Sailing Away down Halong Bay

Photos courtesy of Taking5. All Rights Reserved.

Halong Bay turned out to be every bit as scenic as I imagined. The junk was Chinese style complete with sails which stayed furled throughout. What was a surprise was the food turned out to taste almost exactly like home cooked healthy Chinese food with the exception of having simple salads and the odd habit of serving white rice only towards the end of the meal.

And the second surprise was the party-ing that went on at night. In the quiet of Halong bay surrounded by mystical karstic landscape, the night was punctuated with loud karaoke singing of hits from 70s all the way to 90s. Each junk had its own particular brand of music blasting through the dark wooden walls and airconditioning so that it was possible to hear each boat's merry making from quite a distance.


There was even an intrepid few who were swimming from junk to junk, asking to be allowed on board just for the thrill of jumping off the second level and diving into the cool waters in the evening. It was certainly a memorable trip from the peaceful cruise amid limestone scenery to the amusements on board of a very mixed bunch of guests from Europe, America and Asia.

More anon.

Julia and Julie : labours of love

I'd read Julia Child's "My Life in France" and loved it enough to read it again. So when the movie came out, I promptly went out with a couple of friends and we sat, laughing our way through it. It's a great story of how Julia Child found her vocation late in life. She married late (especially for those days) and her marriage was evidently a very happy one which lasted the rest of her husband's natural life (and he died at 92). And in the course of following her cultural attache husband around Europe, she discovered she loved both food and cooking in France. It was the beginning of what would be a long labour of love, her master cookbook on French cooking with her good friends and co-writers, Simca and Louise. It was also one which fit well into her married life and the one supported the other and eventually her hobby grew to the extent her fame as a celebrity teaching chef became their joint means of earning a living after he retired from service with the US government.

Julie turns out to be a modern day blogger who cooks her way through Julia Child's masterpiece of a cookbook, all 500+ recipes of it in the space of a year and blogs about it under a blog called the Julie/Julia Project. Young, married and living in Queen's borough, New York, she finds Julia Child to be her saving grace from a tedius job and a cramped apartment. The movie, one rather suspects, is kinder about her than her blog is but as I've yet to spend much time reading her blog or her book, I'll reserve judgement on that.

As a movie, it was thoroughly enjoyable and bits of it are certainly memorable. Meryl Streep steals the show as usual and she gets Julia Child's voice pat down. I find that it's not that well sewn together in terms of how the two stories are intertwined. It's done simply enough with long takes of each story leaving you wondering sometimes what's happening on the other end. The cakes Julie bakes don't quite look French, and resemble the hasty American slap-together ones far more but other than that anomaly, the scenes of Julie battling with the lobster and duck are quite amusing.

I tend to think that the Julia Child story deserves a movie by itself but then I am generally fascinated by stories of how people learn to cook seriously and how they study the art of cooking and make their own discoveries in it. I also noticed in the nearby Harris bookstore near the movie theatre I went to, while they stocked the Julia Child, "My life in Paris" and the Julie Powell, "Julie and Julia: My year of cooking dangerously", Larousse Gastronomique, they only stocked a highly shortened version of Julia Child's masterpiece, "Mastering the Art of French Cooking." So, is it that Julia Child's masterpiece has not stood the test of time and the editors were right, that there would be no demand for her demanding cookbook? I hope they're wrong.

So here's to good cooking and good eating!

Bon Appetit!

Swimming Beauty

Swimming Beauty
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Sadly it wasn't quite the right time to go swimming in Hanoi in spite of the very inviting pool in the Somerset Westlake Serviced Apartment we stayed at. But any excuse to buy this bag will do and I was delighted not just with the gorgeous girl embroidered so delicately but that they had put in a waterproof lining and the zip was a hidden one. This little shop of embroidered treasures where I discovered this, is called Tan My Embroidery

Naturally after being enchanted with that bag, I rifled greedily through their carefully laid out selection of bags and selected a few others as gifts for people I knew back home. I have to say what I liked was the marriage of a 700 year old traditional craft in Vietnam to comtemporary designs and objects which can be used. Useful art or design is a whole lot easier to buy than something which simply hangs on one's wall, although that certainly has its place too and the embroidered art pieces were certainly stunning.

I'd say this shop isn't cheap. I guess the picture of Laura Bush shaking the hand of the proprietor should have given me a clue as to why all the items were priced in USD so don't expect a bargin. However, they do deliver high quality contemporary embroidery that can be put to good use whether it's duvets, bedsheets, pillow cases, a blouse or two, or a shoebag.

Blue Trees

After the initial din in the streets of Hanoi, slipping into an art gallery or two, was soothing to the senses. I entered a world with long empty spaces and up narrow staircases, I discovered wall after wall covered with contemporary Vietnamese art that attracted and entranced.

It's easy as a visitor to find the galleries as there are a few streets in the Old Quarter of Hanoi which have a gallery every few steps. I wandered into the Green Palm Gallery, and a few others along the same street and finally came across the Mai Gallery which had paintings by my favourite Vietnamese artist, a woman called Phan Thu Trang, who paints lyrical, impressionistic scenes of trees, houses and people with the colour of the trees showing the season: green, pink, orange/yellow and blue for spring, summer, autumn and winter. I especially liked the winter and summer landscapes. I also came to the conclusion that the Vietnamese must love their trees as quite a number of artists had clearly taken some pains with their trees lavishing them with a nuance, gradation of colour and suggestion of movement that caught my eye. And Hanoi had a great number of old trees in it with the roots spilling across the pavements.

Other pieces which stayed in my memory were the oil and acrylic mixes of bucolic farmhouse amid field scenes where it was more the impressionistic mix of colours that was so striking. The haunting, subtle monk or monks disappearing into a canvas of dark black or orange also stood out.  

But the surprise was saved for the last as one of the last galleries we entered turned out to be a gallery where one could order a masterpiece so to speak eg if you wanted a Van Gogh Sunflowers, you could tell them this was what you wanted and in three days, they would have one ready for you at USD $30-40 depending on the size.  Some of the work was original but the gallery clearly did their best business simply in providing a poor art enthusiast with an inexpensive rough copy of his favourite artist's work.  These paintings were sometimes simply in the style of, sometimes outright copies, albeit not fakes as they were clearly copies.  These would have no investment value obviously unlike the expensive S$700-1400 pieces of emerging Vietnamese artists, but they had their own market niche.   

So, a blue tree by an unknown artist anyone? 

Picture courtesy of Taking5.  All Rights Reserved.