noodle quest 2006

wooooooooooow! it is raining so hard right now it seems like the sky can not possibly be strong enough to hold up these rain clouds. i mean, the sound of the rain hitting the ground- it’s almost like shots being fired as each drop is so weighty. actually, you really can’t see the drops, it is more like sheets. the extreme rain just started like 2 minutes ago and already the water in the street is about 3 inches high. wow. okay. i’m not sure whether to start from the train and work forward or start from now and work backwards. i think maybe it’s better to start from the beginning of things, starting with the night train. we leave little hanoi hotel courtesy of a taxy that river orders and pays for us. we arrive at the train station at around 6:30 and our train departs at 7. we have already purchrased our tickets through the hotel so luckily we have them in hand as it seemed very unlikley that we could have figured out (communicated) how to buy them at the station. so we peek in the windows of the train and decide to board car 9. we get on, thrown our stuff down in an empty room and sit down. moments later a couple and their two small daughters rush into the room with all of their luggage and sit down on the bed with us and pile all of their things on top of us, literally. we are like kind of laughing and then they are like get out… hmmm. it turns out we have an assigned car, room and even bed on our ticket. who knew? so somehow we smush past them out of the door although the little girls jumping on our stuff does not make things very manageable for us. we find our car, room, beds and sit down. then our two bunkmates soon arrive; Dang, a vietnamese guy fluent in english with an australian accent who works fro an australian adventure sports company in vietnam, and some older businessman who spends most of the ride outside of the room with a friend. Dang is very informative and he is good company for the ride. he and i have the top bunks across from each other and jess and the suit have the bottom bunks across from one another. jess and i had purchased sandwhiches at the “no noodles cafe” so we ate them although we were very nervous because it was the first uncooked vegis we were consuming (lettuce, tomato). luckily, we lived sans the dreaded diarreah. the room had two bunk beds, a small table and a big window from which we saw some amazing scenery. I slept pretty well from about 9:30pm until 5am at which point i couldn’t sleep anymore. i went into the hall outside of the room feeling glad that if i was to step on anyones head on the way down it would be jess’ s and not the suit who would scream foreign obsenities at me. i opened the window in the hall and saw torrential rain pouring down into what i thought was a lake but what Dang told me later was a rice paddy that was overflowing. a woman was in the middle of the lake bent over posible saving a couple bags full of rice before it was all washed away. lighting was crashing behind her and it was a very dramatic scene for 5am. i got back in bed and at about 6am the men started receiving phone calls and talking very loudly. at 7am the suit go off in Hue and we three were served instant beef noodle soup and conitinued on to Da Nang where we got off at around 10:30 we parted ways with Dang who was staying on the train until Saigon, another 8 hours i think. then we got in a taxi which took us to the Than Xuan hotel where we are staying now. we walked around to check out some other hotels which were a bit more in the center of town but ours was definitely the nicest. for 12$ we are staing in a hotel with art on the walls, a beautiful garden restaurant, and a bathroom with a huge marble tub. lunch was in some little place with cute tables right on the street where i tried a hoi an specialty- white rose- which is shrimp wrapped in rice paper. We walked around window shopping for a few hours than had a deliiiiiiiiiiiish dinner at a little art gallery/cafe right next to our hotel called cafe cuoi. jess had amazing pumpkin soup and mango tofy spring rolls. i had some garlick water spinach which she went out to buy for me, some rice and amazing fish. it was grilled white tuna with some fresh green herbs grilled into it, with a chili-ginger sauce. yum! it tasted so good it was ridiculous. we also had some special tea that she made for us. then we hung out at the hotel for a bit and watched the monsoon come in waves from the lobby. the next day we went to a restaurant called ba le well for lunch/breakfast which was up a small alley. ba le well is a square shaped well that provides water for this soup called cau lau. cau lau can only be made in hoi an because the water must be used from this well. so this family run restauarnt is named after this well. the restaurant was all locals with a big fire pit outside. the food was so good we swooned and cried out in joyful pain and glory. aaaaaaaaaaaaagh! we