what pastaholic ate for breakfast.

i recently wrote a story for the travelettes about ha long bay. i mention that one of the main reasons why i decided on vietnam was because i love fresh spring rolls so much and wanted to eat as many as i could. and no, before you care to correct me, nobody calls them summer rolls there. pastaholic me however was thinking about pho before going there and got ridiculously excited by the idea of travelling to a country where it was perfectly acceptable to have pasta for breakfast. not even in rome did i eat pasta for breakfast, though i should have and next time i go, i totally will. and while i am very well aware of the difference between noodles and pasta, i was still excited and looking forward to 'pasta for breakfast'.

in case you don’t know what pho is – pho is a broth with rice noodles, usually served with chicken or beef, and notoriously mispronounced by foreigners who end up ordering a hooker for breakfast. i tried my best not to, but i also think that the vietnamese are used to the stupid westerners now and have learned to differentiate if someone is hungry for one or the other.

so we arrived and i ate pho. i ate pho on my first night in vietnam, i ate it at pho 2000 where clinton ate his pho, and at 6.30am after getting off a night train in nha trang with a dodgy stomach at a little side street cafe, barely avoiding pigs feet and blood sausage in my bowl. so i think i ate my way around and really gave it a fair chance. but in the end i realized again, because i kind of knew that already, that i am not a soup/broth fan. it doesn't get me excited at all, ever. unless it’s lobster broth, but even then i would prefer the actual lobster. but i didn't make a big deal out of broth dislike, i just started to eat only the noodles, the chicken, and at pho 2000 the funny, round mushrooms that looked like exploding shrooms from mario brothers, but that were actually super delicious. this was an okay solution for me, but i always felt a bit bad for leaving all the broth. it felt like i was insulting the chef's pho by not eating the broth.

 

the other thing that i realized is that eating noodle soup for breakfast is freaking weird. i really don’t want to sound like a horrible tourist here and i don’t think that my breakfast choices are making the world a better place, but for my palate noodle soup was weird. i thought i was going to be in heaven, being allowed to have noodles all day long, but for breakfast my stomach was like “what the heck? ever heard about eggs? ever heard about a croissant? a dry piece of baguette?”. it got very confused by my repeated attempts to feed it noodles at 7am, something it had clearly marked and stored away under lunch and dinner and after midnight snack foods.

then came the morning when we arrived in hanoi. again we had gotten off a night train which for a change hadn't arrived earlier, hurrah, but nobody had woken us up and so we had to get up, get our luggage, and get off the train in less than 5 minutes. then we had to walk to our hotel for about 10 minutes, backpacks and all, through grey morning streets and high humidity. at our hotel we couldn't check in yet, so we freshened up in the bathrooms, and went off to find some breakfast. even in busy hanoi not an easy task this early in the morning and at least the eggs benedict were still fast asleep. we went to a little corner cafe to have a coffee first and wait for the breakfast place to open.

my stomach was still dodgy, but i decided to ignore it and have an iced coffee with condensed milk. why anyone would drink coffee without condensed milk ever is beyond me and since i knew my days in vietnam were numbered i went for it. eventually more places opened and we had the choice of ordering pho from the stall next to the cafe or to have said eggs benedict for breakfast. my stomach and my wallet both decided that a little chicken noodle broth would be gentler for every party involved. i asked tam, our one vietnamese in the group, to order me a bowl. he did and in return i didn't growl at him when he wanted to take my picture eating pho. which i think says a lot about how mellow i am on holiday, because let’s repeat:

it was before 8am.
i was not feeling well.

implied that i wasn't wearing any make-up and that i don't like to have my picture taken in general. i think i was temporarily mollified though by my pho and by tam's camera, which is a fancy one in a cool, old school cover. and in the end i must admit i quite like it the picture. blame the filter, i blame the pho. the vietnamese seem to have it right – pho in the morning is good for you.

