If it's Tuesday this must be the Linh Phuoc Pagoda

Phung, our guide, is tireless and excellent. Yesterday we took a tram down a mountain to tour some pagodas then took a boat in the nearby lake to an island where we rode an elephant into the jungle. (My father has declared himself done with elephant rides.) Then we went back across the lake and rode a kitschy little roller coaster down a canyon to view a waterfall. Yes, it was really a roller coaster. That was probably the wackiest thing we did all day,  followed by a trip to the Frank Lloyd Wright-ish Bao Dai Summer Palace and a tour of a trippy hotel built by a communist leader's batty daughter. This hotel, which is popular with Japanese tourists, looks like a cross between a Gaudi building and a deranged hobbit's house. It's not how I pictured Vietnam, but very little is. Somewhere in the middle of all this, we had lunch at a restaurant that serves porcupine and anteater -- "jungle meat" is popular in Da Lat -- but despite the half-hatched eggs, I'm not really an extreme eater and we stuck with the wild boar. It was delicious.

I also bought some yummy dried tangerine at the Da Lat town market and tried to imagine shopping daily in a place like this. Couldn't. The meat section was the most striking area, with giant bowls of eyeballs and palates, turgid beef tongues splayed out on warm ceramic counters, blood-smeared tile floors, men hacking at chunks of pork with dirty cleavers, flies. I don't actually mind the charnel house gore and viscera -- I'm not squeamish in that particular regard. It's the lack of ice, of refrigeration. I'm extremely squeamish in THAT regard.

But let's change the subject to something more pleasant: fashion. The average height of a woman here is 4'11 (per wikipedia and my own unerring eye) and she has the silhouette of a slightly precocious 12-year-old American girl. The uniform: Skinny jeans. A form-fitting top, maybe satin, maybe a stylish t-shirt with a funky design. Hair: long, with straight layers. Shoes: mules. Without exception, tiny, tiny, delicate mules, sometimes with heels, sometimes with sequins, but always mules. I'm not sure I've seen a pair of non-mules except on lumbering Western tourists and waitresses. The look is finished off with a surgical mask across the mouth to ward off pollution and disease. Very chic! 

If I stayed here more than two weeks, I would need a whole new wardrobe, though finding my size would be a mighty challenge. The other night I stumbled across a terrific and smart blog by an American couple who spend a lot of time in Saigon. I highly recommend her funny account of trying to buy a pair of jeans in Vietnam.

We are leaving Da Lat today and going to Buon Ma Thuot about which I know nothing except that it is on the way to Pleiku where my father was stationed during the war. Phung tells us this is our "big" day as opposed to yesterday, which was our "easy" day. I hope we survive. I must go fortify myself now with many cups of coffee and a bowl of rice soup. If there are typos I apologize, I realize now I am very very late and have to leave right this second.

I'm no Anthony Bourdain

But I tried. 

Half-hatched eggs a.k.a. baby eggs a.k.a balut a.k.a. duck embryos are widely on offer here in Da Lat, the pleasant highland town in central Vietnam where my father and I arrived yesterday. 

At my request, our guide, Phung, took us to a small, homely restaurant at the entrance of which sat enormous trays of shelled sea (lake?) creatures and one steaming cauldron of eggs. Phung ordered. Three large, warm eggs, accompanied by saucers of  lime, chili-salt and herbs, appeared at our tiny plastic table. The proprietress neatly tapped open the shell of one egg with a spoon, exactly like my mother used to prepare a soft-boiled egg for toast-dipping.

I was told to sprinkle said egg with the chili salt, sip out the juices, then take a bite of the contents. Sort of like eating an oyster, with the sipping-eating order reversed. 

Sipping wasn't half-bad. The egg liquour tasted like a thin, savory soup.

Then  I shut my eyes and took a bite.

Not the best shot of this historic moment, but it will have to suffice.

  

The flavor of the egg? Quite nice. Like chicken with zesty spice.

The texture? Extremely challenging, clotted and clumpy. There were a lot of differentiated parts, and when I dared to look more closely, a lot of differentiated colors: gray, black, white, gold.

 

The concept? You don't need me to tell you that the concept, to a typical Westerner, is absolutely revolting and the egg, therefore, was inedible. 

