I must say, Vietnamese life has impressed me for the most part. The most glaring aspect would of course be the cuisine. Never in my life have I seen a country with such a healthy diet in this day and age. Then again, there are many other countries that I have yet to spend time in that have an overall healthy set of national dishes (I’m thinking of the Japanese), as well as a host of others whose menu is unfamiliar to me.
Still untouched by the evil clutches of unhealthy fast food, Vietnam’s charm that had me hooked was the presence of street food vendors abundantly scattered throughout Saigon that sold a variety of dishes one would not expect to be sold on the streets. Within an arm’s reach from my hotel (ever so conveniently located along De Tham Street in the heart of the backpacker district of Saigon), I had access to:
Pho – Vietnamese noodle soup. Rice noodles in a murky broth, topped with leeks, cilantro, mint, and either beef or chicken. Normally costs VND 20,000, which is roughly USD 1 or PHP 45.
Banh Mi – Baguettes filled with roasted pork, sausages, cilantro, cucumber, and various other vegetables. You normally have the option to add cream cheese for an extra VND 5,000 (PHP 11). Adding cheese is highly recommended. Highly. Banh Mi goes for VND 15,000 with cheese (PHP33.75)
Stir Fried Noodles (whose name I forgot)– Another great way to satisfy those hunger pangs after a few rounds of Saigon beer. This dish is fried noodles (no shit?), topped with pretty much the same assortment of greens as Pho or Banh Mi, doused with sweet/spicy sauce and topped off with a fried egg. VND 20,000 (PHP 45) is usually enough to score you one of these.
Other little delights also abounded on the streets, such as frozen yogurt sold in bite-sized packs for only VND 5,000 (PHP 11) or Ca Phe Sua Da (iced coffee with condensed milk) for VND 10,000 (PHP 22.50) per glass. Not so common but equally as delicious were the strawberry shakes. I suspect other types of fruit shakes are sold throughout Saigon but the ones we bought at only had strawberries. It’s your normal garden variety strawberry shake, made with your normal garden variety blender (yup, still on the street) but with one exception – instead of using refined sugar to sweeten the shake, the vendors have a sugarcane press right there which extracts the juice from sugar canes and gives the shake quite the distinctive taste. It’s almost as if the sweetness comes guilt-free. Almost.
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| Strawberry Shakes, sans the guilt (but probably still with the calories) |
And oh, for dinner that other night, we had:
- 5 different types of snails (cooked in different ways – grilled, with butter sauce, with some other type of sauce reminiscent of gata)
- HUGE HUGE shrimp. The heads alone were longer than my middle finger, I shit you not.
- Bo Luc Lac. Salpicao meat cooked with onions, bell peppers and tomatoes. Really tasty, although I highly prefer the Bo Luc Lac in Ba Noi’s, my favourite Vietnamese Restaurant in the Philippines. Ba Noi’s Bo Luc Lac is cooked a bit differently and served with crispy basil. Plus you get to dip it in a mixture of salt and pepper, which is awesome.
- Fried rice. By this time, I was too preoccupied with the taste of the food to really care what was in the rice. All my mind can extract from itself now is that there were clams in it.
- Shrimp claws, formerly belonging to the shrimps mentioned above. These were almost a foot long each, making for one intimidating shrimp.
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