Progress Report 22.1
Annyongh hasseyo, punk.
First up, Happy New Year! May it be prosperous and joyful up to or beyond at least one tenth of your wildest and least cynical expectations. And I mean that.
How was your Christmas? Yeah? Excellent. Mine? Well, let me tell you...
As you may or may not know, Michelle and I spent the Xmas period in 'Nam, as in Viet Nam. That's right - 'Nam for Christmas. There I was on Christmas Eve - I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet; weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a mains circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be caretaker of.. Oh, hold on - that's Apocalypse Now. Sorry about that. Let's see now... *My* Vietnam adventure...
Oh yeah. So there I was on Christmas Eve. I was going to Vietnam's second city for Christmas and I didn't even know it yet. I hadn't at that point read the Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam, see. However, I remedied this on the plane, and readied myself for touching down in Saigon. Saigon... shit. Seven days was what we'd signed up for. Two days in the city, then out to the coast, and then straight back to Ho Chi Minh before shipping back to Seoul. (Let me explain at this point that Vietnam's second city has two names - Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City. The latter is the correct name but the former is cooler, on account of its power to instantly evoke countless 'Nam film quotes.)
Nothing could have prepared us for what awaited for in Saigon. (Except perhaps Michelle's previous visit, two months earlier). The city was in chaos. Motorbikes every place you looked, covering every available inch of the road; taxi drivers fighting for your dollars like maggots on a corpse; the noise; the dark, deathly heat - this wasn't war, it was murder. (Okay, it was neither). You don't know what that hell can do to a man. It can take him and change him so he doesn't know who he is or what's right or wrong. You don't know unless you were there. So when you hear about what we did 'in country', I'm not saying you'll think it pretty, but you can't sit in judgement. Not unless you were there and went through it with us. When you hear the stories about what we ate and what we did, you can't call it evil, 'cause there was no good and evil: it was just 'Nam. I ate what I had to eat, and I did what I had to do. So get comfortable but brace yourself and I'll tell you all about it...
Things started out easy enough, on account of my booking a five-star hotel for the first two nights as an extra Christmas present to myself and Mitch. It was only five-star by Vietnamese standards, but this still meant it was sufficiently well-to-do to give the impression that we were spoiling ourselves. We worked this image further by spending two hours of Christmas Day drinking champagne in the bath. (Apart from the time I ate seven Weetabix in one sitting, this is the single most profligate act I've ever indulged in.) So far, so much for keeping it real. But we also spent a couple of hours at the Vietnam War Remnants Museum, which was a grisly, graphic and instructive way to spend Christmas afternoon (though appropriately, a few of the napalm-aftermath photos summoned to mind the image of a half-carved turkey). That evening, we got some R&R in central Saigon, pouring back cold beer and making nice with Charlie.
The next morning, we were both feeling hungover and none too bright. Michelle had an idea about getting a massage, so this is where we headed. Let me state at this point that I had no intention of joining her in this venture, but after we'd found a suitably reputable-looking beauty spa, I accompanied her inside purely with the aim of paying for her treatment as an extra Christmas present. However, once I was in, I realised I'd been set up. She'd worked a number on me. I was shanghai'd into getting a hot stone massage and a facial and there was no way out of it. Before I could work out which way to point my rifle, I was stripped and showered and dressed in a robe. From there I was walked Spanish down a corridor and into a private room where I was deprived of my robe and ordered to lie face down on the massage bench. Next door, I could hear Michelle going through the same thing.
I would like to draw your attention to the above term 'reputable-looking', and bear it in mind for the rest of this account. I do not use the phrase lightly - this spa could have been moved brick-by-brick from Harrogate or Windsor. I tried hard to maintain this image in my own mind as the masseuse - a sprightly, dexterous and lithe young lady - clambered atop of me and proceded to go about her work with distinctly un-British familiarity. She was professional enough, but she was most assuredly not shy. Being new to Asian massage game, I decided to just relax and go with it, and for the next 45 minutes, things remained perfectly functional. My muscles were kneaded, my joints cracked, and hot stones placed along the length of my spine. I was thoroughly and deeply relaxated, in a place somewhere along the pleasurable road from consciousness to slumber. It felt good.
