Skip to main content

Passage to Vietnam : Part 2 - The Food

Imagine your friend passes you a fully boiled egg, garnished in onion and sauce. You use your chopsticks, lift it up to your mouth and bite of half the egg. It does not tear away as easily as you thought it would. And it tastes queer. Then while chewing away at that half, you look down at the other half on your plate and you see tiny grey feathers and a tiny leg bone staring back at you.

My exact feeling at that moment was like I was making love to a woman and she suddenly reveals in the middle that she used to be a man.

In short, I wanted to puke.

I am not a big fan of Vietnamese cuisine. During my 18 days stay there, my Viet friends were kind enough to bring me around and let me taste about every kind of street food and drink, from snails to sticky rice to Viet baguettes to local alcohol. Other than certain items here and there, I generally thought the food lacked any kind of strong flavour to it. Plus, for some reason, I could not understand why the Viets went to the extent of eating fertilised egg and cow hooves when a normal egg and beef meat tasted way better.

Though one thing I have to give into is that Vietnamese cuisine is 100% healthy, which is partly due to the truckload of leaves that the waiter places on your table for you to chew on during your meal. As I said, for 18 days I had almost every kind of street food and never did I have any form of diarrhoea or food poisoning.
On the other hand, the day I returned home, I ravished on the sumptuous Indian meal my mother had prepared.

And I spent most of the next day in the toilet.

PS: Please don’t tell my mother.

Comments

Popular posts from this blog

A Fool's Pride

I was rolling up the sleeve of my uniform, preparing for a call up that might never come, when I realised that somehow I was overcome by a strange sense of pride, a pride that wanted the length of my sleeve to be precise as I have always pictured in my mind. Any longer, I would look shabby. Any shorter, I would look amateur. Then I donned the green, tightened the velcro around my waist and looked in the mirror. It was just like before and the memories started flooding me. I never really liked it when I donned it for 2 years in a row. Then I was in a place where I detested the culture, the harsh discipline, the unreasonable demands and the lack of purpose in everything I did. But now that it was over, when I look back, it was perhaps the greatest time of my life. The suffering, the digging, the starving, the cold, the banter, the rowdiness, the jungle, the marches,the mountains, the food, the stories, the friendships, it was all worth the 2 years. A girl friend of mine once asked...

Marriage and All That : Part 2

"How about I get married?" "Are you serious?" "Yea" "No really. If you are serious, I can start looking for one" "Uhh....Nah. I was just kidding" After a while, she stopped asking me if I were serious. Instead, she would laugh it off every time I suggested it, which was the original intention of my question. For me it was just comic relief, this idea of marriage that parents back in India would pester their children with once they reached just about where I was right now; young, working with a steady income and of totally no use at home. Though when she did ask me if I was serious, I do remember feeling a palpitation in my heart, the kind one gets when having to make a yuge decision (#trump2016 #makeamericagreatagain), knowing very well that she, along with an army of aunts, waited for my green light to start searching for a bride for the most promising of their nephews. A NRI (non residential Indian used to refer to the ...

6:15 on Hardy Toll

My left hand lies curled in a tight fist between my thighs, while the right presses stiffly against the coarse leather of the steering wheel, bearing the burden of the task. Though to call it a burden would be an overstatement of an activity that once gave me a sleepless 23 hour flight but now bordered on mindlessness. Now, being on the that road, at that time, when even the sun was too lazy to rise from its sleep, was second nature to me. Thoughts raced through my mind, thoughts about the destination I was headed to. The bulk of them recollected old frustrations and the remainder imagined new ones. My left fist curl tighter as I sped ahead in the air conditioned cocoon. I try to keep to the right of the two lanes as I drove, quasi subconsciously,  at 60 miles per hour on a a 65 mile per hour lane, which still had an additional legally tolerable 10 mile per hour buffer. Lost in my unending imaginings, I stay at that speed until an even slower traveler in front jerk me i...