June 17, 2018 | Leave a comment So. How much street food can a hungry Vivian put away in fourteen days? According to my detailed Chasing Calories: Vietnam guide, it would be 47 distinct dishes and nine tropical fruits, not including the foods I ate repeatedly or did not write about. I guess the best way to start off would be with some heavy lifting. Phở đặc biệt Bún bò Huế Another Bún bò Huế Bún thịt nướng Phở bò Phở gà When I sit at a real food stall, squeezing into baby tables or chairs, I look around and find that the other customers are school kids or motorbike drivers. They usually love me so much they want to take my picture of me eating, with my phone, for me. But they can’t speak English, so they make gestures or the “ah” sound. While the majority of the site-seeing occurred on top of the table, this post is also meant to highlight some memorable moments from in between meals. There were the moments I understood too well, like this diaper-princess with her fan and phone and chips… …moments I think I will one day understand, like this gentleman chopping tapioca dough off of a metal roller into boiling water… …and moments I imagine I will never understand, like this lady who appeared to be charging children to gamble atop her bicycle in the Mekong Delta. In lots of cities around the world people drive without rules, but Vietnamese traffic has just one: the scooters only swerve and never stop. You just have to keep walking straight and chewing the donuts that a lady forcefully shoved into your hands, to lower your anxiety. There were times when the language barrier wasn’t crossed, but didn’t matter. There were times when I was left speechless, staring at how foods were made. Nem lui Bánh tráng trứng Bún bò Huế There were the newborn Couchsurfing memories. In Hanoi, we were four girls sleeping in a one-room apartment. Four happy girls. Four happy girls with narrow alleys of culinary genius and cheap laundry surrounding us. We didn’t have AC. I ran through convenience stores trying to find the perfect draft of AC to dry out my healing tattoo. Two weeks before the start of my senior year in university, my adventures of unpaid lodging were still going strong in Saigon. I became a bookworm by day… …and a waitress by night. At tourist restaurant Royal Saigon, my job as a couch surfer was to use my fluency in English and Mandarin to kindly ask for a review. This would maintain our competitive ranking as a top-hit on Google and TripAdvisor. I scrubbed their glass door so hard that I ran into it immediately after. The security cameras caught it all. I took myself to the Mekong Delta but didn’t want to take a tour. So I had more beef phở when it was raining. And drank more drip coffee when it wasn’t. Once I lit a lantern and set it free on a river. Another time I had a drink with an influential travel blogger who had more than 30,000 followers on Instagram. Alyssa now has 202,000. I made a lot of info graphics on what I was eating. And finally, I continued my love affair with dragonfruit, from the top of the country… …to the center… …to the sleeper buses where the only seating was in the form of bunk beds… …to the bottom. Cảm ơn Vietnam!