Sunday, March 25, 2007

More Vietnamese Soup Noodles?

Bun Cha Day

There certainly is no shortage of food in this country. Everywhere you look, there is a stall selling food, usually of the soup noodle variety, but also plenty of sandwich stalls plus an occasional rice guy or dried squid guy. What's interesting to note though is that the soup noodles came in so many varieties beyond pho. In fact, I don't think I saw a single pho shop down here in Can Tho for some reason. Instead, we found all sorts of other bowls of random noodles here, all generally using a clear broth, but tasting quite differently from pho, including a nameless one that we got with a huge chunk of meat on the bone paired with slices of liver. Sitting in little plastic stools (reminds me of kindergarten) on a random patch of dirt can be quite a challenge too, especially when your legs have trouble fitting underneath a similarly small plastic table..this is a skill that I have yet to master, apparently.

Anyway, I later got some bun cha day, which I thought was going to be of the Hanoi variety with the dry noodles, roasted meat, and thin sweet fish sauce to douse over it with. Instead, this thing was another bowl of soup noodles, although with a slice of some kind of a cylindrical ground meatcake thing. She unfortunately included some of that Vietnamese coriander in here, which I'm not a big fan of, but if you like the taste of laksa leaves, then maybe this is something for you.

Hamburger in Tomato SauceBTW, here was an interesting can of "Hamburger in Tomato Sauce" that we saw at one of the supermarkets here. I didn't actually eat it, but it just sounded a lot like that Peking Duck in a can that I saw back in Singapore. Note to self: surprisingly, the cellular networks out here in Can Tho are voice only (not even a GPRS connection available).

No comments: