From finding pho to the Lunch Lady

When I planned the trip to Cambodia last year, it was a choice between flying in to either Bangkok, Thailand or Ho Chi Minh City (Saigon) in Vietnam. (There were no direct flights from Manila to Cambodia back then;but now Philippine budget carrier Cebu Pacific flies to Siem Reap, yay!) Picked Saigon because according to other travelers the border situation between Vietnam and Cambodia was more organized, plus I’ve never been to Vietnam, and I seriously wanted to spend an entire day eating pho, banh mi, the Lunch Lady’s special and other Vietnamese foods. So when P and I woke up on our first morning in the Vietnamese city after flying in at 1 am and getting to our hotel at almost 2:30 a.m. (after immigration and the long line at the lone money changer opened in the airport), our first goal was to find a bowl of good pho.

Pho for breakfast (or lunch or dinner). We were based in District 1, near the Pham Ngu Lao street, an area considered as the backpacker’s district. Pho Quynh, one of the many restaurants in Saigon known for good pho, is along this street. Most diners are Vietnamese, but since the resto has been included in the guidebooks, a good number are tourists as well. Pho is a soup typically made with rice noodles, meat (usually beef or chicken), leaves of mint and Asian basil, bean sprouts, and a side of lime and some chilies. I had Pho Bo Chin (beef noodle soup with well-done beef). The broth was fantastic (light with very subtle flavors of the herbs) and the beef just right to the bite. We would have other bowls of pho, by the sidewalk, the hotel, and more sidewalks. Nothing though compared to our first bowl.

Pho at Pho Quynh

The cure for Saigon and temple exhaustion

There are times when you’re traveling when you just end up feeling sick about something–sick of too many tourists (what I get for  not being the most off-the-beaten-path kind of girl), too many people trying to sell you stuff, too much rain, too much sun, too many motorcycles, too many temples.

Getting to Siem Reap after a day in Saigon and before heading back there for a couple of more days was a relief. Don’t get me wrong. I like the Vietnam city. The energy of the place, the urban sounds, the food, and most of the people. But when you get screamed at in the marketplace, get almost run over by one of the millions of motorcycles (how predictable, right?), and get screamed at by the driver of said motorcycle (because I’m the newbie at crossing the Saigon streets, hence my fault entirely) on your first day, it can get a bit overwhelming. Thank God for helpful hostel and hotel owners, nice Banh Mi ladies, sublime bowls of pho, and cold Vietnamese coffee. (More on Saigon in a future post.)

It was also a relief because we were finally in the town just outside the Angkor temples, a town that–at least for the next couple of days we were there–offered a little time of quiet and not a massive number of motorcycles.

We got things started on the right foot when we got to our inn. We booked a room at Angkor Discover Inn, a lovely little 2-story boutique hotel located in a quiet part of town, but a short 15-minute walk from the Old Market Area. The inn was supposedly designed in a traditional Khmer house manner. Loved how it look, loved the greenery around it, loved coming home to our room (though a bit small was still pretty and always kept clean), loved the very helpful staff, and how nice and quiet everything was. There were other people booked in the inn, but we only saw a couple of them during breakfast and while we were waiting for our tuk-tuk driver to pick us up before sunrise to head over to Angkor Wat.

Angkor Discover Inn

Missing Nirvana

Thanks to my sister’s friend, I finally got hold of a copy of Rob Sheffield’s Love is a Mix Tape – Life and Loss, One Song at a Time. Sheffield is a contributing editor at Rolling Stone and the book is a memoir about meeting the girl of his dreams, of watching her die, and a lot of mix tapes through their years together.

While another friend of my sister recommended it (we were at Borders in Bangkok and he got the last copy, damnit!), the “Mix tape” in the title did it for me. On the book: “Mix tapes: We all have our favorites. Stick one into a deck, press play, and you’re instantly transported to another time in your life.” Never a truer statement made. Like any kid growing up in the 80s and 90s, I had my share of mix tapes (eventually mixed CDs), some I made, others given. Almost all I can no longer find, probably buried in some shoebox.

Sheffield’s book is so much like a mix tape. Some references to a song or an artist make me remember. Childhood in the late 1980s spent listening to  Top 40 hits (Casey Kasem! Rick Dees!) and recording my favorites on a cassette tape, and getting shocked and seduced by grunge in the early 1990s, particularly by Nirvana.

In the chapter of August 1994,  Sheffield writes about the summer “when Kurt was dead but the promise of rock was raging on.” He writes about his fears as a husband, he writes about the MTV Unplugged special of Nirvana that kept airing over and over; Kurt singing “all through Unplugged, about the kind of love you can’t leave until you die… The married guy was a lot more disturbing to me than the dead junkie.”

I didn’t hear this back then when I was 13. All I saw and heard was this blonde guy and his band, with his guitar and scratchy voice, singing about feeling stupid and contagious, about being so lonely (and that’s okay), about a girl…so much angst, misery, love and being able to sing/shout all about it through the guitar riffs. My teenage heart was happy.

By the end of the chapter–and Sheffield writes it brilliantly, hitting the nail on the head when it comes to listening to Cobain–I was asking my husband for the iPod and shuffling through my closet for those shoeboxes. I wanted to listen to Kurt again. Maybe this time, decades older and married, I’ll hear through some of his songs about the kind of love you can’t leave until you die. Or just be transported back to that time when you felt nobody would understand what you’re feeling, besides some band from another part of the world.

