Crooked Little House - Part 2

There is an apartment building being built on my street. The project is progressing so quickly that is really difficult to believe - especially when you consider how low tech the materials and processes in comparison with similar projects back home.

This is a view of the site today from my balcony.

The floor that was being built last week has been completed, one layer of flooring has already gone down, and they are putting a layer of concrete down today.  The entire building is iron frames, bricks and mortar and hand-poured concrete. 

These guys are really small, but very strong.  They spend all their days hauling buckets of concrete and bricks. They have to work really quickly to pour the concrete out and level it before it dries.

They use a pulley system to get the concrete up to the floor levels they are working on.

The pulley is powered by some kind of fuel - I doubt it's diesel.  It sounds like two-stroke lawnmower engine and it billows out great puffs of black smoke.

 That's pulley operator down there in the hat. 

The concrete is mixed by hand in one of those old-fashioned concrete mixers.  I took this picture on the walk home from the restaurant the other night.

Even concrete mixers need to sleep.

Dear Phil - a birthday treat

Today is my birthday.

Bring Me Cake - or I'll laser you with my Katie Perry eyes!

Since today is a workday, we had a little early celebration last night - by going to dinner at our favourite Vietnamese restaurant:

Cuc Gach Quan - 10 Dang Tat, Ward Tan Dinh, District 1, Saigon

There are many many reasons why we love this restaurant.  And the fact that we live a 30 second walk away from it is only an added bonus. The food is just outrageously good, the price is not expensive, the atmosphere is so pleasant - you feel like you're in a very special place when you go to this restaurant.  As you walk in the front gate you pass a big pile of fresh fruit - especially pomelos that will be used later in the kitchen.  So the very first experience is a delicious fragrance to stimulate the palate.

We are led through the restaurant, then up a very steep flight of stairs to the room where our table is.

Vietnam: I know you are trying to break my ankles. Please have mercy!

This restaurant is a traditional skinny house that has been converted into a restaurant.  The owner is an architect and the design is modern, but also very respectful of the heritage of the place. I love everything about it. But don't wear heels when you go - there may be some stooping and climbing called for to get to your table.


We ordered a glass of wine and a beer, and while we were waiting for our food, my husband gave me an early birthday present - a new camera!  I'm so excited by this, because my old camera is really on it's last legs. And it meant we could get some pictures of the food in the very low light of the restaurant.

We ordered (clockwise) pomelo salad, crispy sea bass with passionfruit sauce, caramelised pork belly in a clay pot, and sauteed beef with lemongrass and chilli.  We were not disappointed.  The pomelo salad had slivers of pork and fresh prawns, and was a delicious cleansing mouthful between morsels of the other dishes.


The passionfruit sauce on the fish had a sweet and sour effect. The fish was light and crispy on the outside but still wonderfully soft in the middle. The pork belly was everything I had hoped for. Very rich and flavoursome with a thick gravy. The winner of the night was probably the beef.

In my old age I find that I have less and less tolerance for too much chilli, and I was a little wary when I saw the big chunks of chilli in this dish.  But it was perfect.  There was only the beautiful flavour of fresh chillis with none of the bite.  And lemongrass!  Perfect.  I couldn't stop eating it.

As evidenced by the 'after' shot:

I've had a gutsful!

But no so full that we couldn't manage any dessert!  We decided to try some Vietnamese desserts (no ice-cream on the menu!).

Struggling to remember, but I think these were called lotus seed porridge and bean porridge.  The Vietnamese word was Che, I think.  Mr Martin was very suspicious at first:

They were sweet and very delicious.  They are served chilled, and the water is a very sweet soupy stuff.  I don't really know what I was eating, but it was great! We liked the bean one best - I think it would make a nice (if a bit sugary) breakfast food.  But then, I always want to have dessert for breakfast!


On a different topic, what do you think of my new haircut?

Crooked Little House - Part One

Saigon is close to the equator, and so all the days are about the same length. There are no late summer nights, and no late winter mornings either. Dawn starts to break at around 5 am, and by 6 many people are already very busy into their day - including the builders who are putting up a new apartment block on our street.  Every morning we are woken by the light pushing it's way through all the cracks in the curtains, and that same light is heralded by the banging and crashing of the builders tools and hammers in the street below. It's as if they were celebrating the sunrise with a parade of drums and cymbals, in the same way that the Hare Krishnas welcome the Friday night sunset with their parade down Queen Street.

The building site today.

When we first moved in, the building site was a few holes in the ground, and I regret it now, but I didn't think to take any pictures at the time. We watched the foundations being built and the concrete being poured, by hand, into the holes.  It all seems pretty precarious and undoubtedly not earthquake-proof!

I got my first pictures at around February 24th, when we realised that the building going up was going to incorporate the existing building on the section behind.

While it would be a bit of a stretch to call this an ecologically-conscious project - it is interesting to see how much building material is recycled and reused.

You can see that a lot of the materials in the
foreground here are pre-loved.

 
In the shots below, you can see the lengths that were gone to to demolish parts of the existing building below without damaging the valuable bricks it was built from.  Three or four men worked up there for about three days, knocking the bricks out one by one.

The pile of bricks behind the 2 guys on the lower
level are all salvaged

This was an exceptionally NOISY day!

I am fairly certain that the building I am living was built in pretty much the same way as this one.  Our building is quite new, and there are a lot of similar building projects happening in the neighbourhood. You might remember this shot of all the rooftops I can see from my balcony window.

Most older buildings in Saigon are 3-4 short storeys high.

In a few years time I'm sure that that view will be greatly changed, as the older buildings are pulled down one by one, and new, high-rise building (which can collect much higher rents) go up.