I have been living Wislawa Szymborska’s Four in the Morning for the last several mornings. If only jetlag could be as profound or as touching as her poetry. But it isn’t and it’s really messing with my day-time plans because I keep falling asleep at five in the afternoon (a sub-optimal time for falling asleep).
The remedy was obvious: I would eat myself into a stupor and then pass out for an unbroken night of sweet repose.
I set off at 7pm, woozy from two hours of ill-timed slumber, into the disorienting glare of District 10’s Nguyễn Tri Phương Street. Now most visitors to Saigon generally stay within the confines of Districts 1,3 and 5 where the street cafés have adult sized steel chairs with canvas upholstery. They don’t go in for such frippery in District 10. In District 10, you’ll be sitting on the pavement on a plastic chair designed for a three-year old Western toddler. You’ll be seated so low that your bent knees almost come up to your shoulders. It’s basically supported squatting.
In the early days of French Indochina the colons apparently avoided native dishes and produce for fear they would catch typhoid. Well, I’ve had my typhoid booster and I’m ready to go. For the purpose of this exercise, I decide to go native and eschew any eatery that looks like it might approximate Western standards of hygiene. This will be My Year of Living Dangerously. Naturally, I am wearing shorts with a forgiving waist-band. (All-you-can-eat adventures require forgiving apparel. You don’t want to be like my ex-law firm colleagues who turned up to an eating competition in their work-clothes. That way, lies madness and cramps.)
Every step brings a different olfactory sensation. Here, the smell of char-grilled squid. There, the scent of drains and durian. Oddly pleasing. Next, an unfortunate whiff of shrimp paste and chilli.
Our first stop is with a purveyor of Broken Rice and Grilled Pork Chops. They ask if I want “extra fat”, which is sweet music to my ears. It means that you get an extra piece of grilled marinated pork belly where the fat has been infused with whatever magic concoction of MSG and spices they’ve used. Delicious! And a bargain at 18K dong (or about 55p in hard currency).
Next up is the old lady with a trolley selling char-grilled dried squid. Dozens of flattened dried squid hang from the top of her trolley where they are ingeniously held in place by plastic clothes pegs. She sticks my squid into a claypot crucible where the burning coals heat it and release the bitter meaty smell I always associate with Têt. A half-inch long cockroach ambles across the trolley’s surface as I wait, and I agree that it is far too hot for scuttling. She puts the hot squid through a roller to tenderise it and hands it to me in a little plastic bag with a portion of chilli sauce. Delicious! (40K dong.)
Further on is a stall selling Vietnamese rice soup with, blood jelly, offal, and Vietnamese sausage (i.e. intestines stuffed with miscellaneous meat products) topped with fried bread sticks. The offal etc are lined up on a trolley on the footpath and lit by a tube of fluorescent lighting. It all looks a bit melancholic but doesn’t taste too bad at 20K dong. Even though the ambient temperature is about 30 degrees and sticky, the soup is served at near boiling point so it takes quite some time to finish. I can’t tell if it is the suffocating, soporific heat, the temperature of the food or general food sweats that it causing me to perspire so. I soon regret the decision to add chilli paste.
Looking around, I see numerous denim clad lasses in skinny jeans. SKINNY JEANS. I can’t bear to have anything touching me in this heat much less tightly stretched denim, vacuum sealing my legs like sausage cases. It’s because I’m getting old, right? Seriously, it is so hot I would just walk around wearing running shorts and nothing else if I didn’t think it would lead to arrest and a diplomatic scandal where I’m disowned by one native and two adoptive countries.
Anyway next up, is an alley way vendor selling crab soup. As geckos crawl across the wall behind me, I am served a bowl that hardly contains any crab and several bits of corn have been thrown in as an after thought – outrageous! There is a bonus of two quails eggs which appeases me, but only a little. This soup also takes forever to eat because it is also served at about 100 degrees centigrade. It occurs to me that this must be the most efficient way for vendors to minimise E.Coli. I guess I will know for sure in about an hour? My mother sees me struggling to finish, as the soup scorches my oesophagus on its way down.
“You don’t have to finish it, you know,” she says.
“Yes…I do…,” I pant back.
“Why are you doing this again?”
“Because I’m greedy, [puff] and it’s there.”
The final course of savouries is found at a place that promises Banh Canh Crab. Banh canh is a type of noodle soup in which the noodles are made from tapioca. The bowl arrives with a baby crab sitting on top with its beady black eyes staring at me all, “Are you weally going to eat me? But I’m so cuuute!”
Yes. I am. But first, I move some crunchy tubular (but otherwise unidentifiable) things aside and find that they have duped me! I have been given flat rice noodles not tapioca ones! Quel scandale! The soup is some coconut broth that can’t be authentically Vietnamese. This is by far the worst thing I have eaten all night. I manage to finish, but I’m not happy about it.
We move on hurriedly to sweets. Dessert is going to be durian based: Che Thai which is half soup half drink made with tapioca, chunks of durian, longan, jelly and a weird, plasticky lump that is meant to mimic the look of pomegranate but is in fact tasteless goo. My second dessert is durian on top of sweetened bean curd in a durian coconut sauce. Anything with durian is a winner in my book.
And then, as a chaser we lumber back to the juice cart lady and I have a soursop smoothie to wash away the memory of that weird Banh Canh crab.
I lurch back home ready to greet sweet slumber. Did it work?
No! For I am still wide awake at 4.30 am. Again. I don’t know what could have possibly gone wrong. Did I not eat enough? Maybe that was it – I knew I should have gone for a bao and/or some banh mi – because as sure as night follows day, deep sleep follows a massive meal! For non-Christians that is, like, the entire point of Christmas!
It presents, however, an ideal opportunity to watch again quite possibly the finest TED talk ever: The Museum of Four in the Morning.
Postcards from the Golden Peninsula 