Joe Haldeman's Blog, page 53

joe_haldeman @ 2011-11-07T08:41:00

(Talking about fountain pens in sff.net . . . )

The vibrating [fountain pen nib] cleaning dish is great. I just recalled that mine disappeared about ten years ago, cleaned out by a kleptomaniac cleaning lady ("Hey … you wanded yer house cleaned, dinja?") Have to angle for a new one for Xmas. I bought mine used at a flea market for a dime!

I've found persistent dried ink may surrender to a 50/50 solution of distilled water and pure isopropyl, with one drop of liquid detergent per pint. I keep it around for optics, but it works well for pens. I wouldn't soak hard rubber in it, though.

I've heard it before, Dave, that the condition of a person's physical workspace is a reflection of his mental one – in which case, I'm a walkin' talkin' junkyard. I can sit down at a clean desk to write a grocery list, and by the time I get up there's the Sunday New York Times and an unabridged dictionary underneath a bushel of random pages. Where the fuck does it come from? Of course that's my secret to making a living as a freelance writer; every Wednesday they back up a truck to my office window and I shovel out a few hundred pounds of waste paper to sell for salvage.

Had a real nice day yesterday, a small dinner party thrown by Mary Zoll. For a couple of decades we went to Ottone "Ricky" Riccio's poetry workshop in Boston together.

I took the T out to Hell & Gone, also known as Waban, where Ellen Seigel (who was also one of Ricky's poets) picked me up with her hubbie Ron, and we drove out to Mary's, somewhere near the planet Neptune, or perhaps Carlisle. Perhaps I exaggerate the distances. For these three months while I'm a city mouse, anything past Somerville requires a native guide and beaters.

Ricky's widow Dolores came with her daughter Lucy, whom I hadn't met. All of us wordmongers of one sort or another – Mary is a serious technical writer as well as a poet, and works part-time at the MIT Writing Center, like Gay.

Mary's a great cook. Pork tenderloin with coconut rice and roasted winter vegetables. She also made a deliciously sinful appetizer, a simple dip with equal parts shredded cheddar cheese, grated parmesan, and mayonaisse, dusted with paprika and baked in a medium oven for half an hour. Ooh. Have to make it for New Year's Eve. ("You can walk in the door, but you'll have to waddle out.")

Joe

pens: use and abuse

M, I did try melatonin for an Australian trip maybe twenty years ago, and have forgotten whether it made any difference. Should have tried it again this time!

The other day I wrote up a thing about using a fountain pen for writing fiction, and I got distracted from whatever blog it was directed to. Found it on a scrap of e-paper here. Forgive me if I've already sent it.

I've written about 25 novels over the course of a 40-year career, and although I do keep up with technology (this is being typed on a new super-slim Maobook Air), back in the eighties I stopped writing fiction with a keyboard, and reverted to writing in longhand in bound blank books.

It's not speed; I write slowly no matter what the medium. I think it's the element of craft, or a physicality even less exalted than that. When I've finished a book I've made an object; something I can put up on the shelf. That shelf is a palpable record of my career. In some odd way it makes the writing real.

I'm not a Luddite; I've loved computers since my first Apple // in the early eighties. I type up my work and send it up into the sky for safekeeping every couple of days, in case the unthinkable happens and my book is destroyed or stolen.

But when I turn on the computer to type, I can feel something tighten up inside me; when I uncap the fountain pen, a similar something loosens. It's as real as a necktie.

Not that I have anything against typing; I sort of enjoy it except when I'm sitting and retyping something.


And another thing I think I neglected to post . . .

Wasted a couple of hours with a poorly made movie yesterday, Johnny Depp in The Rum Diary. A kind of fictionalized biopic about the young Hunter S Thompson in Puerto Rico. Good period stuff, good location, but the movie went flat for me. Most reviewers loved it. I expected to, but then I'm not a great audience for movies about writers. (Maybe the actors have too much fun. They never seem to sit down by themselves for hours every day. I guess that wouldn't make great cinema . . . )


On LiveJournal I'll post a pretty bad picture I did yesterday. I didn't really feel like painting, but the day was so perfect I couldn't let it go to waste, so took pen and watercolors and paper down to the Public Garden. Turned out kind of blobby and blah. But since I usually only post pictures if I think they worked, here's one for contrast:





Joe

best movie?

