Northern Vietnam is all about the seafood. You’ll see stalls of people selling snails, crabs and of course, grilled fish. The snails I found the most interesting, mostly because it reminded me of my childhood when my Grandmother used to make snails. We would have either toothpicks or a needle, like a sowing needle and we would have to pick the little sucker out of it’s shell. Snails can be tricky, sometimes they don’t want to come out, so you’ve really gotta dig. I remember I used to pick a bunch out then pierce them all onto one toothpick, then I’d have a snailsicle. Oh memories. I bet so many of you can relate.
Unfortunately, I wasn’t able to get a good photo of the snail stalls cause you can’t see much. It’s just people sitting around a tiny stool with a plate of snails, an empty bowl for shells and chili sauce. But since they are sitting on the same exact size stool as the stool holding the food, all you see are huddle crowds of people sucking on toothpicks.
But here’s one of the crab lady. Now this takes some serious commitment to eat on a street, I mean if you’ve ever eaten a crab whole, you know the messy consequences and it’s not like these places have sinks for you. But I bet it’s worth it! And you can see the whole sitting on stool, eating off of a stool situation in the background of the photo.
And did I mention the doughnut craze? This is the munchkin version and ladies walk around with these baskets around their necks. They are GROSS. Poor texture, like a cake with sandy bits in it, poor flavor, something of a mix of super sweet and ever sweeter, toss that out pretty quickly.
And then there are Vietnamese pancakes but I’ll talk more about those later, in this photo there are things that look like Vietnamese empanadas.
Off to Ho Chi Minh City or better known as Saigon.
Connie Sun 