And thusly did it remain, until she came to do my front. It started well enough, with my shoulders and arms receving some much-needed attention, but then when she started playing with my nipples and giggling, I felt a little left out of the joke. I smiled politely in acknowledgement of the possible risibility of my odd pink teets to Asian eyes, and on she went with her work. I closed my eyes and tried to get back to the happy place I'd been in prior. My feet were worked with deft sensuality, and thenceforth my legs. From my reinstated happy-haze, I was inwardly lauding the professional way she dealt with my thighs when she unmistakably moved her hand across what can best be described as my 'personal area', and asked me: "Massaahh'?"
"Aha-ha," I responded a little urgently, coming quickly to as she gave my bits a tweak, "that's quite alright, thank you!".
She gave another giggle and a shrug and went on with her work, leaving me wondering if perhaps I'd misunderstood her intentions. I was only to wonder for another minute or so, for she then went on to make a much more deliberate grab for the area in question, and asked me again, just to make sure we were absolutely on the same page: "Massaahh'?"
"No, no!" I told her, quite clear now that she was offering an unadvertised service. "Honestly, I'm fine!"
She seemed puzzled and went about finishing her duties, whilst I focused my mind on making sure that a certain corporeal upstart maintained complete solidarity with the 'no' vote.
When she'd completed her tasks (for which my repeated rebuff appeared to tarnish her enthusiasm), she helped me down from the table and we tried to forget the uneasified atmosphere as we got to talking about the small matter of her tip. She handed me a gratuity slip and signalled that $20 dollars might be an appropriate gesture of appreciation. (Inflation has clearly had a big effect since the days of Full Metal Jacket.) I countered that $10 was more a fitting figure, and she responded with the casual, cajoling physicality of a newlywed. I hastily upped my offer to $15 before anyone got pregnant, and before I knew it, I was back in reception and being led off for my facial and wondering if the past hour had really happened at all.
The facial was conducted by a different girl, with much more decorum and barely a thread of the overheated, avaricious sexuality of my previous encounter, and it gave me time to reflect on the girl whose services I'd declined. Her theraputic skills were beyond reproach, but I doubt they teach handjobs in massage school, so I was a little nonplussed about her professional status. She wasn't just a masseuse, and wasn't just a prostitute. In the end, I found myself resorting to inventing a new term to describe her occupation, which I present to you now for your consideration: She was a masseustitute.
Michelle was understandably outraged when she heard of my experience, so I was glad to find that an hour later we were out of Saigon and on a bus to Mui Ne before any blood had been spilled. Mui Ne, in case you're wondering, is a pleasant, sandy, palm-lined island on the east coast of the country, and provided a peaceful, balmy alternative to the insanity of Ho Chi Minh City. It also provided the first item on my 'outlandish foodstuffs consumed' list; namely frogs, fried with lemongrass and chilli.
As it turned out, the frogs provided an easy segue into the bizarre world of what Charlie considers edible and so the perfect first-stop for my gastronomic adventure. They were essentially like a softer, smoother version of chicken and not at all disagreeable. The light lemongrass and chilli sauce picked out the delicate flavour of the frogmeat, and a bottle of Saigon beer complemented the dish perfectly.
Everything else I ate in Mui Ne was well within the confines of the ordinary, but that's not to say it wasn't good. Big meaty prawns, fresh spring rolls, mussels, snappers white and red - it was all delicious and as fresh as you can get, and all consumed either on or within spitting distance of the beach. It was when we returned to Saigon, having learned during the course of our brief stay that despite what she says, Michelle cannot ride a motorbike, and that even now, it still only takes half an hour for me to get completely sunburnt, that the food started getting truly weird, and very quickly so.
