Skip to main content

Tết Trung Thu


My first holiday in Viet Nam, the Mid-Autumn Festival. Even though I had another long day, I ventured out to District 5 to get special chè (sweet soup) and this little fried treat. It was basically a Chinese doughnut filled with some sort of green bean paste that strongly resembled custard. At any rate, the most amusing part of it was that the food was wrapped up in what was essentially trash. I've been told that it's the Vietnamese way of "saving money and saving the environment" at the same time. I'm still deciding final thoughts on this... 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Chinese Chess - Cờ Tướng - 象棋

The latest interest I've taken in my quest to learn more about my Vietnamese heritage is the game of Chinese chess. It is a bit ironic to look for Vietnamese culture in a game that has the word "Chinese" in its name, but I found that it is only so for the sake of translation. I have taken to this game for a number of reasons. 1. The game has cool historical references that have survived even today. Let's start with the board itself. Unlike a chess board, which is played on the squares, Chinese chess is played on the intersections of lines.  What is most recognizably different from normal chess boards, however, is the large gap in the middle of the board as well as the lines that form an "x" on opposites sides of the board. The square that contains the "x" is known as the "fortress," or 宮(gōng )  in Chinese. The center divider is the river where s ome Chinese words are visible. The words on the left say,  楚河 (chǔ hé ) , mean...
Post a Comment
Read more

It's official!

"Within the first nine months of 2015, zero cases of corruption were found in this city!" "...but we're not saying that corruption doesn't exist, just that none of our inspectors caught anyone." Are you kidding me? Thank you for the freaking clarification, Ms. Nga.
Post a Comment
Read more

It's Been a Long Time

....and what better way to start again than with a quote and fuzzy feelings. “To see life; to see the world; to eyewitness great events; to watch the faces of the poor and the gestures of the proud; to see strange things — machines, armies, multitudes, shadows in the jungle and on the moon; to see man’s work — his paintings, towers and discoveries; to see things thousands of miles away, things hidden behind walls and within rooms, things dangerous to come to; the women that men love and many children; to see and to take pleasure in seeing; to see and be amazed; to see and be instructed; Thus to see, and to be shown, is now the will and new expectancy of half of humankind." -Henry R. Luce, in collaboration with Archibald MacLeish
Post a Comment
Read more