(In sff.net, people are talking about what was their "best movie ever" pick ... )


Maybe it's the mood I'm in, but I find it almost impossible, on reflection, to separate the movie as a piece of art/craft from the movie as a personal experience – that is, I can see a mediocre movie that hits me at just the right time and it temporarily blows me away – Paul a recent example – and I can see a classic and be unmoved, partly because of high expectations.

Last night in Longer Fiction we covered Garcia Marquez's "No One Writes to the Colonel," and although the class went well enough, I was disappointed not to be able to screen a movie. Our guy upstairs, Doug Purdy (who's in charge of MIT's media library) did locate a videotape copy in Foreign Languages / Literatures, but it was in Spanish with no subtitles. A bit of a challenge. Doubly so since I'm not sure that classroom's machine will read VHS.

I was sure I'd seen it on teevee years ago, and I don't think it would have been in Spanish, unless maybe I saw it while we were summering in Mexico. Maybe it was some other Garcia Marquez movie . . . yeah, Google sez Love in the Time of Cholera came out in 2007; that was probably it.

Still feeling kind of half-sentient from the thirty-hour plane ride. They say it takes one day per time zone to completely recover, which means twelve days before I enter a track meet or try to do partial differential equations in my head. Or drive or even take the subway.

Did write a couple of pages this morning, though, in the peace and quiet of the Atheneum. Going to miss that place.

Joe

leaving Singapore

Keith, Swarup was more than interesting. A reasonably modest and approachable Bloody Genius! It was great fun to talk with him; though your hair kept standing up in reaction to the electrical field his mind generates.

Neale, they do still have a few of those "Do Not Trespass Or You Will Be Shot In The Back" signs. Distressing but unambiguous. I sure as hell didn't spit on the sidewalk.

I had fun drawing and painting, our last morning in Singapore. Before breakfast I wandered down Princep Street and sat outside the only 24-hour coffeehouse. A small pot of decent tea for ten bucks. Did a sketch of the crowded chop houses there, which I'll post on LiveJournal when I get to school to scan it.

The panels and talk yesterday were well attended, standing room and sitting-on-the-floor only. A hundred and twenty people in a seminar room with eighty-some seats. I felt slightly unsharp, as they say in photography (wearing an unsharp mask?), ten days of indifferent sleep catching up with me. But nobody complained and I don't think I made any egregious misteaks.



The one interesting thing that happened on the flight back was abruptly truncated. I was watching an absorbing movie, the full-length cartoon feature "The Illusionist," and about twenty minutes from the end, the screen switched over to Delta Bullshit Mode, telling us all how to fasten our seatbelts and say our prayers in Japanese, English, and Spanish, because we were only a few hundred miles from Tokyo. Of course movies on a Delta plane can't be restarted in the middle, or fast-forwarded, so I'd lost the ending unless I wanted to start over on the Tokyo-Atlanta leg.

The film is technically masterful, by Sylvain Chomet, who did The Triplets of Belleville, and it stands as a kind of melancholy twin to that comic movie. There's a complex and controversial back-story to the production, about Chomet's relationship to his estranged daughter, but you don't need to know any of it to appreciate the strain of sadness and regret that runs through the story. (It's almost dialogue-free, just a few exclamations and mumbles in English, French, and Gaelic.) The quality of depth -- realism and illusion -- in the comic art is breath-taking; the 1950's Edinburgh setting is startlingly evocative of the real city.

Our timing in returning to the East Coast was good -- we missed a sudden blizzard that evidently dumped five or six inches of snow from Maine down to Maryland, which had all melted away by the time we landed in Boston last night.

Drinking an excellent tea, Dragon Pearl Oolong, from a big downtown tea shop called Share World. I've never had anything quite like it, the dark strength of Oolong paired with a delicate floral aroma, almost Jasmine but actually something else. A good souvenir of a wonderful place.

Joe

(iPhone shot of downtown Singapore during festival of Deepavali)

Singapore sling!

A good day yesterday. I did one panel, an interview that went pretty well, not a large room but SRO, perhaps a hundred people. The topic was "Meet the Author," and so was not exactly challenging, just chatting off the top of my head.

