 There are several things to do during Tet in Saigon. It’s not a one-day holiday, it’s a season, similar to Christmas in form and Thanksgiving in spirit. The holiday is lunar-calendar based. It starts on the 23rd of the 12th month, the day to “cung dua ong Tao“, a ceremonious dinner to see off the Household God as he takes his annual trip to heaven. It ends on the 7th day of the 1st month of the new lunar year. In the first week, there are spring flower markets on Nguyen Hue Street and water melon markets in Dakao. Water melon used to be available during Tet only, and there used to be only one kind – the green outside, red inside kind. Now there are yellow, striped, even cubic watermelon! There’s the sound of the gongs and the drums of mua lan (lion dance) in the neighborhood. There are thousands of crimson red Chinese sausages packaged, displayed not so far from deep green banh chung and banh tet. Hmm… it just crossed my mind that the main colors of Tet are also red and green, like Christmas… There is orange from the […]
Continue reading L’approche du Tet*
 Vietnamese Around noon time, in front of the smaller-than-a house’s door gate of the old Pho Thong Nang Khieu high school (notice they don’t show you the gate in that picture…), came an ice cream man. The typical street vendor, with a big styrofoam box on a bike, maybe a couple of buckets on the sides, I’m not sure if I remember correctly the details here. He sold kem ong, i.e. ice cream tubes. It’s something I’d never had before and possibly will never see again. His ice cream had a skinny tubular shape, about a foot long, stick to a long skinny bamboo stick. The ice cream is actually contained in aluminum tubes, from which he quickly pulled out when we asked to buy. I usually went for the jackfruit kind (kem mit), where you have little strips of jackfruit hidden inside the ice cream, quite a treasure to chew as the vanilla milky bits melt on your tongue. For VND1000 a stick, the kem mit was sold out within 15 minutes or so. He also had kem dau xanh (mung bean ice cream), kem dau do (red bean ice cream), and a […]
Continue reading Kem ống (Tubular ice cream)
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