Seafood restaurant tonight. Cheap. Delicious. Small plastic tables and chairs. Steamed mussels. Spicy grilled calamari. Baked clams with peanut sauce. Saigon beer. Snails. Plastic buckets at every table to put shells. Ants on the ground. Motorbikes out front. Staff not quite surly but disinterested. One of the best meals I’ve had here.
Afterwards, visited the nearby backpacker area. Full of tourists, mostly young, eating Western food and driving rented motorbikes. I understand being young and broke and wanting to stay somewhere cheap. But if you go to the most Westernized part of the city, you’re not seeing Saigon at all. It seems like the wrong way to travel the world. Like the tourists I see at Starbucks and McDonalds. I think about it in terms of the U.S. If I were from China, for example, and I went to visit New York, I wouldn’t stay in Chinatown.
At the seafood restaurant, had a fetal duck egg (hột vịt lộn). I wasn’t prepared for that and I felt uneasy eating it. But actually it wasn’t bad and tasted mostly of egg yolk.