In the middle of this whole escapade I realized it was probably rude to go into a restaurant, order the specialty of the house, take pictures of oneself choking down a tiny morsel, pay, and depart. I don't approve! But the proprietress seemed more amused than irritated. I bet she's seen this before.

Saigon drivers are crazy, Da Lat is cold

My father and I loved Saigon. Loved it. We both have a little crush on that sticky, noisy megalopolis. But crossing the streets took months off my life.  You're supposed to walk briskly into traffic, trusting that the packs of motor scooters -- carrying smoking men, pregnant women, families of four, giant sacks of mangosteens, windows -- will veer around you. It's your life at stake -- but you make it the other person's problem. Scary! This aspect of the city, we will not miss. 

We are now in the central highlands town of Da Lat where it is actually chilly, something I had not anticipated in my packing. Our tour guide, Phung, is going to take me to a place where they serve "half-hatched egg" tonight. Whether or not I rise to the occasion remains to be seen. 

Too many hamburgers

It's a running "joke" in Vietnam that Westerners are big and fat. I've heard some variation on this "joke" a dozen times and we've been here less than 48 hours. Okay, okay, so it's true, but is it really nice to say it all the time? Is it even funny? Don't giants have feelings too?

We went to the astonishing Cu Chi Tunnels today. It's profoundly strange to think that a significant and sad piece of American history transpired in this sweltering, beautiful, water-logged jungle crawling with massive centipedes. Forty years later, it seems unbelievably random.

 

Anyway, the tunnels. They're this mind-boggling network of TINY tunnels in which the Viet Cong soldiers traveled, lived, hatched battle plans, steamed tapioca, and devised awesome, hideous traps to maim and kill enemy soldiers. There's an extensive display of these ingenious traps with their sharpened bamboo spikes for impaling human bodies. American bodies. It's hard to know what to say when the guide gently asks you what you think. "Impressive" is probably the best answer.

Again, I digress. The tunnels. So, a guide got into one of the tunnel hatches to show us how the heroic VC used to slip down into the earth to evade the Americans. See above. Here's what it looks like an instant later, after he submerges himself and pulls the cover down: 

Amazing.

After he got out, we were encouraged to try it for ourselves. Reluctantly, after much cajoling, I climbed into the hole. And then I couldn't get out. It's not like I was STUCK, people! I just don't have the greatest upper body strength and I was in there up to my armpits. So another guide had to give me a little pull and then he made a joke to the crowd:  "Too many hamburgers!"

Hilarious! 

Jerk.

We nervously eat incredible street food.

Back in California when I was looking for tips about Saigon on the internet, I found a small tour company that hires students as guides. One of their itineraries is a dining tour in which a guide takes you to great hole-in-the-wall restaurants tourists never find and/or are too intimidated to visit on their own. I booked this tour for our first night.

Our guide was Van, a 21-year-old economics student whom my father and I liked immediately. She was funny and irreverent and sweet and asked as many questions as she answered. In the picture she was trying to demonstrate the proper way to eat a dish of rice paste and eggs, but started to giggle too much.

She took us to five restaurants where we ate sticky rice and pork tongue (my favorite),  

 noodles with beef broth, vermicelli noodles with grilled sugarcane pork, fried rice paste with eggs, shrimp cakes, and rice custard. By the end, we could barely walk. The food was staggeringly delicious.

 We ate most of these dishes squatting on tiny stools at tiny tables in rooms open to the wet, teeming sidewalk. Was I nervous about hygiene and our delicate American stomachs? OH YES. And still am. It was an imprudent adventure, but very exciting. 

Some interchanges with Van:

Van: Jennifer, do you smack your kids when they are bad?

Tipsy: Not very often, Van. Did your mother smack you when you were bad?

Van: (giggling)  Oh yes, she had a great big pole. She hit me until I cry and cry when I was bad. In Vietnam, yes.

----

Van: This is the pregnant woman hospital.

Tipsy: Ah! So this is where women have babies.

Van: Yes! And (taps her belly matter-of-factly) abortion. (She smiles cheerfully.)

---

Van: How do you feel with everyone staring at you? 

Tipsy: Are people staring at us?

