.

Well now it’s all different because new, convenience grass jelly drink is available in cans.  I was excited by this find in my local supermarket so bought a can and rushed it home. The ideal mixer for one of my weird bottles of rum or fake gin I thought.  But now I’ve checked the ingredients and found synthetic sweetener and synthetic green colour and synthetic flavour listed on  the side of the can.  In fact, if you remove those from the list all you are left with is water and something called ‘gelian gum’.

So it seems that you can’t beat the traditional method if you want the real taste of grass jelly.  It looks like I won’t be rushing off to the post office with a consignment of canned grass jelly drink any time soon.  Sorry Charlotte.

A long weekend

Ho Chi Minh is a big, sprawling city full of motorbike noise and people squeezed onto pavements so, from time to time it’s nice to get out and see something of the countryside.  Last weekend was a long one, a bit like England the week before, but for us it wasn’t a wedding it was May Day coupled with the liberation of Saigon on 30^th April.  We had Monday and Tuesday off, so to make my escape I joined three other teachers  on a two day trip to the Mekong delta where the towns are smaller and the air fresher.  These trips are cheap and easy to arrange from one of the many travel agents in the backpacker ghetto of Pham Nu Lao in the centre of the city.

The highlight of the two days came early with a boat ride from the Saigon River through the city down murky waterways cutting through the surrounding countryside to the town of My Tho.  For once this was a comfortable boat ride in a speedy boat.  Most of my other boat experiences in South East Asia have been long, noisy and involved hard wooden benches crammed with too many people.  This one whizzed across the murky water even going past the university on it’s two hour journey to the delta.

The truth about the Mekong is that there really isn’t much to see.  They take you to every small scale production facility doing things to the local crops that they can think of.  So we visited a coconut candy factory, a nice noodle factory, a plain rice factory ( which was closed ) and a fruit orchard complete with folk singing locals.  On day two they delivered boatloads of tourists wholesale to the floating market to eat pineapple and watch the river traffic go by.  But the towns are small and quiet, with fewer motorbikes and cleaner rivers.  It’s cheap, relaxing and simple and very well organised.  We all came back happy and thinking about the next weekend away with the tour guides.

Shopping

I’m usually quite careful with money.  I’ve had a few years of training recently when I haven’t had much cash to thank for that.  My new job, coupled with a very low cost of living, has meant that now, for the first time for a while I can buy most things that I want.  Most within reason of course.  I still can’t afford an iPhone 4 or an iPad but as I don’t want either of these things I’m not bothered.  ( well I could be tempted by the iPad ).   So it was a surprise to me that on Sunday I had a bit of a splurge. 

There’s a bus from Phu My Hung into town that drops and picks up along Dong Koi Street, right in the heart of the expensive tourist district and I often take it at the weekend.   When you get off the bus there’s always a group of motorbike taxi guys touting for business and various people selling cigarettes and newspapers to the rich foreigners.  Amongst these there is a bunch of fruit sellers with baskets mangos or oranges or melons depending on the season.  I love mangos but they are usually sold green and eaten either soaked in spicy oil or dipped in salt and chilli so I don’t usually buy them.  Along the street there’s a woman who must have realised that Westerners like mangos sweet as she has a basket of them just about on the turn.  They are soft, slightly bruised but if you get them home in one piece and eat them up quickly they are fantastic.  They make for a very messy eating experience, with mango juice dripping everywhere, but a very rewarding one too.  

I’ve become a bit of a regular with the lady who sells the mangos now and always stop to say hello.  She knows that I’m going to buy from her and makes a big show of selecting the ‘best’ ones from her basket.  I always get a free sample and sometimes a free banana too.  For about £2 I came home with five squashy mangos, which are now in my fridge ready to be dissected and eaten over the next few days.  I hope they last until Thursday.

Next to the fruit sellers and motorbike guys there’s a small indoor tourist market.  It’s much less hassle than the main market in the centre of town but sells more or less the same stuff.  It’s has the things that tourists are assumed to want, joke t-shirts, ethnic bags and fancy scarves.  The people there have a photographic memory for faces as I discovered yesterday.  I bought one shirt a few weeks ago and they still remember me and the price I managed to bargain them down to.  So, as I walked past the stall yesterday the woman dragged me in and somehow managed to sell me not one more shirt but three!  For £8 each I now have three silk shirts.  They are large, baggy and very comfortable in the heat and humidity and quite subtle in colour.  The trouble is they don’t all go with my trousers so I may have to go back next weekend for more clothes.  

The concert

Finally after all the waiting it happened.  RMIT’s big move into show business has finally reached it’s peak.  Bob Dylan was appearing in front of a decent sized crowd in the sports field where I work.

I got there early enough to see something of the support act, a woman belting out some jazz apparently influenced by ‘the Vietnamese Bob Dylan’.  Between acts I moved as close to the front as I could and squeezed into a gap left by other people in the crowd heading off for food or drink.  This left me about 6 rows from the front and with a great view.  Where else could I get this close?

