Mostly, when people ask me about my trip to Vietnam and Cambodia, I say, "The food was amazing." It's always impossible to summarize a trip, long or short, in a few words, but this is true: the food was amazing. In the direst of lost-ness, in the middle of nowhere, at the cheapest of little food stalls, we had quite possibly the most delicious, certainly the most consistently delicious, food I have ever tasted.
We pretty much broke every food rule for traveling. We drank iced coffee with abandon, purchased on the street from a woman who held the ice block in her hand and banged at it with a hammer to create the shards that she put in our glasses. We ate lettuce just as carelessly, at a little table on the side of the road, using it to wrap up bits of lentil crepe that a woman cooked in a wok-like thing over a coal-pot, at a night market on an island, layering it in salad rolls with our fish and noodles. We ate fruit cut open with a machete on a boat on a tributary of the Mekong. We ate ice cream at every opportunity.
If there was nothing else decipherable on the menu, we ordered vegetables and rice in Vietnam, or chicken curry in Cambodia, and every plate of either was delicious. (Except that one time, when we went to an actual expensive restaurant in Siem Reap, where the curry was sickeningly sweet and I found a dead roach cooked into it after I'd eaten half of it. Stick with the street food, I say.)
I learned to eat with chopsticks, finally, tardily. I have avoided chopsticks for years. They hurt my wrist because I cling to them too hard, and I've never been able to pick up small things. Now I can. I can hold them lightly. I can pick up that last grain of rice, should I need to pick it up. I started to understand why people choose them over forks.
That is the overview. The food was amazing, and there were lots of motorbikes. Now, next time, for the stories.
(It's amazingly hard to get back in the habit of even turning on a computer after so long without one. It's good for me not to lose so many hours to the internet - I have a cleaner kitchen and I've gotten exercise every day - but it does not lend itself to writing here.)
We pretty much broke every food rule for traveling. We drank iced coffee with abandon, purchased on the street from a woman who held the ice block in her hand and banged at it with a hammer to create the shards that she put in our glasses. We ate lettuce just as carelessly, at a little table on the side of the road, using it to wrap up bits of lentil crepe that a woman cooked in a wok-like thing over a coal-pot, at a night market on an island, layering it in salad rolls with our fish and noodles. We ate fruit cut open with a machete on a boat on a tributary of the Mekong. We ate ice cream at every opportunity.
If there was nothing else decipherable on the menu, we ordered vegetables and rice in Vietnam, or chicken curry in Cambodia, and every plate of either was delicious. (Except that one time, when we went to an actual expensive restaurant in Siem Reap, where the curry was sickeningly sweet and I found a dead roach cooked into it after I'd eaten half of it. Stick with the street food, I say.)
I learned to eat with chopsticks, finally, tardily. I have avoided chopsticks for years. They hurt my wrist because I cling to them too hard, and I've never been able to pick up small things. Now I can. I can hold them lightly. I can pick up that last grain of rice, should I need to pick it up. I started to understand why people choose them over forks.
That is the overview. The food was amazing, and there were lots of motorbikes. Now, next time, for the stories.
(It's amazingly hard to get back in the habit of even turning on a computer after so long without one. It's good for me not to lose so many hours to the internet - I have a cleaner kitchen and I've gotten exercise every day - but it does not lend itself to writing here.)
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