Before that, at 10:00, I had a journalist interview that went well. Afterwards we went out to lunch with Terence Chua, who had conducted the "meet the author" thing. He and his girlfriend took us across town to a huge buffet restaurant. I went back to fill my plate three times, and had at least twenty courses, even with no dessert! A little too stuffed. But good conversation and excellent food from all seven food groups (not all of which are recognized by Western palates). I guess the thing I liked best was a kind of pressed sandwich, a mixture of mashed sardines and spices in something resembling a flour tortilla, cut into wedges. I had some pretty fiery chillies (as spelled here) but cooled them down with mango juice, all of which I could get used to very fast.

We came back and passed out (I'd been up writing a couple of hours before dawn) and at 17:30 staggered out to eat yet again, dinner. Lighter than lunch, fortunately, and somewhat formal. About a dozen of us luminaries and con organizers having fancy food and a touch of wine (Sangria for Gay; it was a Spanish/Mediterranean restaurant). I finally got to talk with Michael Chabon and his wife, who were both charming.

Conversation among Europeans, Americans, and Chinese got all intense and political/economic (though very cordial) and the waiters gently threw us out when it became obvious that we'd keep talking till dawn if they didn't do something.

And so to bed. Then up at four to get back to work. Today I have panels on "Creativity versus the Bottom Line" and "Freeing Your Mind: Writing as Therapy," and then before dinner I give my talk, "Building Other Worlds - the Fundamentals of Writing Science Fiction."

Thirteen pages of notes in the spiral notebook I bought at the art museum across the street. Brown ink on brown paper, which perhaps was not too smart -- I told someone yesterday that I hope to evolve to black ink on black paper, so then I won't have to look at my notes at all. Which is more truth than imagery. Having written the notes is usually enough; I rarely have to refer to them.

It won't be a very late night, since we have to leave the hotel at 3:00 ayem to get to the airport to make our 6:00 flight to Atlanta. Twenty-four hours, grading papers all the way. Idle minds do the devil's work.

Joe

Disney with the death penalty

(In sff.net, a correspondent noted that we were having a wonderful time in Singapore ... )

We are, indeed, having a wonderful time, TK. Good new experiences outnumbering bad ones twenty to one. But you'd have to be culturally tone deaf not to see the negative side of this science-fictional city.

"Disneyland with the death penalty" was the title of Bill Gibson's Wired article about Singapore in 1993, and it still has some sting. But a lot of the things you can criticize about Singapore are reflections, or refractions, of negative aspects of the world culture, literally the zeitgeist, that America threw like a net over the postwar industrialized world after World War II. We see the enemy here, and he is us.

I think if I lived here, the unrelenting consumerism might drive me bats. But it's pretty familiar.

Gibson's phrase has interesting resonances, twenty years later. Disneyland and its eastern steroid-enhanced avatar Disneyworld are in the two states that have the most inmates on Death Row; two populous states where no serious candidate for anything would run on an anti-capital punishment ticket. Though even Florida and Texas might draw the line at hanging people for possessing marijuana.

(To be fair, the Singapore law doesn't apply to a joint or even a Baggie of dope; under a kilogram will just put you in jail. So it's not really simple possession; even the most dedicated doper probably wouldn't carry two pounds of the stuff around just to stay high.)

(For the record, I'm against the death penalty even for murder, rape, treason, mopery on the high seas, whatever. It doesn't work and it's morally offensive. And it costs less to put the bastards away forever, in jurisprudential systems like ours.)

The conference started last night, with a very interesting and effective speech by Michael Chabon, analyzing the career path -- disastrous -- and artistic accomplishments -- world-changing -- of Edgar Allan Poe, and comparing Poe's world to the one he inhabits.

I'll be on a panel with Chabon today. I won't offer him a puff on my opium pipe . . . .


Joe

in durians vile

I didn't have anything official at the conference today, so we took a last day's outing in Singapore. Feeling vaguely redundant, we took the subway down to Chinatown. Sort of like going to the Disney Store in Disneyland?

But there is a Chinatown here, and it's bigger and more Chinese than the one in your town. The first thing I did, hungry for experience more than calories, was buy a small durian cake. In case you're unfamiliar with the infamous fruit, this is how Wiki describes it:

"The edible flesh emits a distinctive odour, strong and penetrating even when the husk is intact. Some people regard the durian as fragrant; others find the aroma overpowering and offensive. The smell evokes reactions from deep appreciation to intense disgust, and has been described variously as almonds, rotten onions, turpentine and gym socks. The odour has led to the fruit's banishment from certain hotels and public transportation in southeast Asia."

