With the great burden of my life these days being the GF’s arrant vegetarianism, I decided to do something unprecedented and signed up for a food tour. There is an entire industry of these in Hanoi, but the one I picked was one of the oldest and definitely the most expensive, with ecstatic accounts in the New York Times and such.
It was all right. I arrived late as I got the time wrong, but luckily there were just two other people and they had only just started. The guide is an Australian living here. We walked through the streets of the old city, tried some very tasty food including things that I would not have tried myself, such as shrimp fritters, having a bit of an aversion to battered deep fried foods on the street. The company was pleasant. The other two people were young Americans from Bay Area, both very right thinking, their first trip to Vietnam and I found myself with my usual slight embarrassment at having travelled as much as I have so didn’t admit to having been to all of the places they were planning to go on this holiday. The Australian was very nice, clearly loved the country and its food, and food generally. It was one of those somewhat uncomfortable things (I find uncomfortable) where people who are otherwise strangers come together around a common interest and then talk about it. Those narrowed conversations feel to me like I’m playacting, in this case acting as someone who’s interested in food, which I am, but for that to become my persona was strange.
What I didn’t care for was the romanticisation around Vietnam and its food culture, some of which, to my Third Worlder scepticism felt a lot like Western exoticising. Things like – everything sold in the market is from small farms within a day’s journey of Hanoi, all the meat from smallholders nearby, never a slaughterhouse. I have definitely seen huge trucks filled with huge live pigs being taken to a slaughterhouse on the outskirts of the city.
There was one rather amusing conversation where the Australian was talking about how there is a different attitude towards difference here, that the mad are not pushed out of society as they are in the West. Which seems not improbable, as I have certainly seen mad people here and others interacting with them quite normally. Then he said something about how he’d visited San Francisco and felt unsafe there as he never had in Vietnam. The two SF-ers agreed – the immense number of homeless people there, and how some of them felt seriously dangerous. Then one of them said, ‘but for them it is often a choice’ and a sudden sense of relief emanated from them, as though hot, humid weather had broken and cool winds swirled around our faces and what was really at the heart of what they believed had been said, and I wondered if it was a choice or if it’s just so hard to think that it’s our societies and the age we live in that makes us mad. It made me think that maybe madness is just being out of time and some of those mad homeless people in San Francisco would not be mad if they were in Xian during the warring states period, say. Anyway. Deep thoughts had while balanced on a tiny plastic stool eating my fifth bowl of noodles for the day.
All in all, glad I did it, thought it cost too much, others would enjoy it more than I did, probably won’t again unless I am travelling with the GF and get fed up of vegetarians again.