Coffee shops everywhere

Goodbye, coffee shops everywhere.


One thing I will sorely miss is the coffee shop culture of Ha Noi. There are seriously little coffee shops on every street in the city. You can suggest, "Hey, let's go for a coffee" anywhere at anytime of day and it will be immediately possible. There are a few chains, but most shops are family-run affairs. However, they somehow manage to be ridiculously uniform. You can pretty much count on the same menu, flavours, tables with pictures of movietars' faces on their tops, wicker chairs, fonts on the sign out front, and flimsy metal spoons wherever you go. Many of the shops don't even really have names; they just go by their street number. You can't see very clearly in the picture above, but it features Cafe 101, Cafe 99 and Cafe 97. Wow, so original...

But I think my initial nonplused reaction points to a really central and interesting value difference between Western and Vietnamese cultures--in the West, if you're not totally unique and innovative, you get scorned and left behind, while here, being original is... just not that important. This is evident in the way people dress and do their hair, the fact that half the motorbikes on the road are the same make, the repetitive style of houses and interior decoration, etc., etc. There is a margin for difference, but it's very small compared to what I'm used to in North America. It's so easy to pick out young Vietnamese people who have lived abroad of have ambition to... they just look different.

So it does seem ridiculous to my Westerner sensibilities that the coffee shops are almost all so generic and nondescript. However, they are almost all generically and nondescriptly delicious and satisfying. See, those English words hardly make sense in that sentence. We are not supposed to be impressed by anything less than "the one and only." But I am impressed by the coffee shops in Ha Noi. It's like having the quality assurance of a big chain, but without the corporate control. How does that happen? It's a wonderful mystery to my foreign little soul.

Coffee shops everywhere, thank you for being unoriginally wonderful. Always there and always refreshing. I appreciate you and will miss you very much.

Goodbyes... lac ran

So all this re-entry stuff from MCC I've been reading keeps emphasizing: good goodbyes = good re-entry. And, of course, the opposite as well: bad goodbyes = death to your re-entry experience. Therefore, I have started making a lot of lists to make sure I get all my good goodbyes in before I go: people to see, activities to do, things to buy. I've also recently started thinking in colons a lot: obviously.

Along with people and places, apparently it's also important to say goodbye to things. With that in mind, I've decided to devote a few blog posts to these farewells. If all goes as planned, this will aid me in my detachment process and will also help me share with you some of the lovely mundane bits of my experience here, which do not usually make it onto the blog. It seems these everyday little joys are what I will miss most when I am not here anymore. So without further adieu...

Goodbye "lac ran" (fried peanuts)


You would not believe how delightful these little roasted nuts are. They are a regular dish at the MCC office, and I do believe that no one in Viet Nam makes better lac ran than Co Tu (the MCC cook featured in the post about my work at MCC). They add a fabulous nutty crunch to any bowel of steamed rice (wow, I feel like a commercial) and are also good for snacking on before the meal (when you're waiting hungrily for everyone to sit down) or after (when you're feeling nicely satisfied but don't mind munching on something while you continue to chat with you fellow diners). And I would have to say, eating them with sliced pumpkin friend with garlic and scallions is probably in the top 5 of my favourite dishes in Viet Nam. More on those other dishes to come!

I have asked Co Tu to call me down to the kitchen the next time she makes them so I can watch and learn. She assures me it's very easy: just fry the raw peanuts in a little bit of oil, stirring constantly, then wait for them to cool before lightly salting. So it does sound pretty easy... I'm still a little dubious about my ability to reproduce this delicacy independently on the other side of the world. You can buy raw peanuts in North America, right? I've just never tried. For now, I am just trying to eat as many as possible here. Even if I can make them by myself back home, I'm sure it just won't be quite the same.

Lac ran, thank you for livening up my lunches. So simple, yet so wholesomely delicious. I appreciate you and will miss you very much.

Home(?)

In honour of today, June 18: exactly one month before I return home(?)

From The Art of Coming Home, suggested reading from MCC:

Usual definition of HOME: "the place where you are known and trusted and where you know and trust others; where you are accepted, understood, indulged and forgiven; a place of rituals and routine interactions, of entirely predictable events and people and very few surprises; the place where you belong and feel safe and secure and where you can accordingly trust your instincts, relax and be yourself" (15).

However, this is a very high standard, "a standard, in fact, that any such place cannot possibly meet. As you will see, this very realization, that home is not really home, is at the core of the experience of re-entry" (16).

Oh dear.