Best Meal: Streetside Pho in Cau Dhoc, Vietnam (Pho = beef broth with fesh bean sprouts, mint leaves, scallions, chili-peanut dipping sauce for your 'stix, pipping hot flanks of beef and fettucine-sized Asian noodles)
Close second: The COFFEE in 'nam. I refer to it fondly as 'cocaine syrup'.
Best live music: The Vietnamese Disco band on top of ritzy HCMC hotel "The Caravelle" that, replete with synth drum pads, successfully covered the Gypsy Kings' "Bamboleo". Accents and all.
Best canned music: the "Macarena", the unoffically national anthem of Cambodia, all along the beach bars of Sihanoukville.
Best purchase: 4 dresses of Korean and Vietnamese high 60's fashion at a thrift store in HCMC complete with eager to please shopgirl who kept launching more vintage fun into our curtained-off "dressing room" (electrical breaker wall) and yelling "SOOOOO nice for you!" Made me miss my thrift shopping days with Grandma Bev.
Best runs: Outguessing motorbikes to and from Independence Monument in Phnom Penh, Joining the Hash House Harriers in Phnom Penh, along the river in Kampot.
Best Gina quote: "Dude. You're a BUS." While incredulously staring down a tour bus driver obviously contemplating running her over.
Best exercise: "Aerobics" in the park with 150 Vietnamese women in HCMC (wondering how it could potentially be offensive for females to wear spaghetti-strapped tank tops yet perfectly acceptable for droves of them to pelvic-pump for 3 minutes straight at the end of a rudimentary calethetics-like workout).
My aerobics friend Mai, who spends half of her year in Minneapolis!
Best complement (Uhhh, I think): "You not soooo fat. But if you get more so fat, you come back and I make new for you, ok?" - Phuom, my tailor in Ho An, Vietnam while measuring me for a...you guessed it...dress!
Best idea: Because of the constant reliance on the horn of any bus, motorbike or car while anyone and everyone drives in SEA, Gina and I have decided in turn, to scream in long bullhorn spurts as we cross streets. So they know we're crossing. This may or may not have been inspired after a round of late morning cocaine syrup.
Just call me Ann Geddes: The fruit market in Cau Dhoc
Ho Chi Minh City
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