Advertisement
Published: November 26th 2005
The Family Altar
This is where we say prayers and light incense for the owner's parents.So, a little belated, but Happy Thanksgiving! We ended up having a pretty fun shin dig at our place. Brian and Joe's friend Dan is visiting from the Mekong Delta, so he and I cooked up our part of the Thanksgiving feast. Dan knows a decent amount of Vietnamese, he studied here in college, so we were able to go to a really cool market and buy fish. They were still alive when we selected them, and we watched the lady kill them (one was still alive when she started skinning it). It was slighly brutal, but that's life at the top of the food chain. They were also killing and skinning frogs at the same stand - definitely a first for me to see! Our meal included two rice and fish dishes, mashed sweet potatoes, sweet potato fries, hamburgers (a staple at any American Thanksgiving), and deserts (pumpkin pie and some weird vietnamese dish that wasn't so hot...it's still sitting relatively untouched on my counter...). We had about 12 people over, mostly Brits and Ozzies from the TEFL program, then also a few Vietnamese people we know. Dan and I purchased two liters of rice wine for 15,000 VND (=
You're Invited!
Me inviting Alexis to share a shot - see that bottle next to my arm - it'd be the Rice wine!!! $1) and we kicked off the drinking pretty early in the afternoon. The Vietnamese way to drink is to fill a shot, then "invite" someone to drink half of it with you. SOOOOOO, the night quickly degressed into lots of invitations and even more drunkenness. This stuff is not as bad tasting as it's Chinese equivalent, and slightly less alcoholic. By the end, we had polished off the rice wine, along with a few cases worth of beer. We introduced the non-Americans to college drinking games, which was quite fun. At one point, Sam and I went in search of more beer (probably around 2 am). We didn't find any, but we did stumble upon the police station. When we asked about Tiger beer, they laughed and gave us condoms! This action once again demonstrates that girls are often viewed as prosititues or easy, if they are out late drinking with the boys. It's happened to me on a few occasions that I get the 'red nailed chicken' accusation. (While we call women 'chicks' they call sluts chickens. We were talking about bird flu in one of my classes and a student made the comment that there was a type
HCMC Gangstas
Joe and I looking tough for the camera. Incidentally, he was selected for the model shoot - and you can see why! of chicken in Vietnam that was immune to bird flu - the red nailed chicken. At first I thought he was actually talking about a real kind of chicken, but when I figured out what he meant, I thought it was pretty clever...so now it's a running joke amongst my friends. My TA responded to him that red nailed chickens were not, however, immune to AIDS... At any rate, when I woke up the next morning, I was feeling less than 100%, and my house was destrpyed. I found a rotting fish head in the kitchen, along with some raw meat we had forgotten to take care of. Beer bottles, and cans, dirty dishes, food that should have been refridgerated greated me when I went downstairs. Joe and I weren't really productive until 5 pm or so...lesson learned - rice wine is hard stuff!
In addition to the rice wine, I've also recently been introduced to Bia Hoi, which is the cheapest beer in Vietnam. It costs $1.50/liter. I won't say it tastes great, it's quite watery, but it's damn cheap, and it's cool because the places they serve it are not generally where westerners go, so it's
Ranji
Ranji sitting in the kitchen early in the night! much more cultural. So, anyway, happy holidays, enjoy the snow!
Advertisement
Tot: 0.065s; Tpl: 0.01s; cc: 5; qc: 44; dbt: 0.0416s; 1; m:domysql w:travelblog (10.17.0.13); sld: 2;
; mem: 1.1mb
Vlad
non-member comment
haleluya
that shrine is so freaky... i would probably not be able to speak at my normal volume in the house, affraid i'd bother the dead. and what's that lock there?