To my nose the aroma, or odor, has two distinct components, one fruity and the other foul. The fruity one smells like honeydew melon; the foul one a "noble rot" like French hung fowl. Not pleasant but not repellent. The flavor, insofar as you can separate it from the smell, is sweet but not cloying, and more complex than most fruits. I like it, but I've never served it to guests!

The fruit-and-juice stand where I bought it smelled pretty awful; it probably wouldn't stay in business in Peoria. Or even Honolulu. It had plenty of customers here, though. (I wonder whether there's a genetic factor that predisposes one for or against the flavor, like cilantro.) I thought it was delicious.

Maybe there's a kind of controlled cognitive dissonance at work. I mean, I understand that aged bleu and Limburger cheese smell horrible out of context, but I would serve bleu, at least, to guests.

(We used to belong to a cheese-of-the-month club, and about half of them were a little too challenging for our Iowa City crowd. One, a chewy caramel monstrosity, was too much even for me.)

We window-shopped all over the place without intending to buy. I did fall prey to a tea shop, predictably. They had a kind of "yellow" tea, similar to but distinct from white tea. I remember having had it almost fifty years ago in Washington's Chinatown, where it was supposedly a rare treat. Googling, I find it's like green tea, but aged long enough to remove the "grassy" flavor component. Okay . . . I'll brew a pot when I get home, and report.

I also bought a couple of watercolor brushes, one soft and one stiff, nine bucks apiece after a little haggling. Perhaps too little, I always feel after I've paid.

Back in the hotel now. I'm sitting in the lounge with my beer and peanuts, and the place is starting to fill up with Anglo and European types, who look literary, some vaguely familiar. No doubt I'll find out tonight or tomorrow that I should have recognized half of them.

Joe

A sense of sentosa

We spent the day yesterday at the island of Sentosa, which is sort of like an amusement park gone all Asian and educational and huge. We rode over to the island on a cable car that swayed over the river, somewhat disconcerting at times. For some reason I kept thinking about those little news stories you see buried on p. 7 about some disaster in China that would be horrible if it had happened to real people, "144 people perish when overcrowded cable car plunges 250 feet into a river we can't spell." How sad.

We were part of a group tour, about 30 people from various hotels, herded around by a loud bossy Indian woman, which describes about 50% of the island's apparent population. It was interesting and educational, sort of last year's technology applied skillfully.

Loud, fast, undignified -- in other words, ordinary Singaporean -- and more controlled than I care for. An amusement park, for Siva's sake! All I really wanted to do was eat junk food and ogle the pretty girls, all in the name of culture, but instead we were treated like herd animals that subsist on information, driven from one bit of cultural pasture to another.

One part was deeply uncomfortable . . . at some level that I have no rational control over, I'm a spiritual person, incurable, and the spectacle of Disneyfied deities cavorting in neon and laser-blast in pursuit of pocket change was so cosmically undignified it's a wonder god doesn't shut the place down and turn it into gluons, and start over. That's just my opinion, to which fortunately the gods have never listened.

We walked through various exhibits of Singaporean history and culture, much of it kind of 1950's and charming. Saw the history of the island depicted a few times by various cartoon characters -- this prince came over on a boat and thought he saw a lion, but there aren't any, so he thumped his scepter on the ground and said "I'm gonna put a bunch of banks here." And an amusement park. I remember from my study of history that whenever a comic book character like the Phantom or Tarzan had a lion friend, he was called Simba, which provides the linguistic root for Singapore, "the place where some pore guy thought he saw a lion."

It was thirsty work, absorbing all that culture, and the one beer I had was so good I wished it were four. At the end of the day was a good and loud riverfront fireworks show, augmented by way too much cutesy narrative. Then about a million people moved in a single herd to a parking lot the size of Arkansas, where a sea of buses were turning hydrocarbons into cold air temporarily isolated from the outside pollution. We hurtled through the darkness to be oviposited at our various hotels. Gay and I staggered next door to the food court and had a late dinner of this and that. My "that" was a cooling scoop of chocolate ice cream, because my "this" had been some scorching chicken thing not intended for Western tongues.

A full day. This morning the conference starts. Shift gears.

