Lou Dog

Lou is a dog like most.  Except he has a gimpy leg from when he was hit by a motorbike as a puppy.  He's gonna miss me.  I'm gonna miss him.

This is part of what I originally intended to publish on the blog.  Lou unfortunately was hit by a motorbike and died yesterday.  Motorbike accidents are a fact of life in Vietnam.  Death is a fact of life everywhere, and I'm still going to miss him.

Rainy Season Has Returned

The seasonal rains of southeast Asia have returned.  In Dalat it usually rains sometime in the early afternoon and on occasion it begins again in the late afternoon or night.  In the early afternoon, when it rains, it rains hard.  The skies darken and the clouds come together and the torrential downpour begins.  The rain absolutely brings everything to a halt in the city.  The motorbikes clear, the cafes fill, and everything is covered and moved in indoors.  There's not much to do but sip coffee and watch the drops.  We'll get a full day's worth of rain in just over an hour.  It's an amazing tribute to seasonal winds of the Pacific.

Clam Bake Indoors on a Rainy Night

A friend brought back a load of clams and other mollusks from Phan Rang, the closest coastal city to Dalat.  We lit the grill and had a clam bake indoors away from the rain.  Clams and rice was fairly tasty.  The clams were cooked in their own juices and the flavored with peanuts and chives.  It's a little unusual eating seafood when you're a mile high into the mountains, but in Vietnam the ocean is never far away.

These Girls Are Good

A major badminton tournament has been taking place at the university. Apparently they are hosting players from most of the southern provinces, and a few of these competitors play for the national team. I've watched them play and these girls are good. The local Lam Dong team lost two heartbreaking gold medal matches on Wednesday night. They were playing the underdog all tournament and in the final match it came down to extra points, and mere inches along the back line. It was hard to watch.  Check out the video here- http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=O4vIiDuZuho

Dinner

Since I will be leaving in a month and because all their daughters were home, I invited a local family to a farewell/thank you dinner.  We ate at a restaurant overlooking Xuan Huong lake (which happens to be completely drained for construction purposes).  The way Vietnamese dinners work is everything is shared, you start with several different types of fruits, meats, and vegetables, and you end with some type of soup or stew.  I have eaten several interesting meats, which I won't eat in America, and on this night I ate two new ones.  I ate fried frog legs and grilled wild boar.  The frog legs were actually very similar to chicken wings and tasted really good.  They were fried in butter and garlic and tasted mostly of those two things.  The wild boar was just delicious, as with most things here it was flavorful and spicy.  Other opening dishes included grilled squid, stir fried spinach, and crispy pork.  We ended the night with a stew of spicy coconut and curry base with beef, shrimp, and fish balls freshly added when ready to serve.  We had a few Saigon beers and a few laughs, and I'll miss this about Vietnam.

Golden Valley Revisited

I decided to return to the Golden Valley.  It takes awhile for me to get out there and back, but the ride is just about perfect.  The trick to finding these great back country roads is to go north.  If you go north out of Dalat, you then drive away from traffic and the majority of the population.  Some friends of mine were having a picnic along the reservoir we found a week earlier.  I wanted to join them.  After finishing some errands, I enjoyed what I think is the best part of Dalat, the mountain air.  I also wanted to see if I could find the same herd of water buffalo I saw there last week.  We found about twenty of them along the road wading in the mud and huddling together in the shade trying to be beat the midday heat.  It's hard to beat wading along the banks of mountain lake miles from nowhere.

Building a Building

They have been working on this night and day outside of where I live.  They are, I believe, building a new dormitory for students.  I'm not sure when it will be done, but it seems to be going rather fast.  We have an empty building next to me that no one has ever used.  The way construction projects work here is that some of the workers first construct a shanty like building and live on site while the work is underway.  Then they begin digging and pouring concrete.  Most days I just walk by and like to watch them work.  Occasionally the construction reminds of the scenes in Raiders of the Lost Ark where they are digging for the ark of the covenant in Egypt, especially when they are digging at night.  I'm not sure why.  Mostly the construction amounts to a lot of unusual noises during day that I can faintly hear from my room.