This began when I found a bar in central Saigon advertising crickets. No, not the Ashes (arf!), but the insect, fried in fish sauce. I ordered a portion, and one was duly fetched up. They arrived served whole, with a side salad, and they tasted great. They were light, crisp and mildly flavoured, and the carapace melted in the mouth like a prawn cracker. The insides tasted ever-so-slightly insecty, but not in an overbearing way, and was well matched by the fishy accompanying sauce. They didn't look too appetizing at first, but when you think about it, neither does lobster. And it is with this in mind that I would like to proffer my second neologism of the report: I would like to put forward the notion that the humble cricket should be re-christened the 'land-prawn'; for, as the prawn is the insect of the sea, so then is the cricket the prawn of the land. It heartens me greatly to speculate that one day soon, British restaurants might be offering 'land-prawn cocktail' as a starter and that 'land-prawn bhuna' might one day grace menus of curry houses the length and breadth of the country.
Unlikely, however, to make much of a splash on UK cuisine scene is the pond snail. Later that night I tried this water-dwelling gastropod braised in an unspecified stock, and was not at all impressed. They were chewy to the point of hard labour and essentially flavourless. They were a real let-down, truth be told. I was not too downhearted, though, as the snails were just an unusual appetizer for the much more worrying dish that followed: stewed bull's penis and scrotum.
Well, what to say about bull genitals? They arrived in a casserole dish in a thin gravy but there was no mistaking what they were. The scrotum was thick and sliced into segments that brought to mind a dissected tennis ball. The penis didn't arrive whole, but was easily recognizable. I fished them out of the stock and examined them on the plate. They did not look especially mouthwatering, but, ever ready for a new flavour experience, I cut myself a slice of ball-sac and popped it in my mouth.
It was disgusting. It put me in mind of liver, but was much harder to chew. I gave it a good thirty seconds' mastication and managed to swallow a little, but the rest had to be returned to the plate in disgrace. Not to be defeated, I then speared a length of cock on my fork, manouevered it betweem my lips and bit down gingerly. It was soft and gelatinous and took some work to incise, but once I had a chunk in my mouth, I gave it a chew and it wasn't too bad at all. It was lightly meaty, but jelly-like, not unlike raw octopus. I really rather enjoyed it. And had anyone prognosticated that I would see out the penultimate day of 2006 in a Saigon bar with a bull's dick in my mouth, I would have laughed heartily in their face.
So, after the prandial post-mortem bovine fellatio, we took to bed, and so it came to NYE in Ho Chi Minh, where some more new experiences awaited us. After a Buddhist breakfast of rice and vegetables (atoning in spirit if not in body, for my physicality was so enlivened by the bull-cock that it wasn't apologizing to anyone), we went again in search of another beauty spa, but this time, not one offering extras. Michelle wanted a pedicure and a manicure, see, and as for me, I wanted an ear-waxing.
I was unclear about what this was before I went, but whatever it was, I knew I wanted one. I'd been told it involved burning candles being placed in the ears causing the earwax to melt and be drawn out, but I was dubious about this, and as it turned out, quite rightly so. As it eventuated, ear-waxing involves nothing more than having a beautician place some kind of chemical in your ear and then removing the softened accumulated wax with a pair of surgical tweezers. And it feels great.
The feeling of having lumps of the yellow stuff being wrestled from your lug is a strange one but is most certainly delightful. It took around half an hour of the waxer working quickly but carefully, but even this didn't seem long enough. To illustrate the magnitude of her labours, she thoughtfully deposited each chunk of earwax that she extracted onto my forearm so that I could see exactly how greatly my aural canals had been congested. The best bit came at the end, when she mopped up with a wad of cotton wool which she jammed deep inside the earhole and twisted. It felt quite sublime.
Whilst Michelle was having her feet and hands seen to, me and my newly-sharpened sense of hearing went down the street to the market, where I bought some weasel coffee. This is made from coffee beans that have passed through the digestive system of a certain type of weasel. The weasel eats the coffee cherries and the enzymes its gut apparently digest the cherry and smoothen the flavour of the coffee beans inside, which are then excreted and collected from its poo. I'm drinking a cup right now and I can report that a smooth, warm, dark brew it is. I then went to a music shop and bought a Vietnamese traditional zither, violin and flute and returned them to the hotel. By this point, Saigon was getting ready to get its groove on for New Year, but, unfortunately, we were booked onto a 1am flight home. The excitable anticipations of the early New Year's evening led us to frantically try to rearrange our flight, but after an hour and a half of fruitless f*ckmongering, we had to concede to defeat, and resolved to enjoy our last two hours in the city to the max. For my part, I achieved this by eating duck embryo.
