I will make you a Bo Bunh

One sunny day in Lausanne, I decide I would visit Dalat for dinner.

Tripadvisor highly recommends it so I take a cab, 10 minutes up slopes and into apartment suburbia.

I sit outdoors in a corner between the wall and the other side of the door, and a nice man hands me a menu in French, as most things are here. I don’t recognize the words but I smell something wonderful coming from the kitchen.

I suspect he is the owner, a French man who married a Vietnamese lady, and we gesture to each other that I don’t read but what is that cooking? Do I speak Vietnamese? No. Chinois, anyone? No. He decides to take me to the kitchen where I am introduced to a petite Asian lady with kind eyes.

For some reason, I am so happy to see her and I have a huge grin on my face when I tell her I am from Malaisie and could I please order what is cooking? Apparently there are several things cooking. After some back and forth, she tells me, she will make me a bo bunh. Her eyes tell me, with the confidence of a mother who knows what is good for you, this is what you want.

That settled, the one who I think is the husband takes me to choose my drink. He shows me the interior of the dark cooler and all its possibilities. I take a sugared green tea, which he makes a show of swirling in a wine glass and letting me try. I love this couple already.

The bo bunh comes – a bowl of vermicelli topped with beef sautéed in onions, spring rolls, carrots, beansprouts, peanuts and coriander. It is a hearty serving, yet I realize as I look at it that I am going to finish every last scrap. And I do. I take my time, for it is so good and so authentic that it makes me understand how food can be restorative, even remind a person of who he or she is.

These two people will never know the kindness they offered a homesick girl in a foreign land simply by being themselves and cooking good food. I am truly grateful.

2nd time around

"Maybe I'd gone up twelve stories, then down three. Maybe I'd circled the globe. How would I know?
- Murakami -

Although there's nothing like being in a place for the first time, I say sometimes coming back is even sweeter.

Sydney after 7 years, and Amsterdam just about two, it's good to see you again.

Actually, it is Simple

When things are going well, be grateful.
When things are not going well, don't worry.

Euro-Asia

Where “privacy” and “personal space” are still buzzwords for some living in Asia, these here are requirements as basic as breathing, existence unfathomable without.

Where watching, gauging and measuring before speaking are valued as strengths, these may be a handicap here.

Strength, built from self-possession and individualism, pit against fluid power gained from years of tolerating and standing in the shoes of others.

A million other things, none right or wrong, just as different as apples are from oranges.

How is it we are so exhaustingly different? And how do we achieve more common ground?

Be it as Neil Gaiman said “If only experience could be endowed without experience”, surely we will be enriched by these times, but the currents of give and take make trying teachers.