Dylan came on wearing a wide brimmed white hat and took up his place behind a small keyboard surrounded by a 5 piece band, 1 drummer and 4 guitarists.  They played for just under two hours running through the vast back catalogue which included ‘A hard Rain’, ‘Highway 61’ and ‘All along the Watch Tower’ to name just a few. It looked like he was enjoying himself and I certainly was.  From time to time he strapped on a guitar and came out to the front of the stage to join the rest of the band and occasionally he rasped into a harmonica.

And still the stupid press reports from China criticised him for submitting a playlist to be authorised by the Ministry of Culture and endlessly repeating the ‘protest song’ narrative.  With a repertoire of over 800 hundred songs how many are in any way political?  10 maybe 15?  No wonder the guy gets fed up with being asked about it.  They are about women, just like almost every other pop song!!

It ended with ‘Like a Rolling Stone’ and  ‘Forever Young’, two of my personal favourites with the crowd joining in, shouting out the chorus ‘How does it feel/how does it feel/to be on your own/no direction home/a complete unknown/like a rolling stone/.  Well, to me it felt good all this way from home.

They say he’s lost his voice. They say he won’t engage with the crowd.  They say you can’t recognise the songs.  All true but to be there in the crowd taking part in rock history was a privilege. 

Bob Dylan is coming.

The news has been circulating now for a while.  First it was going to happen and then, later, there was more negative stuff about visas not being issued and that it wasn’t going to happen. Then the university hinted at it and finally a few Fridays ago they put it up on their intranet, so it must be true.  Bob Dylan is coming! Not just to the country where I live, or the town where I live but the actual place where I work!  Tickets finally went on sale last week but I handed over 900,000 dong to the owner of a local bar well in advance just to be sure.  I rushed down there as soon as I heard the news and signed up.  There is no way I’m going to miss this.

The concert will be held in the sports field behind the main teaching buildings. It’s where I pay tennis and where the gym I go to is housed.  Will Dylan use the same changing rooms pre and post concert as I do when I go to the gym?  Will he want to pop into one of my classes and find out how to write university style essays?

The pre-concert publicity finally appeared with posters up around the campus and a free draw of 30 tickets for students.  I visited the field yesterday to watch them build the stage and erect the beer tents.  Yes, there will be food and drink and yes there will be souvenirs but no cameras allowed.  I might try and sneak one in if possible.

They are expecting a small crowd, 6 to 8 thousand, mainly expats as the price starts at £35, a  lot for locals most of whom will never have heard of Dylan or his music.  I’ve just read this report in the Guardian where they had a similar size turnout for Dylan’s first ever concert in China and I’m hoping for something very similar here.  

Supply and Demand

I haven’t blogged for a while because I told myself that nothing interesting was happening but that’s wrong.  Even the most commonplace events, sights or activities have some interest if you look hard enough.  I’ve been busy with work and other things so have let the blog go a bit but recently I’ve been thinking about some of the routines of life that are different from home.  Drinking,  or more accurately, what to drink is one of them. 

I’ve worked my way through a range of drinks from the almost undrinkable to the expensively imported in the search for a reliable alternative to wine.  I like wine but recoil from the bottles of imported French wine as they are ridiculously expensive.  £10 for a rubbish bottle of Van de Paye which would be £4 tops in Sainsbury’s is a rip-off.  The local Dalat wine is thin, weedy and sour, borders on the undrinkable but is cheaper at £2 or so.  Beer is just lager really so it’s yellow, slightly sweet and generally flavourless.  Sapporo, the beer from Japan is the only exception to my general lager rule but still makes me feel uncomfortably full after a few.  For all of those reasons I now drink spirits but which ones?

When it comes to the hard stuff my choice is wide.  At the bottom end of the market there’s Hanoi vodka.  Even as you drink it you can feel it’s bad for you.  I get an almost instant headache followed by a general feeling on unease, like I’ve been poisoned, which I probably have.  Koreans love Soju, a colourless, odourless liquid made from rice which tastes worse than the vodka but doesn’t seem so toxic.  I drink it in emergencies only.  Next up from those two is rum from the Philippines.  This comes in two colours, white and brown, but only one flavour which I would describe as bland but on reflection, and after trying Bacardi, I now realise that’s what white rum tastes like.  For those who are prepared to pay there is no limit to what you can buy but I’m mean and I like value for money.

The other problem I have is supply.  There are a couple of decent sized supermarkets in Phu My Hung and lots of small stores and  there’s a couple of fancy wine shops too for those with deeper pockets but there is no consistency in supply.  For a while now my nearest supermarket only has Hanoi vodka and I’m not drinking that.  They used to have a reliable supply of Philippino rum bit that’s run dry so imagine my pleasure and surprise when I saw a small shop nearby selling it. I was so pleased and surprised that I nearly bought two bottles but instead went for one plus  a probably fake bottle of Gordon’s gin at the knockdown price of £5.

what's in the freezer compartment of your fridge?

Inspired by my luck and the spicy tang of the gin, I wrote this blog entry.  Cheers!