 

to eat or not to eat.

yesterday in class we were in half tortoise and i forgot to get out of the posture when everybody else did. well i didn't really forget, i just didn't hear sy when he told us to come out of it. why i didn't hear him? well, i was thinking about my arrival in bangkok and if there were still restaurants open late at night close to the hotel, oh but surely i can get a bowl of pad thai anytime in bangkok, right? so now i apparently not only think about cupcakes but also about pad thai in my yoga classes. next time you worry that you are not focussed enough or that your mind wonders, don’t worry about it, because there might just be a teacher practising next to you who is thinking about noodles.

for this mental slip i blame the fact that i haven’t eaten pasta in 4 (!!!) days for pre-holiday toning reasons and that my mind currently revolves around little else but the planning of my upcoming trip. as you know i am a planner. i plan for a living and i plan for fun and yes, sometimes to a fault. it leaves little room for living in the moment and being spontaneous and all the crap wise things wise people tell you to do if you really want to be happy. but my happiness levels are okay most days and so i continue planning.

at times like these i enjoy the planning immensely because it is like having a mental holiday before the actual holiday and also because planning calms my nerves and i am slightly freaking out here. freaking out because i am going to asia and i have never been and i have always wanted to and what if i hate it and get homesick and cold and and and… so i am planning and since most of my trip has a set itinerary, i am focussing all my attention on the few days that i have added before and after. the amount of research i have spent on junks in halong bay and pondered on the question of how much titanic pre-sinking luxury i can afford is extensive. tripadvisor and i have gotten well acquainted and also my good, old friend google came to the helping when i simply asked: how to pick the best junk in halong bay?

google is like the reincarnated oracle of delphi. it actually found me a blog post comparing three different cruises that the author had all done himself. i like that kind of enthusiasm and effort put into the story and after i went on reading. eventually i found a post of how he went to eat dog in vietnam. let’s leave the question of whether one should eat any animals aside for just a moment and dear vegetarians would you just indulge me for a story of pure adventurous foodie spirit? i need a little food challenge in asia. what should i eat? it’s a given that there will be an entire pastaholic story about the art of eating noodles for breakfast, don’t worry. but here are some of the more … exotic options on the menu which are to be considered:

pets. i don’t want to eat a dog or a cat or a hamster. i completely understand that in other cultures they are considered food and that is fine, but for me they are pets. also hamsters have tiny, little bones and unless it’s a quail tasting likewaffle i am not fan of tiny, little bones.

snake. i think i have ophidiophobia and that extends to eating the things. i sometimes gag just seeing a snake on tv, so i don’t think the attempt to eat one would go down well.

critters and insects. anything that looks like a maggot, and a worm is just a big maggot, is a no. sorry, but i don’t care about their protein content, if you ever had maggots in your house, you wouldn’t pay money to eat some either. but maybe something crunchy, cricket-y as long as it is fried. i like fried and crispy things.

feet and stuff. i have once vetoed a mexican thanksgiving stuffing with chicken feet, but have eaten pigs’ feet and ears, so i am not sure where that leaves me on the issue of feet and other body parts like that.

blood and gore intestines. i would not necessarily say no, unless hanoi in august smells the same as nyc meatpacking district in august.

and that leaves me with the crème de la crème of exotic asian food:

the fertilized egg. a vietnamese speciality. it gives an elegant twist to the conundrum of which came first – the chicken or the egg? and no, as much as i like chicken and eggs, i don’t want chicken in egg. i would however very much like to see some fertilized eggs when they hatch. apparently it happens on the markets in summer sometimes and i think that would be awesome to see. the chicken totally wings it and gets away. sorry sir, but your lunch just hatched and ran off! now i would pay money to see that.

to summarize one could say that though i eat quite a few things, the asian, exotics might not be completely up my alley. but i like a challenge. you tell me what and i take a bite and have a picture taken to prove it too!

camel burger in fez. delicious though i felt slightly bad as we were riding camels 

the next day.

i ate some of henry's brains. the picture does them justice - they were unexciting and mushy.