So I had lunch today with a friend at a Vietnamese soup place. In fact, it was even sitting right beside a giant Asian market that I didn’t even know existed until today. It reminded me a lot of my time in China. It wasn’t just an Asian market, it was a whole shopping center of Asian things. There were more signs in Asian languages than there were in English. The soup place itself was good. The food was fast, good, filling and cheap. Can’t complain too much about that. Two things really made it feel authentic to me though.

Chiefly was the smell, and I don’t mean this in a bad way. The place did have a very distinctive smell, but that’s what you get from cooking with certain spices and oils. Lots of people have a certain smell, but this is always taking in a negative way. I remember when Christa and I were in China, we asked them (or they may have just told us) that Americans smelled like hot dogs. I thought this was very funny, but I don’t really know if it’s true. I mean, I like hot dogs and I rarely even eat them, so how can we smell like them? Maybe they really mean we smell like a lot of processed food.

Secondly, was the sense of confusion. What I really mean was that I was confused. I sat down and they gave me this big menu that I really didn’t understand. Most of the choices all looked the same, but I am sure they were subtly different. I ordered by kinda just point to the menu. Then once we were done eating, we couldn’t figure out how to pay. They weren’t bringing us a check and really didn’t seem to care about us too much anyways. Eventually we just walked up to the cashier and apparently this was the right thing to do. It reminds me of the time I couldn’t figure out how to buy my socks in China, I am sure you could search the site and find that if you really wanted to.

Anyways, good food and it wreaked of authenticity!

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