Jananas

Another night of the root beer challenge and another paired challenge – the diet and regular versions of Frostie Root Beer. For both bottles, they had that nice root beer smell. Ever smelt a bottle of root beer right after its been opened? Well, if you haven’t I suggest that you do – its one of those little joys in life (like jumping in puddles or smelling roses). Unfortunately the overall taste was, well, average. Somehow I expect more from a small distributor and from a beverage in a glass bottle.

However, our Frostie had been sweetened with high fructose corn syrup and wiki rumor mills have it that the latest bottling run has returned back to the original cane sugar, meaning that it might taste a whole lot better. The diet version was sweetened with sucralose (aka splenda). I’m not a big fan. I find that it tastes fine while you are drinking it, but there’s a chemical aftertaste that ruins the good root beer taste.

Anyone know why Frostie bottles have pictures of Santa on the label? I get the frostie/frosty connection (i.e. a cold glass mug) and so could understand if they had used a snowman. But Santa? I just don’t quite understand.

I thought that I’d change up my recent run of travel posts, by adding one of my other favorite topics into the mix. Knitting.

I did research before we left about where to find knitting stores. Although it turned out that I didn’t need it, as it appears that I have an 8th sense reserved just for finding yarn and yarn stores. In Bangkok, I’d read about the Big Knit Cafe on Sukhumvit 49 and about how out there/difficult it was to get to. It turned out that it was on our way back to our friend CJ’s place (where we were staying), meaning that it was super convenient. The yarn gods smile upon me.

Its a pretty fun store – bright and open and stuffed full of novelty yarns. Not surprising given that the climate is too warm for wool and the cute crocheted animal influence from Japan. I spent a lovely hour there one afternoon, working on a pair of socks and drinking some Thai Iced Tea. I even helped a young English girl with her scarf, as she was the only non-Thai person in the place.

Oh course, I had to buy something to take home with me. Think of it as being a yarn tourist. I’m not super into novelty yarns or strange acrylic mixtures, so I picked up some lovely hot pink microfiber (imported from England). I still have no idea what I’ll make with it but I did dutifully haul yarn from Bangkok all across southeast asia.

I also hit up Zawa Knitting (also located on Soi 49). This shop was smaller and cramped. I found the staff to be less helpful overall and felt a little like I was intruding on their private knitting time. Strangely, the Clover needles and accessories where more expensive here than at home. Not entirely sure how that works. To balance that, they did have a better (if less organized) selection of wool yarns.

When we were in Kuala Lumpur we visited the Zoo Negara. It was on the smaller side (as zoos go) and sometimes had that feeling of ‘we wouldn’t do that at home’. Oh, and it was rainy! Outside of that, we had fun looking at animals – seeing lions and tigers pretty close up, all the different kinds of monkeys and apes and orangutans, the giraffes with their knobby knees, and the deer. Man were there a lot of deer.

Including this pretty little species – the Kanchil aka the Mouse Deer. And by little, I mean smallest hoofed mammal in the world. Although there was a moment of hilarity when Jason first described them to me and said smallest ‘toothed mammal’. Slight difference. To put this in perspective for you, they are up to 45cm (18inches) and weigh up to 2kg (4.4lbs). I can just imagine the hollywood starlets carrying them around…

Photo is from an article in the Los Angeles Times, March 7th 2009. We tried our hardest to take our own, but these cute little guys are difficult to get good shots of. And so I trolled google images looking for something that would let you see for yourselves just how cute they are – the little tiny legs, the narrow snout, the big eyes. I mean, they’re better at deer eyes than Bambi was!

In fact, we thought that they were so cute that we made plans to go see the Kuala Lumpur Deer Park one day. After dealing with negotiating traffic to get into the park itself (and by traffic, I mean the highway), we wandered around until we found the Deer Park. Thankfully it was open, as their posted hours were actually much shorter than the advertised hours as they took long lunches every day (from noon-two).

We were excited to go to the Deer Park because their brochure said that they’d have bread/feed for us so that we could hand feed the regular ole’ deer. When we arrived there was none, so we just admired them from afar. The three enclosures of Mouse Deer made up for it, especially because they were moving around a lot for a nocturnal animal so it was neat to see their halting little moves and matchstick legs running around.

