Food for Thought.

Nice Buns.

Hanoi, Vietnam – We dropped down a smoky, fragrant alley, alight with charcoal fires and blackened skewers of uncooked meat. Lunch time.

In each stall: mounds of crab – tinted pink – small barbequed fowl or large brown snails, plucked from their shells with a pointy awl. The omnipresent heat became cloudy, my eyelids fluttering in the acrid air.

Women sat on the ground behind cardboard shields, fans placed beside small charcoal fires. We folded ourselves onto blue plastic stools that could not have been more than six inches high. I felt like the 'clown on a tiny tricycle' act.

There are times being 6"3 can be a disadvantage.

But out came glasses of iced green tea and bowls of vermicelli and grilled pork for our lunch of Bún thịt nướng. Loosely chopped chili peppers added some heat to a day that smoked as it was. I got chopstick practice, wrestling pork and noodles from the savoury broth, enjoying every bite. All this, and lunch for the four of us came to $5.

Aren't you jelly you didn't try this?

Our guides decided we needed dessert as well, so we proceeded to a stall of jellied…everything: corn, bananas, taro, and several things I could not name.

As my eyebrow climbed, the woman in the stall took a scoop of each, placing it into a glass before topping it with milk and passing us a bowl of shaved ice we were to add.

It wasn’t something I would not have ordered back home, but it was sweet and tasty enough.

I was particularly thankful for our excellent guides as I’m not sure I would have eaten in the market on my own on the first day. I certainly wouldn't have known where to start.

What an impressive introduction to Hanoi.