Technical Difficulties and Some Stuff About the Finer Things in Life (Food and Beach)

I'm having some issues getting the past few computers to cooperate with my camera, so I will be without images for a while, apparently.

Lisa and I arrived in Dalat this afternoon after a few days of "real" vacation, meaning, we went to the beach.

But I should start before that.

After we got back to Saigon, Lisa needed some down time. So she sent me to cooking school. :-) I spent a half day in a Vietnamese Cooking class on Sunday morning. I met our teacher, Chef Bao, and his translator/assistant, Jasmine, in Ben Thanh Market. Matt and Katie from San Francisco followed close behind. It was just the three of us. We started the class by taking a spin through the food section of the market, learning more than I needed to about the delicacies of Vietnamese cuisine. Luckily, the menu plan did not include any organ meats, frogs, or eels. We finished the market orientation and headed for the Vietnamese Cookery Center, which sounds so much better in French (Centre Culinaire du Vietnam).

At the Cookery Center, we started off with a small snack (We didn't make it. Just ate/drank it) of tea and candied ginger. Tea is a coomon starter in most restaurants. I think it's generally a pretty weak jasmine or green tea, and can be hot or cold. After tea we moved to our work stations.

The first course was Vietnamese Spring Rolls (Cha gio). We were instructed on the ingredients to mix (including pork, taro root, spring onion, shallot, and a few other things), and then we were instructed on how to roll it in the netting rice paper. Netting rice paper gives the spring roll a kind of cool consistency - almost like you have rolled it in really thin noodles. We deep fried the rolls, and made a dipping sauce, which included one of THE most important ingredients in Vietnamese Cooking: Fish sauce (Nuoc mam). If you have a Vietnamese meal in which fish sauce does not figure prominently, then it isn't Vietnamese.

Course two: Caramel pork in clay pot. I have also seen this dish using shrimp. The thing that makes southern Vietnamese cuisine different from northern Vietnamese cuisine is that it tends to be sweeter - thus the caramel use, as well as liberal use of sugar in most of the dishes. We were to work for a balance between sweet (sugar or coconut juice), salty (fish sauce) and sour (lime juice) in several of the dishes, including the spring roll dipping sauce. We did not make the rice that went with it, but Chef Bao showed us the proper amount of coconut juice (not coconut milk) to add to steam the rice. He had a seriously bad-ass rice cooker too.

Course three: Sour clam soup with dill. Seafood is very common, and dill is used constantly, with seafood as well as other things. I wasn't sure I'd like this dish, because, I mean, come on - sour clam soup? Does that really sound appealing? But it was surprisingly tasty.

We did not make dessert, but we were served sauteed bananas in coconut milk, sprinkled with sesame seeds.

After class, Katie, Matt and I hopped in a cab back to the market. I HAD to get some of that netting rice paper to bring home to try this out. After securing three bags of the stuff, I met Lisa, and we got on the road to the beach.

Ahhhh the beach. You can't *not* relax at Mui Ne Beach. That is, after you have reached your final destination. The 2km walk from where the buss dropped us off to get to our hotel while carrying a heavy, overstuffed frame-pack, in flip flops while you need to pee after a 4 hour buss ride was NOT very relaxing (mental note: Lonely Planet Guide does not use the same scale on all of their maps, so objects may appear closer than they actually are).

But once we got there, it was reeelaaaaxing. We went to bed early, we woke up when our internal alarms told us too, we ate good breakfasts, we relaxed by the pool with books, occasionally hopping into the cool blue water when we got hot. I did finally get in the South China Sea on Day 2. It was lovely. We ate pizza for dinner and went to bed ridiculously early again.

It just doesn't get much better than that.

Now we are in Dalat. It is significantly different. They call it City of Eternal Spring for a reason. It's cool out and we are surrounded by mountains and pine forests as opposed to beach and palm trees. It's lovely too, just in a different way. And both options are better for me than being at home in cold Washington DC.

More on Dalat tomorrow after our tour with the "Easy Riders."