The Vietnamese delicacy of duck embryo consists of a fertilized duck egg, incubated for 17 days and then boiled. You eat it like a soft-boiled egg, but instead of finding a runny golden yolk and a pristine white inside, you discover a transparent brown fluid, a veiny, expanded yolk and within it, a half-formed duckling. The head, beak and wings are discernable, but the rest of its anatomy is hard to ascertain. The dish was served to us at a pavement restaurant, as a starter, and it came with a few simple green leaves on the side. It managed to look even less appetizing than the bull cods, but paradoxically, it was the biggest flavour surprise - it was delicious. It had the texture of good humus, and the taste was pleasantly, subtly egg-like. The beak had no solidity to it, and it wasn't really possible to tell the yolk from the foetus once it was in the mouth. Even Michelle enjoyed the small piece of it that she ate.
Alas, from here, it was a over-leisurely stroll through the centre of a feisty Saign back to the hotel presaging a panicky taxi-ride to the airport, and then a series of the usual queues as the clock counted down to midnight. I had feared that we would see in 2007 in line for immigration, but we made it through the officious hoopla before the big moment arrived. Unfortunately, it transpired that we were accidentally apart as the year turned, as I was purchasing two tins of Tiger Beer from a concession in the departure lounge, whilst Michelle, whose slow watch was to blame for our seperate seeing in of the New Year, was buying toiletries from duty free. Once we'd regrouped, we had our own counting down and whooping-it-up five minutes after the fact, when her dilatory timepiece had it at midnight. It was no less underwhelming that the official airport celebration.
And then, five hours later, we were back in Korea. Cold, sensible, dull Korea.
Yes, I was down on 'the R.o.K.' when I returned. It seemed so restrained and so predictable compared to its excitable South-East Asian cousin. It wasn't just the icy temperatures that chilled my mood, and it wasn't just the accumulated exhaustion that twisted my nipples - it was the realisation that my adopted country of residence has gotten routine. It was just like I'd never been away. Which means that I've made the leap from 'being' here to 'living' here.
Oof.
Maybe I should start learning the language...
Anyway, sorry to ramble on. I've got to get going as I've got a three hour junior class to teach. One way my January has been made a little more unbearable by my ever-considerate school is with the introduction of the 'English Camp' (nothing to do with Noel Coward) for the winter vacation. Not content with piling it on the their schoolchildren for twelve hours a day during term-time, a lot of parents like to ruin their kids' school holidays by sending them for three hours in my company every day too. However, the ludicrousness of the Korean approach to pedagogy is an issue to be addressed in another report.
For now, I would just like to summon a fanfare and a choir of cherubim and celestial horns as I attempt to put into words the extent of my gratitude to Ms Natalie 'Quite Clean for Essex' Allen. Why? Because she brightened my return to Korea with an act of generosity that quite puts all previous efforts in the shade. She sent me the following: The Summons, by John Grisham; The London Pigeon Wars, by Patrick Neate; High Society, by Ben 'f*cking' Elton; The Poet, by Yu Mun yol; Archangel, by Robert Harris; The Underground Man, by Mick Jackson; 1st to Die, by James Patterson, The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon; and Inishowen, by Joseph O'Connor. But not only that, she also sent a box of Yorkshire Tea, and most wonderful of all, a box of my absolute favourite breakfast cereal, Kellog's Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes. Words are an inadequate means to convey my level of indebtedness, but if Natalie ever needs an organ donating, some skin grafting, or a stand-in to serve a community servce term, I'll be first the first to volunteer. Thank you, T.
Also figuring once again in my gratitude list is Mr Rob 'Taff Punk' James, who played a blinder by sending me the latest copy of Viz. Thank you indeed, sir.
C'est tout.
Annyonghi kasseyo,
S
First up, Happy New Year! May it be prosperous and joyful up to or beyond at least one tenth of your wildest and least cynical expectations. And I mean that.
