Tetherd Cow Ahead

May Contain Traces of Nuts*

This is a little bag of snacky-type things they hand out on Vietnam Airlines.

This is the ingredient list on the back:

So far so good. Roasted mixed nuts, salt, vegetable oil. Yep, you know exactly what you’re gonna see when you open that little packet, right?

Wrong! You are in Vietnam, remember, where all rules and laws are merely suggestions.

This is what you’re really going to see:

I have marked for you the actual nuts. Yes, you counted right, three (3) cashews. Which as my friend Simon pointed out, are not even technically nuts. Everything else is definitely not a nut, even the cunning little things that look like peanuts. There are peas, little starchy corn things, and the fake peanuts that are probably made of some kind of crunchy soy product.

True, there was salt (probably – it tasted salty), and vegetable oil (I guess being charitable it could even have been peanut oil…). All in all though, the ingredient list is a much better guide to what’s not in the packet.

I had such a great time in Vietnam.

In Quang Ngai City, where I spent most of my time, there is a new supermarket. We love the supermarket. It is a place where you can spend a good few hours browsing.

In the liquor section, there was a bottle of wine which was labelled ‘Wine with Young Bees’. Floating in the bottom inch and a half of the bottle was a sludge of bee larvae. I held it up and to an old man who was watching us curiously examining the swirling insect brood.

“Good?” I mimed, with a big smile and a raise of the eyebrows.

“Nope”, he mimed back, shaking his head and making a face that said “this is one of the most disgusting things ever invented. I don’t know what they were thinking.”

Outside the supermarket, the road is divided into two sets of two lanes by a median strip. This is the only median strip in Quang Ngai. A median strip in Quang Ngai makes about a much sense as an amber traffic light.

You don’t need to understand Vietnamese to get the sense of perplexity people feel about the median strip.

“Why have they done this? What – we are supposed to cycle all the way down the end of this to the corner, turn around and come back to get to something on the other side? Why are they messing with our heads like this? Next they’ll be coming up with some daft concept like, oh, saying you can only go one way down a street or something.”

Consequently, if you need to get to a place on the other side of the median strip from where you are, you just ignore it! You just get on the other side of the median strip and cycle to where you want to be. Like it doesn’t exist.

I love Vietnam. Did I mention?

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*If you’re lucky.

The Waste Baskets of Vietnam.

Be sure to click for bigger versions. You can only be further impressed. Number 3 is particularly interesting in that one of its offered features is that it is comfortable.

I ask you to reflect on what might find a waste basket ‘comfortable’ for we shall have cause to ruminate a little more on such things in due course.

Well Cow fans, The Cow and I have journeyed far, seen extraordinary sights, made wonderful friends and had many laughs along the way. Sadly, such travels inevitably turn back toward home, where I now find myself, huddled inside the cloister while the wind howls outside and the rain buckets down.

It’s a far cry from the heat and the swelter of the last two weeks.

As I suspected I wasn’t able to report to you too regularly while I was travelling, but I have accumulated a veritable milk-pail full of great stories, so I hope you don’t mind if we stay restrospectively in Vietnam over the next little while.

There is fun aplenty still to come.

This is the remote control for the air conditioner in a cabin on a cruise junk at Vietnam’s beautiful Halong Bay. Please to take notice of the only English word to appear on this unit.

It explains a lot.

Last night one of the Quang Ngai orphanage volunteers threw a party for her English students at the volunteer household. It was a Western style party with beer & nibbles and an almost unbelievable spread of Vietnamese food. It was also a theme party and the theme was ‘Everyone Speaks English’. I felt sure I’d be able to handle that, even after the inevitable copious imbibation (! Did I say English?) of the ubiquitous ‘333’ beer.

At the party I met the delightful Mr Viet, Director of The Fund for Children of Quang Ngai Province, and his wife Khanh, who generously invited a few of us to tour his two rehabilitation centres just west of Quang Ngai city and see the work they were doing there for underprivileged and disabled children. I won’t dwell on the harrowing aspect of this trip – it is sufficient to say that Mr Viet and his volunteers are doing amazing things for their community and the people of Vietnam are very lucky to have such committed, hardworking and canny people.

After our tour, Mr & Mrs Viet took us to lunch at My Khe beach, a stretch of white sand and warm blue water that rivals the best Pacific Resorts for beauty, and which sports a bunch of funky shaded restaurants that surpass pretty much anywhere for food.

After the enormous meal (how the hell do these people stay so thin?) of clams, monstrous prawns (Americans: there is NO way these things can qualify as shrimp), banh xeo and fish soup, the talk naturally turned to the eating of dog. Mr Viet asked if I had ever tried dog meat, and I confessed I had not. Mr Viet is a very big fan of dog meat. He assured me it is the best food one could find in Vietnam, and invited me to dine with him the next time I was here, on the most superior dog cuisine I would ever eat. I said I would be honoured to join him. We talked further of eating dog, then snake (very popular dishes in Vietnam), horse (which would possibly be popular if there were more horses) and cat (which is also eaten, but not so much).

On the way back in the car I said to Nurse Myra, “Y’know, I have no in principle problem with eating dog. I mean, I feel I can’t object really, without being hypocritical – I eat pretty much anything else”.

We drove on for a few minutes.

“What about cat?” she asked, with her typically evil insight.

We drove on for a further few minutes.

I wondered idly if Glitch would taste better with rice or noodles.