I arrived safely in Saigon this morning via a sleepless sleeper car on my train. The nine-hour ride was unventful, including the event of sleep. I stepped into a hotel next to the Saigon train station for the 16 hours I have to kill between the train’s arrival and my plane’s departure to Seoul. What would I do in between? One last adventure.
The sounds of this city are beginning to give me a headache. 6,000,000 (or 10,000,000? I don’t now) people are crammed onto the streets beeping their horns and screaming at each other to make their way through the congestion. On one corner the congestion was so bad that the motorbikes (which represent about 98% of the vehicles on the road) had just taken to the sidewalks. To walk on the sidewalk I had to walk against a stream of thousands of motorbikes.
I walked through the cooling city as the sun went down and saw a steaming plate of rice and vegetables on a plastic table next to the road. I gestured to the owner that I wanted a plate of that and he replied, “Thong?”. Yeah, “thong”, I say.
(Let’s pause here and point out that the Vietnamese prounce t’s and p’s as a softer, “sloppier” version of what we Americans do. To your balang ears the word “thong” would sound like “tong”.)
When the meal arrived, I spied at least three types of meat among the rice and veggies. Squid was unmistakably one of them but unknown red meat and unknown white meat comprised the others. I can exclude all the obvious meats (pig, cow, horse, chicken, duck, pigeon, sparrow, deer, insect, fish, clam, squid, octopus, etc.) so am left at a loss for what I’m being served. I asked the owner, “Thong?” and he corrected me with, “duong”. I said, “duong?” and he said, “ya…duong! bark bark!” Ah, “dog!” Good times.
In truth even this final learning didn’t entirely clear up the picture. I’m not sure if the dog was the unknown white meat or the unknown red meat. And then the question remains: what the fuck was that other animal? I’ll die never knowing the answer to that question.
I watched some movies at one point and had a beer or two but am definitely ready for the flight out of here. I’m tired as hell and depriving myself of sleep so I crash hard on the Saigon-to-Seoul flight. I want to be in better shape for the Seoul/SFO flight because I’m flying business class. Damn straight I want to enjoy United’s slightly less shitty business class service.
See/talk to you guys when I get back.
I thought of you last night. We were watching Tony Bourdain’s No Reservations and he was in Vietnam eating really weird food. He ate something they called “squeezle” and he found out it was a porcupine. Did you have any??