FOOD!

In general, when Chris and I are traveling, we like to eat our way through wherever we are visiting. Vietnam is no different. Here is a sampling of foods we have tried for breakfast, lunch, and dinner:

Breakfast

A typical Vietnamese breakfast would be rice or a bowl of noodles, perhaps with a fried egg. Our breakfasts tend to be a little more western as we live with an Irish priest and a Vietnamese-American priest.

• Coffee (or Tea) - The Vietnamese love their coffee, there are cafes everywhere and coffee is typically taken with sugar, and sometimes ice. Kim isn't a coffee person so she brought her own stash of tea.
• Toast - Sometimes we have fresh french bread, very typical in what was a french colony, and sometimes we have raisin bread from the store. Either way we make toast.
• Jellied Meats - For a lack of a better description we will compare these to bologna. 
• Cheese - Despite Vietnam's native dairy industry, cheese is not a part of the typical diet. French cheese, however, is widely available, including Laughing Cow - which is manufactured here. (Laughing Cow is a brand of Bel Fromageries, based in Paris) Occasionally we also have imported hard cheeses like cheddar.
• Fruit - There is, of course, always an abundance of fresh tropical fruit. 
• Dragonfruit
• Mango
• Lychee
• Oranges

Dragonfruit

Left - Lychee, Right - Oranges which have green rinds

Left - Cold breakfast meats, Right - Laughing Cow singles

Lunch

Lunch is the main meal of the day for the Vietnamese. We eat out lunch in common with the seminarians. The local community provides them with the food, which they prepare themselves.

• Rice - Always the staple starch, steamed white sticky rice makes an appearance at every meal.
• Steamed or Sautéed Veggies - The Vietnamese love their veggies! Cucumbers, bok choi, carrots, broccoli, and okra are all very popular.
• Soup - No meal is complete without soup. Usually made of leafy greens, broth, and some sort of seafood it is considered the appetizer to a typical meal. In general we have found the soup a little bitter, sour, and fishy for our tastes. 
• Meat - Grilling and barbecuing are popular forms for cooking meat, and we usually have some sort of pork or beef for lunch. Sometimes instead of coming as a separate dish it is cut up and stir fried in with the veggies or boiled with the soup.
• Fish - Fish is often fried whole, so eating it becomes a search mission for bones to avoid accidentally swallowing one. When the fishes are little enough, they are eaten whole, bones and all. We have been a little wary of seafood in general here, for the sake of our stomachs later. 
• Fruit - After dinner there is always fruit as a dessert. While the fruits listed above are common here are some of the more interesting ones we've had at lunch:
• Durian - This fruit tastes like garlic and has the consistency of snot. Would not recommend. It also stinks. 
• Avacado - This is considered a sweet item here, and would never accompany a savory dish. Instead they frequently use it to make smoothies or mash it up with sugar.

Left - Soup and sausage stuffed tomatoes at lunch, Center - Avocado mashed with sugar, Right - Mangos

Durian

Dinner

Dinner is a simpler affair than lunch, often consisting of leftovers from lunch or perhaps a bowl of noodles. Some nights our landlady cooks for us, and some nights we go out. Eating out is relatively affordable, even for the middle class here, and cheap street food abounds. Unlike in America, where going out for food often means eating foreign food, going out in Vietnam still means Vietnamese food. Most of our seminarians have never had any type of foreign food - even in a restaurant. We have enjoyed some excellent Pho, and fried rice in the restaurants. 

Left - Chicken hot pot with veggies, Center - fried fish and basil, Right - Grilling octopus

Thanks for reading!

-Chris and Kim

Stay tuned for more tails from the other side of the world!

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