How was your Christmas? Yeah? Excellent. Mine? Well, let me tell you...
As you may or may not know, Michelle and I spent the Xmas period in 'Nam, as in Viet Nam. That's right - 'Nam for Christmas. There I was on Christmas Eve - I was going to the worst place in the world and I didn't even know it yet; weeks away and hundreds of miles up a river that snaked through the war like a mains circuit cable, plugged straight into Kurtz. It was no accident that I got to be caretaker of.. Oh, hold on - that's Apocalypse Now. Sorry about that. Let's see now... *My* Vietnam adventure...
Oh yeah. So there I was on Christmas Eve. I was going to Vietnam's second city for Christmas and I didn't even know it yet. I hadn't at that point read the Lonely Planet Guide to Vietnam, see. However, I remedied this on the plane, and readied myself for touching down in Saigon. Saigon... shit. Seven days was what we'd signed up for. Two days in the city, then out to the coast, and then straight back to Ho Chi Minh before shipping back to Seoul. (Let me explain at this point that Vietnam's second city has two names - Saigon and Ho Chi Minh City. The latter is the correct name but the former is cooler, on account of its power to instantly evoke countless 'Nam film quotes.)
Nothing could have prepared us for what awaited for in Saigon. (Except perhaps Michelle's previous visit, two months earlier). The city was in chaos. Motorbikes every place you looked, covering every available inch of the road; taxi drivers fighting for your dollars like maggots on a corpse; the noise; the dark, deathly heat - this wasn't war, it was murder. (Okay, it was neither). You don't know what that hell can do to a man. It can take him and change him so he doesn't know who he is or what's right or wrong. You don't know unless you were there. So when you hear about what we did 'in country', I'm not saying you'll think it pretty, but you can't sit in judgement. Not unless you were there and went through it with us. When you hear the stories about what we ate and what we did, you can't call it evil, 'cause there was no good and evil: it was just 'Nam. I ate what I had to eat, and I did what I had to do. So get comfortable but brace yourself and I'll tell you all about it...
Things started out easy enough, on account of my booking a five-star hotel for the first two nights as an extra Christmas present to myself and Mitch. It was only five-star by Vietnamese standards, but this still meant it was sufficiently well-to-do to give the impression that we were spoiling ourselves. We worked this image further by spending two hours of Christmas Day drinking champagne in the bath. (Apart from the time I ate seven Weetabix in one sitting, this is the single most profligate act I've ever indulged in.) So far, so much for keeping it real. But we also spent a couple of hours at the Vietnam War Remnants Museum, which was a grisly, graphic and instructive way to spend Christmas afternoon (though appropriately, a few of the napalm-aftermath photos summoned to mind the image of a half-carved turkey). That evening, we got some R&R in central Saigon, pouring back cold beer and making nice with Charlie.
The next morning, we were both feeling hungover and none too bright. Michelle had an idea about getting a massage, so this is where we headed. Let me state at this point that I had no intention of joining her in this venture, but after we'd found a suitably reputable-looking beauty spa, I accompanied her inside purely with the aim of paying for her treatment as an extra Christmas present. However, once I was in, I realised I'd been set up. She'd worked a number on me. I was shanghai'd into getting a hot stone massage and a facial and there was no way out of it. Before I could work out which way to point my rifle, I was stripped and showered and dressed in a robe. From there I was walked Spanish down a corridor and into a private room where I was deprived of my robe and ordered to lie face down on the massage bench. Next door, I could hear Michelle going through the same thing.
I would like to draw your attention to the above term 'reputable-looking', and bear it in mind for the rest of this account. I do not use the phrase lightly - this spa could have been moved brick-by-brick from Harrogate or Windsor. I tried hard to maintain this image in my own mind as the masseuse - a sprightly, dexterous and lithe young lady - clambered atop of me and proceded to go about her work with distinctly un-British familiarity. She was professional enough, but she was most assuredly not shy. Being new to Asian massage game, I decided to just relax and go with it, and for the next 45 minutes, things remained perfectly functional. My muscles were kneaded, my joints cracked, and hot stones placed along the length of my spine. I was thoroughly and deeply relaxated, in a place somewhere along the pleasurable road from consciousness to slumber. It felt good.
