Medium Delirium

Parenthood milestone – took my first holiday since getting pregnant, a pocket-sized weekend getaway to Ho Chi Minh. I flew off on a Friday afternoon and was back on the couch by Sunday night; a blink of an eye by vacation standards, but the longest I’ve ever spent away from the baby. It felt good to bask briefly in the illusion of freedom, though my boobs decided to dampen my feelings of liberation by promptly becoming engorged. I spent Saturday trying to deal with an achy chest heaving with milk – mind you, milk production is never this zealous when the baby is actually around to have a drink – and at regular intervals had to return to the hotel room to milk myself like a cow.

HCMC is less chaotic than I recall, but perhaps I feel this way because I’ve been to Hanoi now, and that, well, that is TRUE chaos. Since we didn’t have much time at all, we mostly circumambulated within walking distance of the hotel, which was in a very central location. The area was teeming with tourists and every other shop was peddling identical, kitschy souvenirs. My sister (who I was joining on the tail end of her work trip) was deathly afraid of contracting food poisoning, so unfortunately we had to steer clear of street food; this being Southeast Asia, those places of course were where all the good food was to be found. Instead, we had mediocre pho at more sanitised joints and ultimately concluded that we’d had better Vietnamese food back home in Singapore. Personally, I’d also had way better in both London and New York. The Vietnamese diaspora, as J reminds me, reached far and wide and took their excellent cuisine with them. One of the best memories of my uni years in London is of countless evenings spent at Cafe East, a humble but excellent Vietnamese restaurant in Surrey Quays. It occupied a standalone, one-storey building at a corner of the Odeon’s outdoor carpark, and in winter we would tuck our chins into our cheap Primark puff jackets and brave the freezing gales that swept, unobstructed, across the large expanse of empty lots, arriving with relief to a steaming bowl of pho that would thaw our frozen cheeks and warm our young and restless hearts. Cafe East’s pho tai is still the best pho I’ve ever had, and I suspect will continue to be because it was seasoned not only with herbs and salt and fish sauce but also the irreplaceable taste of nostalgia and crystallised youth.

This trip was a bit of a warm up exercise for a longer one I’m hoping to take later in the year, to go gallivanting in Europe for a little bit. We’ll see!