My Vietnam Blog

A Diary or comments upon experiences and the daily life in Dalat, Vietnam.

Thursday, January 11, 2007

Fish and Coffee

Ok, ok...My idea today was to tell you about Motorbikes and Scooters but because of a request, I'll go for the fish and the coffee.
Every lunchtime it's fish. All other dishes like meat and vegetables changes from day to day but the fish is always there. The fish is dried and I mean really DRY. Its redish colour comes mainly from the Chilisauce which softens it up so it's easier to eat and also more easily breaks into pieces.
The fish is 10-15 cm long and is whole with head, skin and bones. Everything is eaten and I have never seen anything like bones or things being spitted out.
I like to try all kinds of strange food but I must admit that fish is not my favourite food and therefore I haven't eaten it yet, but I promise I will before I leave. It shouldn't be any problem because I have eaten quite a lot of strange seafood before such as Sea Cucumber...if you don't know what it is; look it up and you will understand what I mean.
Another thing that's always on the lunchtable as well is Tofu. That's a Soybean product and is eaten almost everywhere in South-East Asia. It's nutritious and good food if you like it or are used to it. Tofu is also not among my most loved dishes to put it that way.
After lunch we always have some fresh fruits like banana,small tropical apples, oranges or watermelon. That's normal but what I haven't seen before is that they dip some of the fruit in a mixture of chili and salt and that makes an interesting clash of tastes...personally I found it crashed a bit too much.

Now, you'll probably expect that the coffee is terrible, but it's not...it's only strange. I mean the coffee is good but it's made in a special way. The first time I ordered coffe I didn't know what to do with the things they put in front of me.
I ordered white/black coffe...and it was.
The coffee cup is small and on top of it they put a metal filter in 4-parts. It takes quite long time before the filtering is done and you can remove the filter. I said my coffee was white and black...on the bottom of the cup or glass is a layer of thick milk and the coffee doesn't mix into the milk when it's filtered down so you'll have two layers, one white and one black..looks nice and then you mix it. Alternatively you can have white/black coffee with ice. Then you'll get a glass with ice and after the filtering and mixing is done, you pour the warm coffee over the ice. Really Good!
Here are Coffebars and Cafes for almost every 10 meters in some streets and probably hundreds in this small city, but still no Starbucks, Blendz or Cafe Nero with their Espresso, Cappucino, Cafe Mocha etc.
When I think about it; it's no McDonalds, no KFC, no Subway and no 7Eleven either. It's incredible that I was so lucky I came here before one of those.
I think CocaCola is the only one that's impossible to beat!

2 Comments:

At 12:29 am, Anonymous Anonymous said...

really? u`ve eaten sea cucumber?i looked it up at google, pictures. suddenly im not so hungry anymore!
well then u definitely could eat the fish u were writing about.
how u get ur coffee was interesting, maybe they think it is normal coffee.

 
At 12:21 pm, Blogger Da Hai said...

Yes, I have, we even picked a nice fat one from the aquarium in the restaurant.
The sauce was good though!

 

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