Archive for September, 2005
Mid-autumn festival song from Vietnam
This weekend is the mid-autumn festival. Everyones eating mooncakes and lanterns are all around.
In Vietnam, the mid-autumn festival is also celebrated as a children’s festival.
You can listen to them singing a lantern song, click on the link below.
Do you want to sing with them?
The lyrics to the song:
Tet trung thu ruoc den di choi.
Em ruoc den di khap pho phuong.
Long vui suong voi den trong tay
Em mua ca trong anh trang ram.
Den ong sao voi den ca chep
den thien nga voi den buom buom
em ruoc den nay den cung trang.
Den xanh lo voi den tim tim.
Den xanh lam voi den trang trang
Trong anh den ruc ro muon mau.
In English
At Mid-autumn festival,
walk around with lanterns lit.
Take them all across the town,
singing to the autumn moon.
Lanterns all in different shapes, lantern angel, lantern dream,
Lantern fish, or lantern star, lantern swan or butterfly.
Take my lantern to the sky;
take my lantern to the moon!
Source: Tet Trung Thu and Mooncake Madness By Linh Song
Wikipedia: Mooncake Festival
Tags:
vietnam
Making rice paper in Vietnam
I love the Vietnamese springroll. I have often wondered how they make the rice paper - so thin and yet so strong.
In Vietnam, I got to see a rice paper factory.
There rice over here is brittle and breaks into powder when moistned. This powdered rice is thoroughly mixed with cured river water to form a paste.
This paste is then spread over a cloth covering a steaming vessel. Here the man is using his pan to even out the paste.
A metal cap is placed on top to prevent the steam from escaping. Once it is cooked enough(couple of minutes) , the lady uses a bamboo roller to wrap the rice paper around it.
The ricepaper is then left to dry out in the open. After a day of drying, the ricepaper is ready to be rolled into lovely springrolls. The ricepaper sheets can also be passed through a shredder to make rice noodles.
Tags:
vietnam
springroll
Heaven my blanket, Earth my pillow
Here is a poem from a collection I am reading - Heaven my blanket, Earth my Pillow by a Song dynasty poet Yang Wan-Li
When are my travels ever going to end?
My old body has come to this inn again.
The roadside pines and junipers are ten years older,
once short but now tall and stately.
The place where I stopped last night is far away;
and tomorrow, tonight will be last night.
In just an instant the present has become the past–
I’d have to be a saint not to drink wine!
Writing postcards in lieu of poetry. A hillside inn in Bali, Indonesia.
Cory Doctorow on Copyright and the future of media
Audio transcript of the talk titled "Copyright and the future of media" held at Singapore National Library on September 3, 2005.