Let's Eat.
You'd never believe it but the most popular question I'm getting on email is "what kind of food are you eating?" Meals are always an adventure here. And one I've found to be wonderfully different than back home.
First off, I eat breakfast every day. No bagel on the run here. I mean a full meal. Although on occasion I have had a Western style breakfast of eggs and toast w/ jelly and butter, I much prefer the Pho (pronounced Foe). It's a beef broth soup with noodles, pieces of beef sliced thinly and scallions. You eat it 2 handed, right hand with chop sticks for the noodles and chuncks of good stuff and left hand with a spoon for the broth. When well prepared fro the local pallet, it's seasoned with special spices (one of which I believe is cartamun). But I find that tourist-y places often make it rather bland, I suppose so that iit's more universally likeable. I like to eat it on the street at a local vendor. We sit on miniature tables and chairs. In any case, a hot breakfast has started my day every morning. A good start.
Mid-day, usually a long day of sight seeing makes this weary body hungry. Oh, the tough life I lead. Lunch is usually a dish with rice. These are ordered separately, not to be assumed tey come together. With many styles of rice here, like steamed white rice and various fried rices, my favorite is xoi (pronounced zow). It is a sticky mountain rice with peanuts and eaten with course salt flavored with seasame and paprika. Th salt here is extra potent, but very delicious. With the rice is a meat or fish dish. I've had a variety so far including Praying Mantis Prawns, grilled deer, and curry pork. Although dog and horse are often on th menu, I've not bcom adventurous enough to leave my Western morals behind and explore that side of the menu.
The best food is served away from the tourists. And there are often different menus altogether (and different pricing too). So I usually pair up with another courious traveler and head off to look for the locals. Stalking or followig them I have to. Tonight for dinnner, we came across the "Hot Pot". Enough food for a a crowd and the 2 of us eating it was surely dinner and a show (dinner for us, a show for the locals). Immediately after ordereing, a hot plate was plugged into ou table. Staming seasoned broth was added to a gigantic metal pot. Next chuncks of raw chicken started to boil table top. (Head with beak and all.) More ingredients kept arriving to the table, with each our eyes got bigger, our plates more crowded and our unknowingness of exactly how to ach this dish grew. Most everything was added to the hot pot creating a soup like stew. The heaping pile of fresh herbs of mint, dill, spinach leaves and parsley along with a few others were added only as each individual bowl was served, quickly cooked and put into your bowl. Noodles were also cooked in the pot but as an individual portion, quickly dipped in, held together by a slotted spoon, then immediately put in your bowl.
It as an endless pot of food of which we OOOOH'd and AHHH'd at ach new discovery. The warmth from the meal was comforting, indicating it's popularity this time of year (in winter). As we gave up trying to finish all the food and declared our fullness to the very kind staff that helped us figure out how to eat the meal, we noticed the crowd disappating. Surely they were mumbling something about those crazy tourists, but we didn't much mind. We slowly strolled home, content with our first hot pot experience.