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Five flavours: Day 4 Hue
Soundtrack: “The Lovecats”, The Cure Five flavours: sweet, salty, sour, bitter, spicy. I must admit that over the last few years bitter and sour had become almost synonymous for me, thanks to flavours like bitter lemon, I’ve been using bitter to mean sour, and sour to mean bitter. Call it getting old and lazy. So I went back and looked it up: lemon juice/citrus is sour, coffee is bitter. Sour is related to acidity, bitter is more about the other chemistry. It gets confusing with things like beer: beer is acidic, but with the addition of hops it’s bitter. Lemon juice is sour, but lemon rind is bitter. A whisky…
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Five flavours: Day 2 Hue
Soundtrack: “Umbrella”, Rhianna Hue. The ancient capital of Viet Nam, full of history and royal tombs, ruined citadels. The scene of some of the worst conflict during the Tet Offensive during the American War (see previous ruined citadels). We toured a lot of that history back in 2014, so this visit is mostly just seeing modern Hue, eating the food, and relaxing knowing we are far from our day jobs. Despite being quite tired from yesterday’s expedition, we were awake fairly early, early enough to catch the hotel breakfast before it entered its death throes. This hotel does a fairly decent breakfast spread: as with all hotel buffets there are…
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Iberian Spring: Day 10 Madrid
Soundtrack: “Vogue”, Madonna Sunday was fashionista day for us. After a hostel breakfast we headed north to the Museo del Traje, which google seems to think “traje” means suit. Maybe it does, but it’s a fashion museum, so it has more than suits. It’s a collection of almost 400 years of Spanish clothing. including what the aristocracy wore as well as regular folks. So there were some wonderfully intricate posh jackets, amazing frocks, and embroidered waistcoats from the 17th and 18th centuries. The path runs chronologically, and highlights other events at the time that had an impact on the fashion, as well as times fashion was at the forefront of…
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Viet Nam the fourth: Day 5 Quy Nhon
Happy New Calendar Year. It’s a good thing that the Vietnamese seem to be happy celebrating every new year, be it calendar, Chinese lunar, or their own lunar (which may or may not coincide with Chinese lunar) as around 1140pm on New Year’s Eve the heavens opened up and it rained a bit for at least the next hour. Fortunately we were safely tucked up in bed, but I wonder how the outdoor concert fared. We did see some of the fireworks from out window. It’s now 2024, crazy. The only resolutions you’ll see here are to travel more, eat more, walk more, and try to judge the world less…
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Viet Nam the fourth: Day 4 Quy Nhon
It’s new year’s eve, and from the 15th floor of the Odin Hotel we can clearly hear what sounds like the strains of a passionate karaoke singer, while out the window the Grand Hyams Hotel is one big light show. The streets of Quy Nhon are full of families on scooters, but its not the same dense throng we saw in Ha Noi a few years ago. We didn’t hotel breakfast this morning (generally L will go the hotel breakfast as she’s more likely to get gluten free options this way), instead heading out into the streets to find something. We didn’t have to go far to find a little…
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Viet Nam the fourth: Day 3 – HCMC to Quy Nhon
I neglected to mention that there was also dessert on last night’s food and scooter tour, wonderful milk puddings, basically pannacotta/creme caramel (something else the Vietnamese kept when they sent the French packing) in three flavours: matcha, cream cheese, and caramel. Quite delicious. Started with a decent breakfast at the hotel, noting that their banh canh is quite different to the one last night, and is more like pho ga but with prawns, quail eggs, and banh canh noodles. Sadly, the very delicious meat on a lemongrass skewer wasn’t present, and not because we ate all of them yesterday. We took a wander down the street, noting that yesterday’s lunch…
