A Short Letter Home: Let them eat snake

Sunday, March 12, 2006

Let them eat snake

We had a new dining experience today. It stemmed from Yau Neih's latest teaching technique. Concerned that maybe she was being too easy on her students, she asked them how challenged they were by her class. To her relief, only three of them thought things were easy. In order to up the ante for those three, Yau Neih offered them some intense English practice by accompanying us on various jaunts out in the community and serving as translators for us. (Quite a scam, eh?) Anyway, this morning we made our initial outing as Gail and Whitney tagged along on our morning rounds. For the most part it wasn't entertaining, at least until lunchtime.

Since we were out until the noon hour, we naturally offered to buy the kids lunch. As we were riding the bus, we started talking about places to eat in town, and Gail mentioned that she found a place to get "snake". Both she and Whitney claimed it was really good and I guess Yau Neih and I were feeling adventurous. (Our children had stayed home, which might have had something to do with it.) We went to the entrance of a local park, where a handful of food vendors had set up their carts. The students handled the ordering, from two different vendors. We bought bowls of noodle soup from one and slurped away while the other worked on making up our snake snack. I had polished off about two-thirds of my bowl when the "snake" arrived. It looked like a burrito--a huge rice noodle wrapped around all sorts of stuff. We chomped down and found it rather tasty. It was a tad on the spicy side, even though the kids had got us the easy on the peppers, lao wai special. As we worked on our meal, Yau Neih and I noticed a distinct lack of meat. She queried Gail as to the construction of our serpentine delicacy and it turned out that "snake" was actually a stick of dough fried in snake oil, smothered in sauce and veggies and wrapped in the aforementioned rice noodle. Oh, well. Burritos aren't made out of little burros, either. We shrugged and finished our meal--enjoying the taste, but slightly disappointed that it wasn't as exotic as we thought.

But one question remained. As we walked back to campus, we asked the girls if they ever actually ate snake meat. They just looked at us and said, "Eeww!"