A quick publish to say utterly pleased holidays from warmth and sunny Vietnam. Remaining yr’s Christmas and New Years was spent in England with my brother, and this yr is a gigantic change in local weather and in meals: I’m heading to Mui Ne tomorrow for per week of seashore, waterfalls and sand dunes. Christmas in Vietnam!
Saigon is filled with Christmas decorations, with 1000’s of its residents dashing to take footage in entrance of the lights as quickly as darkness falls. Throughout the higher parks they’ve prepare small-scale Christmas decorations for folk to hold the youthful children. Expert photographers stand on the ready, able to seize that trip smile. It rings a bell in my memory of the pumpkin patches they prepare in elements of the USA, wonderful for {photograph} ops. Moreover proper right here the youngsters are dressed up in Santa outfits, full with reindeer headband.
Whereas there are a number of Christmas lights and timber scattered spherical metropolis, I wanted to publish a definite tree, one which’s correct near my home and that rises straight up from the precept highway, watchful and proud. I don’t know why I am compelled to stare up at its branches every time I stroll by, nevertheless I do. A cyanotype filter on a clear afternoon:
And naturally, the meals is completely totally different than the identical outdated Christmas fare. My newest pleasing discovery was a roadside fish and seafood soup topped with a cube of beef’s blood and crab and egg ‘meatloaf’. Vibrant, delicious and sudden. The plastic desk and chairs had been the smallest I’ve seen however in town, with a woman ladling the soup out from a metal pot alongside facet the road. This bowl was free, too, on account of the gorgeous Vietnamese lady subsequent to me was so incredulous that I was consuming the meat blood throughout the soup, along with the accompanying pig ear spring rolls, that she gleefully refused to let me pay. After which she invited me over so she might educate me learn to make it myself.
It’s moments like these that keep on with us as we journey.
As we switch into 2013, I wanted to put up a quick publish to say thanks for learning, for commenting and for supporting my e book as a result of it’s come to market. I’ll be posting a roundup of press and totally different book-related updates in January. For now, however, I wanted to need all people the happiest of holidays, full of members of the family and delicious eats, and all the best for the approaching yr.
For people who have to spend part of their holidays catching up on attention-grabbing learning, I believed I’d moreover cobble collectively a quick file of among the many greater roundups thus far.
Have a super one!
-Jodi