“But when I listen to Kurt, he’s not ready to die, at least not in his music–the boy on Unplugged doesn’t sound the same as the man who gave up on him.A boy is what he sounds like, turning his private pain into teenage news… I hear a scruffy sloppy guitar boy trying to sing his life. I hear a teenage Jesus superstar on the radio with a song about a sunbeam, a song about a girl, flushed with the romance of punk rock. I hear the noise in his voice, and I hear the boy trying to scare the darkness away. I wish I could hear what happened next, but nothing did.” Thank you Rob Sheffield.

On the last day of 2011

Before my family and I got started on a day of cooking and eating to welcome the New Year (yes, this post is nine days overdue), my husband and I decided to walk around Quezon Memorial Circle in the morning of December 31. It’s a national park located along the Elliptical Road in Quezon City, where the 66-meter tall Quezon Memorial Shrine stands. Inside the shrine is a small museum and mausoleum with the remains of the Philippines’ second president, Manuel Quezon.

I think I was in elementary school when I first set foot in the shrine for an educational outing. Most people though go to the circle for the park grounds. It comes alive in the mornings when joggers run around the perimeter (there’s even a running clinic every Tuesday and Thursday at 6 am, Saturdays at 7 am, and Sunday at 5:30 am). On weekends, families bring their kids to the playground, fly some kites, ride a paddle boat or an aqua bike in the teeny man-made pond, and during the holidays, go the the carnival for some merry-go-round and Ferris wheel action. There’s also vegetable market, a zip line, a sad-looking soccer pitch (it looked like it needed some major work) and even a fish spa (dip feet in a water tank filled with fish and let the fish do the work.)

Should those activities make you hungry, you can also grab some grub afterward. People have breakfast in one of the many modest stalls and restaurants selling mostly Filipino food–breakfast favorites of various silog (fried rice with egg and meat of choice), lugaw or congee, champorado (chocolate rice porridge), all varieties of kakanin (rice cakes), barbecued meats, and so much more. Since it was December, there were the Filipino Christmas staples of bibingka (a type of rice cake made with coconut milk) and puto bumbong (a distinctly purple rice cake  traditionally cooked in bamboo). I prefer the salty, sweet taste and the fluffy cake texture of the bibingka, but bought some puto bumbong as well before heading home for my brother who recently discovered he loved it. There’s also the beloved ‘dirty’ ice cream. If you’re not familiar with Filipino food, it’s the cheaper and street food version of ice cream. ‘Dirty’ because it’s peddled on the street and street food typically doesn’t really score high in proper sanitation.  Never got sick from it when I was a kid though.

Quezon Memorial Shrine. Look up and you'll see the statues of three angels holding sampaguita wreaths on top of the three vertical pylons

Pick a balloon--Dora, Spongebob, or an Angry Bird

Mang Sorbetero or the dirty ice cream man. Local flavors include cheese, mango, ube and langka (jackfruit)

Bibingka being cooked with charcoal underneath and that tray of charcoal goes on top.

The Quezon Memorial Circle is the nearest open space from our house (closer than UP Diliman), but unfortunately P and I rarely go there. I suggested that we should spend more mornings there this year–to run, to eat, to just take a break from the usual mall-movie-restaurant weekend outings.

An impending new year always brings thoughts of what you want to start doing. A few changes you know would be good for you. To go outdoors more. Write more. Get distracted less. Keep running. Keep hoping. Save more. Bring an extra bag every time I go out. Cut down on plastic bags. Cut down on water bottles. Cut down on the Internet. Read more books. Be braver.

Day 2 of Angkor temples: Banteay Srei, Pre Rup and Phnom Bakheng

Or also known as the day I was supposed to run in the Angkor Wat Half-Marathon.

For all the planning in the world, sometimes the world has a plan of its own. I had to have a medical procedure done a little more than a week before we left for Vietnam and Cambodia and my doctor was not exactly too keen on me even running a 10k until we knew the result. It was something I wanted more than running in the race so even with our race kit ready to be picked up in Siem Reap and my running gear in my backpack, the day before the race, I finally decided not to run.

The day of the race though was not wanting of physical exertion (but not of a half marathon variety). Aside from having to walk around more temples, the day involved climbing up a hill and some of the steepest stairs known to man. I didn’t get a chance to cross a finish line that day, but did manage to find a speck of fulfillment in the day for not rolling down some steep temple steps.

Banteay Srei

Our first temple for the day was almost an hour away from town via tuk-tuk. Banteay Srei is around 38 kilometers from Siem Reap but many tourists still go out of their way too see it; it has been dubbed one of the most beautiful temples in Angkor for its very elaborate carvings and red sandstone walls.

Travel guides will tell you that it is best seen before 10 a.m. and after 2 p.m. We wanted to start our temple hopping a bit late: left town by 11 a.m. after going around the Old Market area and got there in the Banteay Srei right smack at noon. But even with the harsh high noon sun, you can’t miss the temple’s predominantly striking shade–different from most of the other temples’ walls.

Banteay Srei is only a small temple and it was built in the late 10th century when the Khmer empire was only starting to gain significant power

The inner enclosure of Banteay Srei was not accessible to tourists, but one can already appreciate the intricate carvings from outside...

...or take a look inside the inner enclosure for some more fascinating carvings and statues

One of the minor perks of going around a temple at noon--you don't have fellow tourists getting in all your shots. (Just most of them)

Red sandstone can be carved like wood so it's no wonder that the walls of Banteay Srei are so densely covered with beautiful and elaborate carvings

Pre Rup

We stopped at Pre Rup on the way back from Banteay Srei. The moment I saw it–its lofty towers, high stairways and people making their way to the summit–I knew I wanted to see it up close.