Com hen

Trying to avoid seafood has been too hard. I love fresh seafood and Nam has it in spades. I've heard terrible reports of people getting ill from seafood in flood prone areas (which we are currently in), and yet I can't resist fresh shrimp spring rolls, fish hotpots, etc. Just the other night despite my best intentions, we walked into a streetside eatery with the intention of eating whatever looked good. The proprietor spoke no english, and myself no vietnamese, so I just pointed over to the table next to us and held up two fingers. The woman brough us two bowls of flavorful rice soup that was really briny and delicious, and about halfway into it realized it was eating com hen, rice soup with a specific variety of river mussel that is described in our book as being 'dredged up from a bank of the perfume river'. The perfume river runs through Hue and is swollen, brown, and nasty looking from the flood. There are weird things floating in it, ranging from plastic bags, styrofoam blocks, oil slicks and more, (plus all the faeces that just dissolve right into it) and immediately I lost my appetite. I was nervously awaiting the golden 12 hour rule this morning - the approximate hour that food poisoning makes itself known within your system and was rewarded with not so much as a cramp... for now.

On a side note, we've seen a crazy number of little babies peeing into the gutter. They are too young to pee themselves, but are held by grandmothers who aim them far enough from the curb so they don't soil themselves, but passers-by really have to be careful! Their trajectories are quite high and arching, you can easily be a target. How this got to be a common practice, I guess I'll just have to keep wondering.

P.S. Cort - you should come down south from Hanoi, we can go in search of weirder and weirder things to eat!