BootsnAll Travel Network



food for thought

by the girl who likes the type of cooking that consists of saying “Where shall we eat tonight?”
Hanoi, Vietnam

 

In Vung Tau we ate rice soup with beef for breakfast, noodle soup with beef for lunch and rice with claypot or fried fish for dinner. Every day.
On the train we ate baguettes or crackers for breakfast, baguettes for lunch (oh no, we had rice and pork one day), baguettes for dinner. Same again the next day. Arriving fairly late in Hanoi, we grabbed some baguettes at the station for a snack-in-case-we-can’t-find-dinner and then took the nearest and cheapest something more substantial to fill our tummies: doner kebabs (yes, another hunk of bread). Breakfast was provided by the hotel: baguettes! And you’d think we wouldn’t have, but after a morning chasing embassies and camera repair shops and nursing a vomitting ER2, lunchtime came round all too quickly and the easiest thing to do was buy more baguettes from a basket on top of a lady’s head. ER2’s vomitting continued and so we couldn’t venture far for dinner…..some of us went back for more takeaway doner kebabs. Next day’s hotel-provided breakfast was more of the same (that would be baguettes and bananas), and by lunchtime we had decided it was time for noodle soup! We had missed eating bread in Malaysia and Thailand, but nine meals out of ten being bread-based more than made up for that.
Finding noodle soup was not going to be difficult. There are stalls on every street and alley. The main problem with them (apart from the liberal use of MSG and the fact that there are no advertised prices) is that it can be difficult to tell if a little table with its surrounding stools is available for public use or if it’s part of a private dwelling. Just like in the other countries we have come through, people spill out onto the street to do their living. Being in the Old Quarter with its narrow streets and claustrophobic alleys does not prevent this practice.
This blurring of the public-private distinction continues to be fascinating to us. Nowhere in New Zealand would anyone set up a rack beside a public train track to dry their fish. Nowhere in New Zealand would anyone hang up their washing in a public park. Very few New Zealand homes are built right on the street – usually there’s at least a grass verge, a footpath, a fence and a front garden before you get to the house. Even fewer homes will have their front door left wide open so passers-by can see your big bowl of homemade rice noodles for sale sitting on the floor next to a set of scales. In New Zealand I’ve never seen anyone sitting beside their front door with a dozen bottles of fizzy for sale and four glasses on a table to pour them into. In New Zealand I’ve never seen anyone sleeping in a hammock strung between a tree and a lamppost. I’ve never seen anyone chop their garlic for lunch at the side of the road.

All that to say at lunchtime today we found a wonderful restaurant, a real restaurant with wooden chairs and ceramic plates and a printed menu, all inside a building. Some of the selection (like noodle soups and the fried rice) were cheaper than the street stalls where you perch on little plastic stools holding your plastic bowl of soup seasoned with motorbike fumes and use two unmatching chopsticks. The food was not only cheap, it was also beautifully presented and DELICIOUS. So we didn’t bother following the two BBQed dogs we saw on the back of a motorbike today, and we didn’t try to find other Hanoi delicacies like duck embryos or snake hearts; we just returned here for dinner. We even decided what to order tomorrow night too!



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2 responses to “food for thought”

  1. grandpabear says:

    Let’s hope ER2 is well enough to enjoy some of your new-found delicacies!

  2. Gran and Pa says:

    Good to see the healthy meals you are enjoying.

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