Van: Oh yes. In Vietnam everyone stare at foreigners because of how different they look. They maybe pretend they're not, but . .  (She shoots an intense, sidelong glance to show how we are being furtively observed.)

She was wonderful.

She also told us about:

-weasel coffee. Weasels eat the coffee beans, poop them out, and the poop is used to brew coffee. I thought she was joking, but no.

-"baby eggs" (a.k.a. balut) which she calls by their Vietnamese name -- trung vit lon. These are embryonic ducks still in the shell and they are considered a great delicacy. She offered to take me to eat one ("they're very good before the duckling get too big, before you can see the fur,") but it was late in the evening and I was just too stuffed. Really.

Walking around Saigon feeling like a giantess

That's a picture of the hotel breakfast. My hotel breakfast. My father forbade me to photograph his plate because he got scrambled eggs and bacon and he told me he doesn't want to become a "joke" in my blog. Too bad! Scrambled eggs and bacon? Hmmph.

The rice soup was completely bland, but alongside the tureen there were platters of pickled cucumbers, finely shredded pork, fried tiny fish, and salted eggs that you could add to provide flavor. I added a lot, and the soup was fantastic. I've read about this kind of Asian porridge, but never had the pleasure of eating it.

After breakfast, we walked around a lot, went to a museum, got rooked by a street vendor, drank some passionfruit juice, ate noodles, talked about the Vietnam War, wrote postcards, perspired. It's extremely humid and there are millions of motor scooters. Altogether, unbelievably exciting.

I guess we have to go see some sights, now

Airplane food almost makes one nostalgic for the South Beach Diet.

LONG TRIP.  

Pretty displays of Japanese cookies and sweets at Narita airport where we had a 2-hour layover:

And pretty fruit plate in my room at our hotel in Saigon:

The bananas are delicious, and so are the cute furry pink fruits, which I think are lychees, though I've never seen a lychee outside of a can. (Correction: Having looked them up, I think the furry pink fruits are actually rambutans, heretofore unknown to me. Ditto the purple thing that looks like a small eggplant and which I think is a mangosteen. It was worth flying 17 hours to eat that.) No nostalgia for the South Beach Diet now!

We arrived at 11:30 last night. I think it's morning based on adding hours to the time on my computer, but can't be sure because there's no clock in the room, my watch broke, and the window overlooks an airshaft. 

Definitely morning. I just looked out and managed to see a small patch of sky. It is there, and it is cloudy. It is also unbelievably hot. 

We're leaving for Vietnam

This morning, my father and I are leaving on our trip to Vietnam. I am bringing my laptop, so I will post when there is interesting food/chicken/bee-related news and an internet connection.

I have never been to Asia. My father spent a year there in 1967. It wasn't a vacation. The picture above is of the two of us shortly before he left for Vietnam. He looks like he's about nine. Here's another picture from that same vintage: 

This is my father's first trip back to Vietnam, and we're visiting the city in the central highlands where he was stationed. Here's what Frommer's says about it: "These days the town of Pleiku is just a polluted commercial center. If you're in a pinch, there are a few hotels here, but most visitors give Pleiku a pass. "

Who is this Frommer person, anyway? Sheesh. In addition to Pleiku we are visiting more popular tourist destinations like Ho Chi Minh City, Da Lat, Hoi An and Hue.

Now I need to finish packing and leave.

 

South Beach Diet: Yeah, it works

I accidentally ate a bite of homemade bagel this afternoon --  I was talking to someone and got carried away --  so I guess the diet is pretty much kaput, which is okay since this is day 7, the last day. I've lost five pounds. You can't ask for more from a weeklong diet. 

What's my verdict on the South Beach Diet? You eat a lot of vegetables and you're never hungry. Maybe you're not all that psyched about that next baked chicken breast dinner or egg white omelette, but psyching you up for meals is not what diets are for. As a short-term diet, South Beach is okay with me. As a way of life, it's barbaric. The thought of trying to resist a ripe nectarine, a bowl of blueberries, a spoonful of honey, a roasted sweet potato, month after month, year after year, appalls me. Eating artificially sweetened strawberry Jell-O instead of a strawberry? So clearly wrong.