Joe

writing, here and there

We set off yesterday for a morning jaunt to Malaysia, to the city of Johore Bahru, the capital of Johore, just a long causeway away from Singapore. (Each country paid for its half of the bridge.) It was pretty much a standard tourist rip-off. We drove around the town a bit and stopped at two places that had Malay touristy stuff for sale. At one we got a cookie and some interesting cinnamon tea for our efforts. Gay bought a large scarf or a small shawl from one, a nice silk and cashmere mix.

I was tempted to buy a bandana -- I wear one around my neck, bicycling in the winter -- but decided to just keep my eye out in normal venues, rather than shell out $11.

We did drive by a Malay cemetery, which would have been interesting to see, and visit the governor's palace, at least the outside of it, and the huge Royal Abu Bakar mosque, which any of us who were Muslim might enter. I didn't try. I know that they ask for the password, and if your accent betrays you it's off with your head. Both were nice big buildings, a little dusty from new construction. Malaysian government and religion seem to be thriving businesses. Same the whole world over, different labels. Same busloads of cash-lightened tourists.

We had a good lunch back at the hotel -- I had the restaurant's specialty, a fiery hot Nonya Laksa -- "king prawn, fish cakes, quail eggs, shredded chicken and bean sprouts, finished in spicy coconut gravy," twenty bucks and well worth it. Not quite hot enough to give me hiccups, which is my signal to back off.

Spent the afternoon in the National Museum of Singapore, across the street. It's very well laid out, but perhaps over-organized. You're given a sound device as you enter, and you push buttons to hear a commentary as you go from exhibit to exhibit. Of course more than half the time, the interpretive voice tells you much more than you want to know. After about an hour and a half, we started skipping -- almost in desperation! I'm not sure what happened to Singapore in the twentieth century, but it sure went by fast.

At the café, I was served a delicious new drink, lavender tea. It's an infusion of sugar water and lavender in the bottom of a glass of strong iced tea. And I bought a writing notebook in the museum shop, an irresistible spiral one with light brown paper.

In the evening we met Kiruthiga Mahendran, the woman who had invited us to the conference. An attractive young woman, she took us into Little India, through crowds that were literally shoulder to shoulder, front to back, and led us to an unprepossessing restaurant upstairs over the madness of the market. The food was very good, though not remarkably different from an Indian restaurant in America -- I suppose if we'd asked for something challenging we could have gotten sauce that makes vindaloo seem bland. I just got the day's special, though, and a salt lhassi. It was a seasoned mess of yellow lentils rolled up in flatbread, presented with various sauces. Very good. Only one sauce, an innocent-looking white puddle, was actually lethal.

I should note that the Little India market is probably a glimpse of the future, as the Earth's population inches toward ten billion. Moving from one place to another you are in intimate physical contact with several people at once, mooshed up together like a football pileup -- or a lentil stew! -- moving along by a kind of Brownian motion. Lots of nice soft girls, so I didn't mind, but I can only imagine how people who shrink from physical contact with strangers, especially if they're at all homophobic, would feel in such a scrimmage. Screaming panic!

Coming back home was not so bad; after a few minutes it was merely crowded, and then when we went down into the subway system (where, it occurs to me, no one without money will go) it was not crowded at all, and two trains took us smoothly back to the hotel in relative quiet air-conditioned cool. I was asleep before my head hit the pillow.

Got up about four and went down to the hotel lobby to work on mail -- no wi-fi in the room -- and when the sun came up like thunder, not quite six, I took off in search of coffee. Actually, I'd seen an intriguing student joint a couple of blocks away, in a neighborhood that's probably perfectly safe, but through which I was reluctant to walk in the dark. I encountered one drunk and a few young couples who looked like they could use a room.

The coffee place, Mr. Bean's Café, looked agreeably funky and studious, with a sign saying it was open 24 hours. The one customer left right after I arrived. Good ambient light and no music. A good place to work until I got the bill. Coffee was $4.50 (as opposed to $1.00 where I had been working) and there was a service charge of 15% even though I carried my own cup to the bar for refill. A twenty-buck session, with a piece of apple crumble. Guess I'll go back to the one next to the hotel.

Gay found a lovely John Cleese talk on creativity, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=zGt3-fxOvug&feature=player_embedded. Much of what he says is so familiar I felt like I was listening to myself talk. Find a place and time where no one will bother you and go there the same time every day. Make sure everyone knows not to disturb you. Find your existential place and let yourself play. Don't be ashamed to call it play.

