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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.

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