Another country down, another batch of photos.
Obviously I wasn’t going to leave Vietnam without having pho. I’m not a crazy person.
I didn’t know this before getting here, but there are actually two types of pho: there’s the beef version, called pho bo. That’s the one that we’re more familiar with back home. There’s also a chicken version called pho ga.
I tried both, of course. Again, I’m not a crazy person.
…And maybe the greatest sandwich I’ve ever had, period? It’s right up there, that’s for sure.
When I sat down to eat fish noodle soup (a Vietnamese dish called bun ca) at around eleven in the morning, I started to wonder: is this a mistake? Maybe eating a potentially very pungent fishy soup for breakfast isn’t a great idea?
I take back everything I said about crossing the road in China, because crossing the road in Vietnam is pure, unadulterated insanity.
One of the more interesting things I’ve seen in Ho Chi Minh is the Independence Palace, the former home of South Vietnam’s president, right up until it was taken by North Vietnamese forces in 1975.
There was something particularly depressing about eating at McDonald’s in Vietnam. I’ve only been here a few days, but it’s already clear that this country has some of the best food of anywhere I’ve visited so far. It kind of sucks to waste a meal on McDonald’s, but I’ve come this far. No point in turning back now.
It’s amazing how vibrant and colourful the markets are here.
Pho may be the thousand pound gorilla of Vietnamese noodle soups — it’s the one that pretty much every single person on the planet has heard of — but it’s certainly not the only one.
Take, for example, bun bo hue. I just had a bowl of it at Bun Bo Hue Nam Giao, and it made a strong case that there should be room in your life for more than one noodle soup from Vietnam.
Though there are tourist-friendly markets in pretty much every city in the world, the Ben Thanh market in Ho Chi Minh is particularly interesting.