And yes, I still sometimes call them the Deer Mouse. Which while similar (and similarly named and for similar reasons), is a totally different thing.

We loved Northern Laos. Loved. Loved as in I would gladly spend two weeks bumming around in Luang Prabang.

Vientiane (the capital city) was another story. It was super hot – for whatever reason the sun there was blistering and we found it difficult to be outside for more than two hours at a time. We were also getting over the stomach flu / food poisoning, so we weren’t feeling up to exploring.

Instead we spent a fair bit of time kickin’ it in our hotel. Yes, in Vientiane we stayed in a hotel – for $30 a night we had nice beds, proper showers (oh my!), tv, and a mini-fridge.

We also had the following sign in our room, detailing the myriad of rules that we had to follow in order to be allowed to stay in the room. Number nine will forever be a classic in my books: “Lepers, thieves, ex-prisoners, and criminals are prohibited.”

How do you identify an ex-prisoner? Or a thief (assuming that they aren’t in the middle of burglarizing your room)? Or for that matter, a leper before they start losing appendages?

Jason’s vegan and I like vegan food, which means that we’re always on the look out for good vegan food. Traveling can be a little tricky sometimes, but a little bit of research normally smooths things over and leaves us with lots of possibilities.

In Hanoi, we mostly relied on our Lonely Planet travel guide. It has handy sections for things like Indian Food, which incidentally was our go to staple if we couldn’t find anything else veg friendly. Thankfully most of the veg places were reasonably close to our hotel.

We did stop by the Tamarind Cafe (80 Ma May St, Hoan Kiem District) one day, as they are a vegetarian restaurant with a selection of vegan dishes. The food was decent, but nothing super special to write home about. I did end up having a grilled cheese sandwich as I was craving some north american comfort-type food, although I was a little confused when they brought out two sandwiches. Not only is that a lot of cheese, they had marketed it as being a ‘sandwich’. As in singular. I guess little grammatical points like that get lost in translation.

The highlight of my meal at the Tamarind Cafe was getting to try grog for the first time. I considered borrowing one of my mom’s parrots and wandering around town dressed like a pirate.

Next up was Fanny’s Ice Cream Parlour (48 Pho Le Thai To, Hoan Kiem District). This wasn’t cheap for Vietnam prices, but was still a steal for some of the best ice cream and sorbets I’ve ever had. In fact it was so good that we had dessert here three times during our 4-5 stay in Hanoi. And yes, they have vegan options and a wide variety of sorbet flavours (the lime is particularly good).

Last, and certainly not least is Com Chay Nang Tam (79A Tran Hung Dao, just north of Hoan Kiem Lake). It was a little sketchy finding this restaurant. The area its in closes down at night so there was this semi-abandoned feeling. And its way far back in an alley off an alley off an alley. However, it is 110% worth it. We had the best mock meats we’ve ever had in our lives here. Ever.

“In the Buddhist tradition, vegetarian food has often been prepared to resemble dishes favoured by non – Buddhist. In this way, Buddhist have been able to show hospitality without appearing to deprive their guest of favorite foods, at the same time not violating their own principles which forbid taking the life of animals.

And so it is the names of dishes of this menu, which your hostess Mrs. Diễm has collected from all corners of the country. Names not with standing, all dishes are prepared without meat. (In the best tradition of ancient Vietnam cuisine, they are also prepared without MSG).”

We had their set menus both times we went, as they offered us the opportunity to try multiple things on the menu so we weren’t just limited to eating one big dish. I can only wish that we’d had the chance to go with a big group so that we could have tried one of their large tasting menus. Their fake beef-dishes are especially succulent, as in literally melt in your mouth good. Oh, and did I mention that the 454mL bottles of Bai Ha Noi were only 10,000 dong (that’s about the equivalent of $0.60 at the time of writing). In fact, our meal with two set menus, an appetizer, a 1.5L bottle of water and a beer came to less than $10 USD.

Anyone want to open up a franchise here?