ordered nothing and were served a heaping plate of mixed greens, rice paper, crucnchy taco like pancakes with egg, beansprouts and shrimp in them (no shrimp for jess). Mai the hostess was so nice to us and sat down at our table and rolled everything up for us. the rice paper triangle goes in the palm of your hand, the taco is opened up and put inside it, (teh next day when we went back, bbq pork is pput inside it too! yuuuuuuuum!) the leafy greens are put inside the taco, then it is all wrapped up into a rice paper spring roll. next you dip it into a chili-peanut sauce mix. aaaaaaaaagh! it was so delicious we made a scene with our moaning and cries. the teenagers in their laughed at us and everyone kept bringing us mroe food. i also ordered cau lau, the hoi an speciality soup which consists of grilled pork over wide egg noodles with crispy croutons. it was pretty delish but nothing compared to the pancakes. now fed, we felt able to shop, and hoi an being a town of tailors, was ready for us. we looked all around and viewed the cloth market where we met some interesting charactors. then we decided to have some clothese made. i went for a pair of jeans (10$) at one shop and two dresses (16$) at another. we were measured from every conceivable angle and chose our patterns, materials, etc. for dinner we ate at a restaurant overlooking the market on a second floor terrace where we kept it light and ordered simple rice, tofu and vegis. food was okay, nothing to rave about. for some reason although it seems like we should be stuffed to our gills, we needed a second dinner later that evening so we splurged for pizza at and some fishy tasting wine at a restaurant called “Good Morning Vietnam.” the next day was Monday, which was yesterday. We took a walk over a tiny very old somewhat scary bridge into the residential side of town where children were very intrigued with us. we walked around some very small streets and sat for a while with some nice people who were selling lanterns outside of their home. there are a handful of men in this town with no legs who ride around in bicycles powered by their arms. it makes us feel like we do not want to say we are from america so now we are from chile and we mostly speak in spanish. we looked on the internet for a bit for some clothing we might want copied then went back to ba le well for lunch. later we had some more cloths made (pants, tank, shorts) at two different places and went for second fittings of our sunday shopping spree. the jeans i bought are pretty gross and the dresses are very cheap but cute. after i am done writing i will go check on yesterday’s purchases. jess started feeling a bit queasy and weird at around 5pm yesterday. she went to the bathroom and unfortunately realize that the draeded diarreah had found her. the monsoon got crazy and we got in a cyclo (little cart, little bike, little man) and went back to the hotel where jess proceeded to get much sicker. much more diarreah and vomitting ensued and also a really high fever which required her to wear two layers of lcothing and use two blankets in a room that to me felt comparable to the humidity level of the amazon. i went out to go get her some bread and when i got back she had two of teh ladies from the front desk in the room- while i was gone she had goten the shakes and almost passed out. based on her symptoms it seemed like she had a bacterial infection and should start taking cipro although i felt a bit scared at how sick she was so we decided to call a doctor at around 11pm. he showed up and he seemed pretty legit. he gave jess a shot that would allow her to keep the medicine down. he determined that she had gastroenteritis and told her to take the cipro and some other medicine that suppresses the symptoms (i.e. bloating, cramping). poor jess. i was really nervous. i know it was bacterial and her symptoms were very normal but it was very extreme and she was moaning and in tons of pain. thankfully we are in a very clean nice hotel and the people who work there are helpng us a lot. jess got to sleep and thankfully kept the medicine down. today she is feeling better but is achey from expelling so much out of her body. we are not sure why she got so sick. we ate all of the same things except that i ate 20 pounds of pork which should have made my diarreah stakes rise higher than hers. the explanation we could think of was that i was immune to the bacteria because i had been exposed to it before. this is probably true as i had an almost identical sick experience in chile and maybe that was when i was exposed to this bacteria. whew. okay. i am going to check on jess, and check on my clothes. GOOD NEWS! photos should be available for viewing in about 2 hours (they have already been uploading for the past 2 hours). check back later for pics of ha long bay, hanoi part 2, and the beginning of hio an.

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