Surely, You Can't Be Serious!

I am serious. And don't call me Shirley.

Tina and I have been traveling all over Saigon and the Mekong Delta, and yes, we do things other than eat. However, some of the highlights so far have definitely been food related, especially the exotic edibles we've had the opportunity to try, like ba ba(turtle), pictured above. Although I've had little pieces of sea turtle in soup before, having an entire turtle that looked like Norman, my class pet in the third grade, made me a little squeamish. And that was before Tina's cousin, Huy, opened it up:


We quickly realized that this cooked version of Norman must actually be a Normina, as those yellow balls you see are premature turtle eggs:


The turtle meat itself was pretty good, but Tina's Vietnamese taste buds preferred it much more than mine. The eggs, on the other hand, were excellent. They tasted sort of like quail eggs. If you ever eat ba ba, I highly recommend asking for a female.

Hmm, that actually sounds sort of gruesome, so please disregard that suggestion.

We've also tried several different versions of se se(sparrow):


You can eat their little grilled bodies whole, including their legs, and they taste like the best barbecued chicken wings in the world. I just wish they had an option for buffalo se se.

Oh and I finally got to try the aforementioned "cat poop coffee", aka ca phe cuc chon(literally translated as civet poop coffee). Despite my excitement, deep down I feared that the coffee would taste just like normal Vietnamese coffee. Upon my first sip, I discovered a completely unique brew unlike any coffee I've ever tried. The taste sort of hit me in my nose, like a hoppy beer. I'll try to bring some back with me if I can.

Finally, we visited a monkey zoo, which was actually more of a human zoo for wild monkeys , but I'll post pictures of that next time. The one animal in a cage was our good friend, the civet, who is responsible for the wonderful coffee. Civets are sort of a cat/weasel/racoon animal that apparently love to eat coffee beans:


Tina's Uncle is supposedly cooking some Civet for us tomorrow. Tonight we get to eat snake!

More pictures coming soon.