And thusly did it remain, until she came to do my front. It started well enough, with my shoulders and arms receving some much-needed attention, but then when she started playing with my nipples and giggling, I felt a little left out of the joke. I smiled politely in acknowledgement of the possible risibility of my odd pink teets to Asian eyes, and on she went with her work. I closed my eyes and tried to get back to the happy place I'd been in prior. My feet were worked with deft sensuality, and thenceforth my legs. From my reinstated happy-haze, I was inwardly lauding the professional way she dealt with my thighs when she unmistakably moved her hand across what can best be described as my 'personal area', and asked me: "Massaahh'?"
"Aha-ha," I responded a little urgently, coming quickly to as she gave my bits a tweak, "that's quite alright, thank you!".
She gave another giggle and a shrug and went on with her work, leaving me wondering if perhaps I'd misunderstood her intentions. I was only to wonder for another minute or so, for she then went on to make a much more deliberate grab for the area in question, and asked me again, just to make sure we were absolutely on the same page: "Massaahh'?"
"No, no!" I told her, quite clear now that she was offering an unadvertised service. "Honestly, I'm fine!"
She seemed puzzled and went about finishing her duties, whilst I focused my mind on making sure that a certain corporeal upstart maintained complete solidarity with the 'no' vote.
When she'd completed her tasks (for which my repeated rebuff appeared to tarnish her enthusiasm), she helped me down from the table and we tried to forget the uneasified atmosphere as we got to talking about the small matter of her tip. She handed me a gratuity slip and signalled that $20 dollars might be an appropriate gesture of appreciation. (Inflation has clearly had a big effect since the days of Full Metal Jacket.) I countered that $10 was more a fitting figure, and she responded with the casual, cajoling physicality of a newlywed. I hastily upped my offer to $15 before anyone got pregnant, and before I knew it, I was back in reception and being led off for my facial and wondering if the past hour had really happened at all.
The facial was conducted by a different girl, with much more decorum and barely a thread of the overheated, avaricious sexuality of my previous encounter, and it gave me time to reflect on the girl whose services I'd declined. Her theraputic skills were beyond reproach, but I doubt they teach handjobs in massage school, so I was a little nonplussed about her professional status. She wasn't just a masseuse, and wasn't just a prostitute. In the end, I found myself resorting to inventing a new term to describe her occupation, which I present to you now for your consideration: She was a masseustitute.
Michelle was understandably outraged when she heard of my experience, so I was glad to find that an hour later we were out of Saigon and on a bus to Mui Ne before any blood had been spilled. Mui Ne, in case you're wondering, is a pleasant, sandy, palm-lined island on the east coast of the country, and provided a peaceful, balmy alternative to the insanity of Ho Chi Minh City. It also provided the first item on my 'outlandish foodstuffs consumed' list; namely frogs, fried with lemongrass and chilli.
As it turned out, the frogs provided an easy segue into the bizarre world of what Charlie considers edible and so the perfect first-stop for my gastronomic adventure. They were essentially like a softer, smoother version of chicken and not at all disagreeable. The light lemongrass and chilli sauce picked out the delicate flavour of the frogmeat, and a bottle of Saigon beer complemented the dish perfectly.
Everything else I ate in Mui Ne was well within the confines of the ordinary, but that's not to say it wasn't good. Big meaty prawns, fresh spring rolls, mussels, snappers white and red - it was all delicious and as fresh as you can get, and all consumed either on or within spitting distance of the beach. It was when we returned to Saigon, having learned during the course of our brief stay that despite what she says, Michelle cannot ride a motorbike, and that even now, it still only takes half an hour for me to get completely sunburnt, that the food started getting truly weird, and very quickly so.
