2025⇨2026 Savoring noodle dishes (🇻🇳 New Year's Eve soba and Okinawa soba) First up is soba

[Year-End Reflection] For New Year's in Vietnam, every year we somehow end up eating toshikoshi soba. Supermarkets sell dried noodles, so we eat them normally too, but for New Year's it really has to be freshly-made soba. So, at "Miou," a shop in Ho Chi Minh that makes Japanese soba by hand https://maps.app.goo.gl/BXRZFQmjNvjd7qAZ6 I reserved and bought fresh soba here. One serving: 100k VND. Generously dusted with buckwheat flour, I boiled it in plenty of piping-hot water. Made it as kake-s

It flopped over all droopy and wasn't pretty. I was aiming for the beauty of a clear soup (osuimono), lol. Oh well. Listening to the Kohaku singing contest on the radio, we did our couple's annual year-end ritual: telling each other our Top 10 news of 2025. It's the same every year, but living together as a couple, there are things we're alike on, yet our viewpoints differ a little, and as we share them—"Oh, so that was your intention"—and so on. Even in Vietnam you can fully enjoy New Year's