boo_urne

i didn’t do much of anything for the first 4 months of the year. Now i’m playing tennis 4 days a week and wishing i could get out more often.

Looks like the real challenge here is “find winter sport i like enough to do 3-4 times/week.” Going to the gym loses this little game. Badly.

Dinners have been good lately, barring some post-dinner alcohol-induced messiness, but i’m starting to run out of energy for them. We need some variety here – a new format, more new people, something. It’s getting too routine. I like that it’s become so easy to throw a good 6-10 person dinner, but we need to make things new and challenging again.

I think we’ll start with “you have to bring someone new each time,” to farm out the job of recruiting new people, and start getting other people involved in cooking. A few people want to cook, and maybe it’ll help me learn how to share the kitchen and still turn out great food. Oh, and from now on: much, much less messiness.

We saw or heard of cooking schools in Hanoi, Saigon, and Hoi An. You’ll learn a bit, but a lot of them seem to be more about the show – you do a little cooking, but you watch a lot and don’t end up taking home a ton of reusable info.

There’s a woman named Miss Vy, who runs the Cargo Club in Hoi An. Her regular classes have a good reputation, though there’s still a lot of demo time and a pretty big class. We’d heard you can talk her into doing private classes, and she actually rescheduled a regular class to give two of us a morning of completely hands on cooking. We made a ton of stuff (invite friends to come help eat it after!), asked a hundred questions, and learned a ton. Do it – i can’t recommend it enough!