This began when I found a bar in central Saigon advertising crickets. No, not the Ashes (arf!), but the insect, fried in fish sauce. I ordered a portion, and one was duly fetched up. They arrived served whole, with a side salad, and they tasted great. They were light, crisp and mildly flavoured, and the carapace melted in the mouth like a prawn cracker. The insides tasted ever-so-slightly insecty, but not in an overbearing way, and was well matched by the fishy accompanying sauce. They didn't look too appetizing at first, but when you think about it, neither does lobster. And it is with this in mind that I would like to proffer my second neologism of the report: I would like to put forward the notion that the humble cricket should be re-christened the 'land-prawn'; for, as the prawn is the insect of the sea, so then is the cricket the prawn of the land. It heartens me greatly to speculate that one day soon, British restaurants might be offering 'land-prawn cocktail' as a starter and that 'land-prawn bhuna' might one day grace menus of curry houses the length and breadth of the country.
Unlikely, however, to make much of a splash on UK cuisine scene is the pond snail. Later that night I tried this water-dwelling gastropod braised in an unspecified stock, and was not at all impressed. They were chewy to the point of hard labour and essentially flavourless. They were a real let-down, truth be told. I was not too downhearted, though, as the snails were just an unusual appetizer for the much more worrying dish that followed: stewed bull's penis and scrotum.
Well, what to say about bull genitals? They arrived in a casserole dish in a thin gravy but there was no mistaking what they were. The scrotum was thick and sliced into segments that brought to mind a dissected tennis ball. The penis didn't arrive whole, but was easily recognizable. I fished them out of the stock and examined them on the plate. They did not look especially mouthwatering, but, ever ready for a new flavour experience, I cut myself a slice of ball-sac and popped it in my mouth.
It was disgusting. It put me in mind of liver, but was much harder to chew. I gave it a good thirty seconds' mastication and managed to swallow a little, but the rest had to be returned to the plate in disgrace. Not to be defeated, I then speared a length of cock on my fork, manouevered it betweem my lips and bit down gingerly. It was soft and gelatinous and took some work to incise, but once I had a chunk in my mouth, I gave it a chew and it wasn't too bad at all. It was lightly meaty, but jelly-like, not unlike raw octopus. I really rather enjoyed it. And had anyone prognosticated that I would see out the penultimate day of 2006 in a Saigon bar with a bull's dick in my mouth, I would have laughed heartily in their face.
So, after the prandial post-mortem bovine fellatio, we took to bed, and so it came to NYE in Ho Chi Minh, where some more new experiences awaited us. After a Buddhist breakfast of rice and vegetables (atoning in spirit if not in body, for my physicality was so enlivened by the bull-cock that it wasn't apologizing to anyone), we went again in search of another beauty spa, but this time, not one offering extras. Michelle wanted a pedicure and a manicure, see, and as for me, I wanted an ear-waxing.
I was unclear about what this was before I went, but whatever it was, I knew I wanted one. I'd been told it involved burning candles being placed in the ears causing the earwax to melt and be drawn out, but I was dubious about this, and as it turned out, quite rightly so. As it eventuated, ear-waxing involves nothing more than having a beautician place some kind of chemical in your ear and then removing the softened accumulated wax with a pair of surgical tweezers. And it feels great.
The feeling of having lumps of the yellow stuff being wrestled from your lug is a strange one but is most certainly delightful. It took around half an hour of the waxer working quickly but carefully, but even this didn't seem long enough. To illustrate the magnitude of her labours, she thoughtfully deposited each chunk of earwax that she extracted onto my forearm so that I could see exactly how greatly my aural canals had been congested. The best bit came at the end, when she mopped up with a wad of cotton wool which she jammed deep inside the earhole and twisted. It felt quite sublime.
Whilst Michelle was having her feet and hands seen to, me and my newly-sharpened sense of hearing went down the street to the market, where I bought some weasel coffee. This is made from coffee beans that have passed through the digestive system of a certain type of weasel. The weasel eats the coffee cherries and the enzymes its gut apparently digest the cherry and smoothen the flavour of the coffee beans inside, which are then excreted and collected from its poo. I'm drinking a cup right now and I can report that a smooth, warm, dark brew it is. I then went to a music shop and bought a Vietnamese traditional zither, violin and flute and returned them to the hotel. By this point, Saigon was getting ready to get its groove on for New Year, but, unfortunately, we were booked onto a 1am flight home. The excitable anticipations of the early New Year's evening led us to frantically try to rearrange our flight, but after an hour and a half of fruitless f*ckmongering, we had to concede to defeat, and resolved to enjoy our last two hours in the city to the max. For my part, I achieved this by eating duck embryo.
