Now, don’t get me wrong, I kind of like seeing how much stuff people can fit on one motorbike–I’ve seen giant paintings, 20-foot-long metal rods, mattresses, TVs–and packing on a bunch of pigs is quite a feat, but when you see five slaughtered pigs hanging off the back of a motorbike, a cloud of exhaust hovering around them, you start to grow a little skeptical about that “fresh” pork you’re buying at the market. I realize this is a relatively minor complaint. For instance, I haven’t the slightest idea yet of what farming’s like in Viet Nam, or how much this really matters if the dead pig’s just going to be skinned and chopped up and cooked anyway, but I still do hope this French woman and others can help improve the means of transporting food within towns and into cities, because there’s something about watching dead pigs choke on exhaust fumes that’s a little disconcerting.

I asked the French woman what she did in the province when she wasn’t working, and she said she didn’t do much. I asked her what she ate for the three months she was there, and she said mostly rice and vegetables, which the lady at her hotel would cook for her each night and set out on the table for her to eat alone. I was somewhat saddened and a little shocked by this for a couple reasons. First, Vietnamese cuisine is much more than rice and vegetables, so I was surprised my new friend never ventured out into the town to find small restaurants or even people she could pay (in some form) to prepare other types of foods for her¹. Second, and more crucially, I’ve always assumed that when there are few opportunities to meet or interact or socialize with people, one of the most sure bets to do so is through food.

I don’t speak Vietnamese, so forming anything like an actual human connection with anyone here who doesn’t speak English is difficult. While I can get by performing day-to-day tasks (I know numbers and the names of different foods), I can’t carry on even a basic conversation with most of the people around me. Some of the most “meaningful” connections I have with non-English speaking people in my neighborhood, then, are with food vendors. Even though initially these people only spoke with me and Erin because we wanted to buy things from them, over time we’ve managed to ingratiate ourselves a little more. We buy meat and greens from the same people each time we go to the market. We get fair prices and decent cuts of beef. The greens lady prepares the appropriate quantity of vegetables for Erin without her having to ask. The woman who runs the bia hoi joint across the street now knows me and Erin, and smiles and sits down with us every time we come in (as she does with all her customers). She even brings us new foods, which we don’t have to pay for if we don’t like. On the surface, these are just basic producer-consumer relationships, exchanges of money for goods, but I think they go a little beyond that.

There’s a number of reasons why I think buying locally is a good thing–reasons which have been laid out by others, like the people at Slow Food and the lady who runs the Berkeley Schools Lunch program–but one of the reasons I’ve begun to think about more since coming here is how buying locally allows you to form connections with those around you. That idea has seemed a little trite to me over the past couple years–in Portland, the coffee’s all direct trade and farmer’s markets are all the rage–but I interpret this idea a little differently now. It’s hard to imagine what it’d be like to live here were I to never eat street food or shop at my local street market, but instead always order delivery from Western restaurants or supermarkets. I might save myself from getting sick from unhygenic food occasionally, but I’d be missing out on one of the best and (for now) only ways to integrate myself into my new community.

1. I’ve since learned that said French woman was able to come into Ha Noi sporadically during her stay in the countryside, so I do not mean to imply that all she ate was rice and vegetables for three months straight. I only talked to her for like twenty minutes and do not mean to single her out.

We got there at around 4:30am. In order to enter the market proper, we had to wait for the right moment to cross the street. I shadowed a woman who looked like she knew what she was doing, dodging motorbikes and trucks and trying not to get trampled by street vendors heading away from the market, en route to neighborhoods across Ha Noi. Once we made our way across the busy street, we entered the market.

One of the first things I noticed about the market was that 95% of the people there were female. Alex and I seemed to be the only other males there not lifting and hauling boxes, or delivering buckets of squid or slaughtered pigs via motorbike. And of course, the market is not designed with tall people in mind. I had to duck beneath elaborate networks of extension cords and electrical wiring as we made our way through.

The market is divided into sections. There’s the fruit and vegetables section, the meat section, the seafood section, etc. Each of these sections is further divided into subsections–for instance, there’s quite a large area in the seafood section devoted to the sale of different types of squid.

Seafood at The Market of Markets from josh r on Vimeo.

The squid is housed beneath large tents and shares this space with a few other creatures, including crabs and snails crawling around in large buckets. Outside the squid tent is more seafood, mostly live fish swimming around in circular tubs, just like you see at any other market in Ha Noi. The difference here is that there’s just so much of everything and so much to choose from, which means that the smell of fish is particularly potent. The ground in the seafood section is wet and puddly, and most of the women selling and buying wear clogs or waterproof boots. My feet managed to stay dry, despite the fact that I was wearing my old hightops with holes in the soles.

The meat section was probably my favorite section. We can get pretty decent cuts of meat at our neighborhood market, but the slabs of beef here looked so good. There was also lots of delicious-looking pork sitting on tables, waiting to be chopped. I’ve been told the Vietnamese like fatty portions of meat, and I think I can believe that after seeing the fatty cuts people were buying up at this market.

