The Vietnamese eat rice in so many different forms, it truly is amazing: fried rice, steamed rice, rice noodles, rice vermicelli, rice paper, fried rice flour, sticky rice, rice cakes, rice soup, rice pancakes, rice doughnuts… I’ve even found a place that makes young rice ice-cream!

Consequently, they cook rice in different ways. One method consists of spreading rice that’s already been cooked on a newspaper and let it dry outside on a roof or on the ground, under the sunlight.

Drying rice on the roofs.

How do they use it afterwards? I don’t know, and I prefer not to!

Next to my window...birds!

The Vietnamese are very fond of iced coffee or iced milk, and they need a lot of ice to quench everyone’s thirst including the tourists’. Thus, every early morning on Bui Vien street, a few people cut huge ice pillars into small chunks to supply all the little shops and street vendors.

Ice choppers on the street.

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STREET STYLE

Les Vietnamiens mangent du riz sous tellement de formes, c’en est vraiment incroyable: riz poêlé, riz vapeur, nouilles de riz, vermicelles de riz, frittes de farine de riz, riz gluant, soupe de riz, pancakes de riz, beignets de riz… Je connais même un endroit où on fait de la glace au jeune riz.

Par conséquent, le riz se cuisine de multiples façons. Une méthode consiste à parsemer du riz cuit sur une feuille de papier journal, posée sur le toit ou à même le sol, pour le laisser sécher au soleil.

Qu’en font-ils ensuite? Je ne sais pas, et je préfère ne pas savoir!

Les Vietnamiens sont aussi très friands de café glacé et de lait glacé, ce qui nécessite beaucoup de glaçons pour étancher leur soif, en plus de celle des touristes. Ainsi, tous les matins au chant du coq dans la rue Bui Vien, on casse de grosses colonnes de glace en morçeaux pour achalander les petits commerçants et les marchands ambulants.

Dear Icepack: you are my only true friend.

One of the perks of working for Jet Set Zero is that I get to make my own hours and, more importantly, my own office. From a very young age I’ve suffered from pretty severe lower back pain. It was actually one of the reasons I had to leave my job animating in New York: I just couldn’t handle sitting in an office chair anymore.

For those of you who have suffered similar spinal problems, you’ll know what I mean: sitting upright for longer than an hour or two in almost any type of seat will drive you slowly mad with pain.  I’ve tried kneeling chairs, sitting on exercise balls, $900 super-space chairs, everything.  There simply isn’t a comfortable upright working position for people in my condition.

So when I set up my editing suite (read: bedroom) for Jet Set Zero’s production office (read: apartment) I decided to take things a step further and build myself an actual standing desk.

I recommend anyone suffering from back pains and working in the desk-job world give this a shot if they can.  The working position is great and if your feet get tired it’s a lot easier to pull a laptop down with you onto the couch for a half hour than it is to stand yourself up after setting your ass into the mold of an office chair for half a day.

Besides that, it allows me to join a long and illustrious tradition of important historical figures who swear by the standing desk including Virginia Woolf, Winston Churchill, Benjamin Franklin, Thomas Jefferson, and Donald Rumsfeld.

One of these things is not like the others. Or two, depending on your search criteria.