Love in my tummy

Of all of my favorite experiences on the road, food often ranks high on my list. I'm traveling with real foodies now, and we are quite known to describe a fantastic meal, saw a braised oxtail in a cherry wine reduction, at a gorgeous restaurant, maybe at the base of a ski slope, candles and ambient music a constant prescense, but my favorite dining experiences are the roadside food stalls. Ok, so you're hungry right? When you open your wallet do moths flutter out? Are the poor imitations pizzas and spaghetti bolognaise made with chopped sandwich ham failing to quench your honed sense of taste? walk down a dimly lit alley and have a broken, filthy, small, plastic seat. That ambient music I mentioned earlier? Yeah, thats crying babies, sizzling oil and clucking women. Can't decide what to have? Taken care of. There are no menus at these mobile metal carts, your order is places when you sit. Julie, Jon and I can now discern whats being slung into bowls by the demeanor of the diners, the cutlery being used, even the shape of the "kitchen". Julie can almost always be counted upon to murder a bowl of pho bo, jon is often drawn to grilled seafood and I am partial to noodle places, like Hoi An's specialty, cao lau. Pho bo joints have large steaming pots of broth, handles of the large sieved ladles used to steep the noodles like broth curling over the edge. Sandwhich places have baguettes stacked up against the glass piled on rounds of laughing cow cheese and delicately balanced hardboiled eggs. The women with conical hats who bob along with a yolk are often weighted down with chicken rice topped with fresh curry leaves. Today, Julie and I sat for pho bo, good old reliable pho bo. Without so much as a glance or spoken word, bowls are instantly heating up the lower half of our faces. The carousel on our table consists of always, always, the same items. IN no particular order, there are a mix of broken wooden and plastic mismatched chopsticks, spoons scrubbed clean of their design, forks ( for the foreigners, square pieces of paper, often cut up childrens homework, which are used as napkins, toothpicks, soy sauce, bottles of store bought hot sauce, tiny jars of homemade thick scarlet hot sauce, a plate half covered in limes half in red chilis, small bowls of fish sauce, sometimes containing garlic, sometimes chilis, a tea pot full of the dreaded tepid winter melon tea and a small tray full of loved and abused teacups. Your server often shows you how to squeeze a lime into your soup ("Yes, thank you."), and how to spoon up some hot sauce ("So that's how its done.") and before you know it, your tossing your said "napkins" on the ground with the lime rinds, chili butts, dropped chopsticks (if your traveling with Julie) whether you're inside or out. No matter, the stray dogs will get whatever your leave behind, eating under the stool of selectively attentive locals. The average street food costs about 75 cents, and cannot possibly be compared to the mostly shitty little guesthouse restaurants with their exorbitant grease and prices.
I'm still waiting for the bizarre food Ive read about in Vietnam, which can apparently be found in bizarre specific food markets in Hanoi. Julie and I can stroll in the market for hours, buying anything we haven't tried before. Out favorite snacks are lychees, boiled peanuts and hardboiled quail eggs. We had grilled chicken feet in Kom Tum, nails and all. The one thing I couldn't quite get myself to try was the baby- chicken fetus eggs we found in Cambodia. The eggs were interrupted during the development process, and one western woman i met described eating one as eating a bony, feathery egg. Luckily, shop owners are gracious enough to indicate theses "baby inside" eggs to us, and the tip often has a small hole in the shell. Other eggs are literally coated with a partially dried, jet black mud as if they had been buried at some point. Banana leaves make a frustrating packaging job for curious foreigners. Their contents are indicated to those in the know by their use of toothpicks and bits of string. Sometimes unbearably sweet, sometimes a gummy fish cake, its like playing edible Russian roulette.