I don’t recall much about the fruits except for the fact that the hands of bananas were a deep green color, far from ripe. It’s not unusual here to see unripe bananas, but these were the freshest I’ve seen. Maybe people prefer really unripe bananas for certain dishes or stews?

A friendly man wearing a pair of shorts and nothing else beckoned us over with cries of “ca phe, ca phe!” We stopped and asked how much. He said 10000 for a cup, and even though everyone else probably pays half that, we decided it’d be nice to sit down and take a break from our meanderings. For whatever reason though (I can think of many), the lady behind the table, who was working frantically, preparing something (not sure what), said, “I can’t.” So no coffee for us.

On the edge of market territory was a pleasant, relatively calm space where shirtless men shot pool on two different pool tables. Across the street, inside a quiet garage-type shop, a girl made long ropes of tofu. I want to go back to take better photos and video, but this will have to do for now.

Our first mission was to find nem lụi and bánh khoai¹. Nem lụi is grilled minced pork that comes on a bamboo stick. Like almost all the pork I ate in Hue, it’s brushed with some kind of shrimp sauce that makes it taste a little sweet². You build each roll of nem lụi at your table by putting some greens on a sheet of rice paper, pulling the pork off the stick and onto the paper, and rolling it all up into a “nem.” Then you dip it in peanut sauce and enjoy. Bánh khoai is a fried rice flour pancake filled with bean sprouts, pork and shrimp. So greasy and delicious.

Desserts in Hue are fantastic. I had my first glass of chè–a gooey, gloppy drink that originated in Hue–on a street corner near the Perfume River. The drink consists of crushed ice and coconut milk plus whatever else the chè-maker feels like throwing into the glass that day. You drink/eat chè with a spoon, and each bite tastes different. In the photo, the chè on the right contained red beans, sweet corn and tapioca, among various other ingredients. At another chè place, we had chè xoa xoa, which, according to our Vietnemese friends³, literally translates as “chè touch touch.” Chè touch touch consists of a bunch of colorful jello-like squares⁴. I also tried chè heo quay, which is essentially a glass of crushed ice and coconut milk with about 6-8 pork dumplings thrown in. Pork in a dessert drink confused my tastebuds, but didn’t stop me from gulping it down. We also tried lotus chè and banana chè, both refreshing and a little less extreme.

Another popular drink is nước mía, or sugarcane juice. Ours came in a clear plastic bag, like the kind goldfish come in, with a straw sticking out. The best thing about nước mía is that the stands are easy to spot: you just look for a bucket of sugarcane stalks next to a metal crank-powered stalk-crushing machine. (Lucky for us, in the last week or so a few chè and nước mía stands have popped up on our street in Hanoi.)

We also found some scrumptious candy. One is a gooey sesame seed-covered square⁵, and the other is a tiny peanut bar⁶ that tastes sort of like a Payday, minus the sticky caramel part.

1. known as bánh xèo in Hanoi and Saigon
2. This sauce is made from shrimp paste (mắm tôm) mixed with garlic, chilies, and caster sugar
3. or, rather, according to their guesses, which were presented in the form of song lyrics
4. We all agreed that the name must refer to the interesting way these squares feel in one’s mouth
5. kẹo mè xửng
6. kẹo đậu

So it was without hesitation that I seconded Erin’s motion to prepare a spicy tofu dish for dinner on Thursday night. Along with the tofu we cooked up stir-fried pork with peanuts, lime, and basil. Our side was pickled carrot strips.

stir-fried pork over rice with carrots and greens

In other news, our delightful housekeeper, Thu, has agreed to let us shadow her in the kitchen one night a week as she prepares a meal for our household. We’re hoping that by the time we go back to the States, we’ll be able to prepare delicious Vietnamese meals in our American kitchen (so long as we can get our hands on the proper ingredients).

Finally, in case I couldn’t convince you to head to the highly informative Wikipedia article on betel leaves, I’ll quote this interesting tidbit about their place in Vietnamese culture:

The betel and areca also play an important role in Vietnamese culture. In Vietnamese there is a saying that “the betel begins the conversation”, referring to the practice of people chewing betel in formal occasions or “to break the ice” in awkward situational conversations. The betel leaves and areca nuts are used ceremonially in traditional Vietnamese weddings. Based on a folk tale about the origins of these plants, the groom traditionally offer the bride’s parents betel leaves and areca nuts (among other things) in exchange for the bride. The betel and areca nut are praised as an ideal combination to the point that have become important symbols of the ideal married couple bound together in love. Therefore in Vietnamese the phrase “matters of betel and areca” (chuyện trầu cau) is synonymous with marriage.

what a shot

1. Bánh – which describes the class of foods that includes cookies, cakes, biscuits, and breads – is a word you’ll be seeing often on this site. This is because all things bánh are delcious.
2. including me, Erin, the resident footnoter
3. baozi