Joe

(Admittedly, I work in a lot of venues that are far from that ideal. The price of gathering life to write about, I suppose.)

joe_haldeman @ 2011-10-24T08:09:00

Yesterday I had a long interview in the morning, at the hotel here, with a reporter from a local paper -- actually a freelancer who flew down to Singapore from Malaysia to cover the conference. I was well-read in the Haldeman ouvre -- does that mean eggs In Chinese? -- and had an hour's worth of good questions.


Gay and I had had a large breakfast and went out for a little exploring before the interviewer came. There's an arty neighborhood just behind the hotel; an art museum a couple of blocks to the left on Orchard Street and a large art school to the right -- I mean REALLY large, a futuristic building with an entrance of towering slabs forty feet high, all strange angles and forbidding textures. Not a place where art students might hang around flirting and drawing each other. But a block away, perpendicular to Orchard Street, there's an appropriately funky neighborhood, with coffee houses and not-too-clean cheap tea houses and rice places. I want to wander around there a bit, perhaps this morning.


One restraint on free-wheeling touring is the remarkable breakfast that's included in our rather pricey hotel bill. It's a buffet that combines American and European standards with pretty odd Japanese, Chinese, and Malaysian stuff. I'm not tempted to go out for breakfast, with a free cornucopia of such variety waiting here. (I should say "free.")
We decided to try out public transit, and followed the concierge's directions to a place that sold bus and subway tickets. Gay had studied the map, and we got on board a bus headed in the right direction, which of course turned and took off for parts unknown. No big problem , since everything is new, and Singapore is a pretty safe city. (Violent crime is rare, but purse snatchers are a problem, so we keep our bags close.) We rode for a few minutes and got off and tried to get our bearings.


After wandering a few blocks we found one of our destinations, the absolutely huge shopping mall (I think Paragon), about a large city block square and seven stories high, each floor the size of a large American mall. We sort of wandered around sightseeing. Most of the stores were not that interesting, because they were too high-scale -- I don't have to come to Singapore to buy Prada, Gucci, and Mont Blanc.


But we followed directions and found an awesomely large and varied stationery and book store, the size of four or five Borders merged on one level. I was looking for an art department so I could buy a small watercolor blank book to paint some travel notes. I managed to leave behind my little watercolor box -- I remember tossing it into the suitcase, but must have taken it out, repacking. Got a little spitbox for about thirty bucks, and a pair of the same kind of waterproof drawing pens I use at home. A really good Moleskine-type drawing book, "monologue" brand, for about ten bucks; I bought two.


We went into a little fast-food joint for lunch, where I got a strange combination of crispy fried chicken and spaghetti in a spicy sweet sauce, actually very good. We walked around a bit more and then hit the bricks. Humid but not unpleasant. We were about a mile from the hotel, and started walking in that direction.
Walking is a visual delight, moving through a sea of attractive Asian women. I'm sure there were probably some boys among them. We stopped to rest at a bar with outside tables. With my pomegranate soda, I did a little watercolor of Gay having her iced coffee.


Partway home, we came to a gigantic theatre complex, and on impulse bought tickets to a movie and went in. It dwarfed the huge Cinerama complex on Central Park in New York. Escalators going this way and that, dozens of screens on a half-dozen levels. We took an elevator to the sixth floor and waited for our screen to open -- we had assigned seats and an assigned time. Meanwhile I went down to the fifth floor and got us a small box of popcorn and an orange drink, ten bucks. Probably not much more than a city in the States.


We watched a large-screen explosion of special effects and car chases, Killer Elite, a routine thriller with Jonathan Strahan and Clive Owen, with an extended De Niro cameo. Rotten Tomatoes gives it one tomato, but I wasn't disappointed; didn't expect all that much. Could do without some of the writing, though. Tough-guy De Niro gets into the face of a new tough-guy wannabe, and tells him, "Killing's easy. Living with it isn't." Maybe acting is the same way.


Back at the hotel we put our feet up for awhile and then went off in a new direction for dinner, no plans. We wound up at a big food court with about thirty stands, not too noisy. Bright and full of delicious smells. Gay got some noodle soup and I got a whole fried fish with a rice ball and some hot and smoky sauces on the side. Absolutely delicious, and fun to dissect with chopsticks.


Staggered off to bed exhausted.


Joe