Destination Saigon by Walter Mason

Author:Walter Mason
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: TRV000000, TRV003000
ISBN: 9781741768091
Publisher: Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd
Published: 2010-03-01T05:00:00+00:00

THE FURNITURE-

BREAKING DEMON

In Saigon I wake too late to feasibly get to temple in the mornings, especially when one takes into account a long breakfast out. This is a non-negotiable in Vietnam, no-one takes breakfast at home. And then there’s a cup of coffee or two at a café afterwards, another non-negotiable. These may well be bad habits introduced by the French but, without the coffee, I suspect that they were in place a thousand years before Europeans ever saw Vietnam.

Kien, my Ho Chi Minh City best friend and protector, keeps his busy hairdressing salon open till late at night. I rely on him to take me out to breakfast and so I am somewhat hostage to his schedule, as he hates getting up early. Breakfast by myself was fairly unsatisfying as, being too scared to drive my own motorcycle, I was confined to the several small eateries close to my house. Most of these I had ruled out because the food was not tasty or it made me sick, as they were streetside stalls where refrigeration is unknown and hygiene was a secondary concern.

One of the places I liked to venture to on my own was the banh cuon shop on Pham Van Hai. Banh cuon is a delicious Vietnamese breakfast of fat rice noodles stuffed with a mixture of pork mince and mushroom, and steamed. These divine noodles are covered in a sweet, spicy fish sauce, and the whole meal can be eaten quite quickly and is insanely cheap.

The shop on Pham Van Hai started as a streetside stall, and I had been a customer since its earliest days. The woman who owned it cooked the banh cuon, while her husband attended to the customers. The tiny shop itself was minimalist, but they had invested in a large, elaborately decorated menu board. This was always entirely empty, which made sense because they only served one dish—steamed banh cuon. The shop owner always made a great deal of fuss over how fat I’d become whenever she saw me. ‘It’s not healthy,’ she’d call out if I should happen to be passing down the street. ‘You must get very tired. Reduce!’ Whenever I stopped in for breakfast an elaborate charade always took place in which multiple plastic stools were stacked, one on top of another, so that I might have a safe seat. This was always observed with great merriment by the other customers, who pointed me out to their children and said things like, ‘Look! The fat foreigner breaks the furniture. Better behave, or he’ll eat you.’ The excessive use of multiple pieces of furniture was probably quite sensible, given my track record. Still and all, it was humiliating.

The other breakfast option was always the Pham Ngu Lao district, Ho Chi Minh City’s backpacker paradise in District 1. Here you can eat cheesy croques-monsieur, banana pancakes and even muesli, a dish the Vietnamese look upon with singular revulsion. But you also have to run the gauntlet of rapacious street vendors, beggars and other hustlers.

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