Pho Heaven

We're walking through one of the countless markets one finds throughout SE Asia. To Western eyes (and noses), these are not places that appear sanitary or familiar. A thousand contrasting sights and smells confront your senses; sometimes drawing you in, sometimes repulsing you. There tends to be lots of produce and food stalls at places likes these, but it's always unclear what one would actually be served to you and if it would indeed be a wise decision to eat it. In fact, most health literature you find dissuades you from eating “street food.” But seriously folks, half the fun of travelling to places is getting to sample the local cuise and I'm willing to risk a bit in search of a culinary gem. Plus we were hungry.

I usually employ two stategies when trying to find a delicious food stall that won't make me sick:

1. Look for the places that are busy. If stuff has been sitting around it's more likely to be bad. Plus, if the locals aren't eating there, chances are I shouldn't either.

2. Order something that comes out hot and steaming. All the better to to kill the little nasty invisible things.

So, Peter and I employed these two strategies and sat ourselves down at a little soup stall in the Mekong Delta of Vietnam. The smiling lady there didn't speak any English, we didn't spead any Vietnamese, so we pointed.

We were rewareded with a big steaming bowl of soup. Next to our soup bowl she placed another big bowl with a variety of green, leafy vegetables. Some looked kind of like lettuce, one I'm pretty sure was mint. We stared to throw them in whole, but the nice lady chucked at us and showed us how to pull off the leaves and break the big stems into smaller portions. Also, (and this was key for me) there was an abundance of small, yellow, red and orange peppers I could put in my soup.

Fragrant steam pourning onto our foreheads, we dug in wholeheartedly. And oh man, it was SO good! The nice Vietnamese lady poured more hot broth onto our cornicopia of Goodess. I kept adding peppers. My nose was running and I was sweating like a madman and enjoying every minute of it. At one point, I was slurping a noodle with such abandon that it flung around and hit me right in the eyeball. Mind you, this was a hot and VERY spicy noodle that just wrapped itself around my eye. The Vietnamese lady saw all this, including me blinded groping for a napkin to wipe my sweaty, tearing up face. With some amusement, she kidly offered me a box of napkins.

P.S. We didn't get sick.