Somewhere between Vox & Hunter S. Thompson
Viewing entries in
Culture
Is there even anything to do in Vietnam for Christmas? Asia has definitely bought into Christmas for the pure commercialistic value of the holiday (check out below if you don't believe me) but does anybody here actually care? It was the evening of December 24th and though some light Googling I had happened upon some vague information about Christmas Eve festivities at or around Notre Dame Cathedral in the center of the city. So we got in a cab and told the driver to head over!
Since moving to Southeast Asia I've felt that I would be robbing myself of the true experience if I didn’t at least try every strange dish that is pushed across the table in my direction. So that is exactly what I have been doing. And it's been a lot less disgusting than I expected... until the Buffalo penis.
This was disgusting.
We were driving overnight and I was doing my best to sleep but it was tough with our bus driver trying to break some sort of land speed record on the winding, bumpy mountain roads. It didn’t help that I had to twist and mangle my long white-person legs into terrible positions to fit into my seat in the first place. We made it to Mù Cang Chải a little bit before sunrise. This town would serve as our ‘base camp.’
As an English teacher, I often find myself giving the ‘food’ lesson. I will ask my students to tell me all of the different foods they know in a given category and they will help me compile a list of all the different vocabulary words they know. One day I was teaching this lesson to a class full of 8 and 9 year olds. I was asking them about different kinds of drinks and one of them kept saying a Vietnamese word that I didn’t understand. Every time he said it the class laughed and my teaching assistant scowled at him. I asked my teaching assistant what he was saying and she explained that he was talking about a traditional Vietnamese dish that is essentially blood soup. Cue my first food post.