The Vietnamese delicacy of duck embryo consists of a fertilized duck egg, incubated for 17 days and then boiled. You eat it like a soft-boiled egg, but instead of finding a runny golden yolk and a pristine white inside, you discover a transparent brown fluid, a veiny, expanded yolk and within it, a half-formed duckling. The head, beak and wings are discernable, but the rest of its anatomy is hard to ascertain. The dish was served to us at a pavement restaurant, as a starter, and it came with a few simple green leaves on the side. It managed to look even less appetizing than the bull cods, but paradoxically, it was the biggest flavour surprise - it was delicious. It had the texture of good humus, and the taste was pleasantly, subtly egg-like. The beak had no solidity to it, and it wasn't really possible to tell the yolk from the foetus once it was in the mouth. Even Michelle enjoyed the small piece of it that she ate.
Alas, from here, it was a over-leisurely stroll through the centre of a feisty Saign back to the hotel presaging a panicky taxi-ride to the airport, and then a series of the usual queues as the clock counted down to midnight. I had feared that we would see in 2007 in line for immigration, but we made it through the officious hoopla before the big moment arrived. Unfortunately, it transpired that we were accidentally apart as the year turned, as I was purchasing two tins of Tiger Beer from a concession in the departure lounge, whilst Michelle, whose slow watch was to blame for our seperate seeing in of the New Year, was buying toiletries from duty free. Once we'd regrouped, we had our own counting down and whooping-it-up five minutes after the fact, when her dilatory timepiece had it at midnight. It was no less underwhelming that the official airport celebration.
And then, five hours later, we were back in Korea. Cold, sensible, dull Korea.
Yes, I was down on 'the R.o.K.' when I returned. It seemed so restrained and so predictable compared to its excitable South-East Asian cousin. It wasn't just the icy temperatures that chilled my mood, and it wasn't just the accumulated exhaustion that twisted my nipples - it was the realisation that my adopted country of residence has gotten routine. It was just like I'd never been away. Which means that I've made the leap from 'being' here to 'living' here.
Oof.
Maybe I should start learning the language...
Anyway, sorry to ramble on. I've got to get going as I've got a three hour junior class to teach. One way my January has been made a little more unbearable by my ever-considerate school is with the introduction of the 'English Camp' (nothing to do with Noel Coward) for the winter vacation. Not content with piling it on the their schoolchildren for twelve hours a day during term-time, a lot of parents like to ruin their kids' school holidays by sending them for three hours in my company every day too. However, the ludicrousness of the Korean approach to pedagogy is an issue to be addressed in another report.
For now, I would just like to summon a fanfare and a choir of cherubim and celestial horns as I attempt to put into words the extent of my gratitude to Ms Natalie 'Quite Clean for Essex' Allen. Why? Because she brightened my return to Korea with an act of generosity that quite puts all previous efforts in the shade. She sent me the following: The Summons, by John Grisham; The London Pigeon Wars, by Patrick Neate; High Society, by Ben 'f*cking' Elton; The Poet, by Yu Mun yol; Archangel, by Robert Harris; The Underground Man, by Mick Jackson; 1st to Die, by James Patterson, The Shadow of the Wind, by Carlos Ruiz Zafon; and Inishowen, by Joseph O'Connor. But not only that, she also sent a box of Yorkshire Tea, and most wonderful of all, a box of my absolute favourite breakfast cereal, Kellog's Crunchy Nut Corn Flakes. Words are an inadequate means to convey my level of indebtedness, but if Natalie ever needs an organ donating, some skin grafting, or a stand-in to serve a community servce term, I'll be first the first to volunteer. Thank you, T.
Also figuring once again in my gratitude list is Mr Rob 'Taff Punk' James, who played a blinder by sending me the latest copy of Viz. Thank you indeed, sir.
C'est tout.
Annyonghi kasseyo,
S
posted by Stephen Beckett at 6:00 PM
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