Food

Meals on a typical day:

Breakfast ranges from French bread spread with condensed milk to leftover fish to chicken noodle soup. Grandma cooks and I wolf it down at 6:20am.

Lunch during the week is either at a cafeteria on campus or at one of the abundant cafes nearby and could be noodles with beef and vegetables, fried rice, or chicken and green beans. And lunch often involves ice cream and perhaps a sinh tò xoaí (mango smoothie).

I eat dinner with the family around 7:30pm. Mom and Grandma cook an assortment of different dishes to spread across the table while the giant rice cooker has a special chair at the table. Everyone sits down and gets a small bowl with chopsticks. First I pass my bowl down to get some rice and then I pick up food from different dishes, place them in my bowl, and eat them with rice. This often involves multiple arms reaching over others but I have yet to see anyone knock elbows. Using chopsticks to eat has posed some problems, but after my host father showed me the right way to eat, I think I’m getting better at the chopsticks thing. The method: once your bowl is full, you must maneuver your chopsticks as a shovel and hold your bowl right up next to your mouth, scooping the rice with meat or vegetable into your mouth. Needless to say, table manners are a little different here! Some of my favorite dishes are spring rolls (any variety), stewed tomatoes stuffed with meat, and squid.

Although my stomach took a few days to adjust, after a brief bout of food poisoning in my first week here I have thankfully had no further trouble. In fact, I think I am now so accustomed to Asian food that when we went out with the school for French food last week my tummy grumbled a bit!