Their article struck a personal chord for me of the flight of the gallant Vietnamese immigrant  – often simply referred to as the Boat People – as they staked out a new life in my home state of Washington. Seattle, in particular, came to the aid of thousands of Vietnamese refugees fleeing violence and persecution in their own country well-over forty five-years ago. Today, we are blessed to have a Vietnamese ethnic group that is now nearly 70,000 strong in Seattle, and their success is traced back to Gov. Dan Evans. His exceptional leadership established a lasting legacy of the state helping the world’s oppressed seeking refuge. Today, most Vietnamese residents of Seattle are clustered around what is known as Little Saigon, just east of the International District. The strong presence of Vietnamese food in Seattle is marked by the ubiquitous pho restaurants all around the city. But there are many types of Vietnamese soup noodles beyond that well-loved bowl, as well as banh mi sandwiches, dry noodle dishes, plates of rice, and even esoteric preparations of various beasts. Seattle has always been considered the gateway to the Orient, and my hometown continues to be of our nation’s greatest culinary centers due to the rich tapestry of the immigrant experience. There’s a number of recipes in Leo and Nina’s article that still haven’t made it to the shores of the Pacific Northwest, and I am hungry and curious to give them a try. – Audrey

Healthy, Balanced and Tasty: Vietnamese Cuisine

By Leo & Nina Castillo

Ever since we’ve shifted to a plant-based diet our dining options have considerably narrowed. But there’s one particular cuisine that only suffered a minor hit with this change. We’ve always enjoyed Vietnamese food and with our adoption of a plant-based regimen we discovered we still had a lot of options to choose from. For omnivorous diners, Vietnamese cuisine offers a tasty yet healthy alternative.

Vietnamese food is considered one of the healthiest worldwide due to a minimal use of oil and dairy products and a heavy reliance on herbs and vegetables. During our initial visits to this country we would often spot locals sitting beside heaps of green veges plus a variety of herbs while dining. Vietnamese cuisine is also characterized by an excellent balance of aromatics, heat, sweetness, saltiness and sourness.

Vietnamese cuisine is one of our top 5 favorite international fares and is now one of the most popular around the planet. While we no longer travel to Vietnam as often as before, a good number of authentic Vietnamese restaurants in the Philippines have allowed us to continue savoring Vietnamese fare. (What we do miss, however, is Vietnamese street food, one of the true highlights of traveling in Southeast Asia.) The following are some of the dishes we have sampled.

Pho (Phở)

Pho is easily the most popular Vietnamese food globally. A French-influenced noodle soup originating from Hanoi in the early 20th century, pho is made with flat rice noodles, herbs (mint, coriander and others), meat (typically beef or chicken) and tasty broth. Pho is also topped with bean sprouts and other vegetables. We often add Hoisin and chili sauce to the mix for more pep. Our transition to a whole-foods, plant-based diet did not stop us from enjoying this noodle soup since vegan pho may be found in almost any Vietnamese restaurant in Manila.

Banh Mi (Bánh mì)

It’s almost as popular as pho worldwide and perhaps the most conspicuous proof of French influence on Vietnamese cuisine. Originating from Vietnam’s southern regions, banh mi is a crusty baguette filled with layers of meat (traditionally pork but also with myriad variations of other meats), radish and carrot pickles, cucumbers, cilantro, pate and mayonnaise. This might be head-scratching but in about 10 trips to Vietnam before last year only Nina ever got to sample a banh mi once – at a street cart in Da Nang. Leo got his first taste of banh mi at a Vietnamese sandwich shop in Linda Vista, San Diego and fell in love with it instantly. Our shift to a plant-based diet wasn’t a deterrence since vegan banh mi is sold in many Vietnamese restaurants here in the Philippines.

Bun Cha (Bún chả)

This is a dish we encountered fairly recently on a trip to Hanoi where it is believed to have originated. Bun cha is charcoal-grilled pork served over a plate of vermicelli noodles, herbs and green leafy veges such as lettuce, perilla, cilantro and mint. It’s also eaten with a side of deep-fried crab spring rolls and a dipping sauce.

Banh Xeo (Bánh xèo)

Another French-influenced dish, banh xeo is a crispy, savory crepe made with fried rice flour batter stuffed with pork belly slices, shrimp, green onions and bean sprouts. Our first encounter with banh xeo was at our old office in Baguio City where visiting Vietnamese colleagues prepared several of them. We liked it so much we each consumed 3-4 pieces. However, our Vietnamese friends looked at us in disappointment and asked us if we didn’t enjoy it. Later we understood why. When it was their turn to eat, each one polished off 10 of the savory crepes. That they could eat this way and yet remain svelte and slim was a source of envy for us.

Goi Cuon (Gỏi cuốn)

Our favorite Vietnamese salad is perhaps their pomelo and shrimp salad (goi tom buoi) but what we often order as appetizers is goi cuon. Known as fresh summer rolls goi cuon is shrimp, pork, herbs, rice vermicelli and other ingredients wrapped up in rice paper. It is usually dipped in a rich peanut sauce although an optional dip is light fish sauce with spices.

Cha Gio (Chả giò)

This is the deep fried version of goi cuon and is often referred to in English as fried spring rolls or egg rolls. It’s among the first dishes we’ve tasted in Vietnamese restaurants in the Philippines and it very much resembles a local version. Goi cuon is usually made up of minced pork, veges and spices wrapped in rice paper and deep fried to a crisp.

Cha Ca La Vong (Chả cá Lã Vọng)

Another dish from Hanoi, cha ca la vong is a grilled catfish or snakehead fish cut into nuggets and served with rice vermicelli, roasted peanuts, spring onions and herbs. The fish is marinated in galangal and turmeric giving it a caramelized coating after grilling. A dipping sauce made up of fish sauce, vinegar and garlic adds to its flavor. Some folks will also add a bit of shrimp paste with lime juice. We had this in a restaurant at the Old Quarter in Hanoi but a cousin said it’s best eaten at the market close by.

Kho Tộ

During our trip to Hanoi last year we ordered vegetable claypot rice on a number of occasions. Claypot rice is originally a Chinese/Southeast Asian dish of pre-soaked or sometimes partially cooked rice finished in a clay pot with other ingredients. The rice develops a tasty crust in the process.

Rice Plates and Veges

Rice plates served with meat or vegetables or a combination of both is a staple in Vietnamese cuisine as in other Southeast Asian countries. One such dish that we encountered in Ho Chi Minh City is com tam. This dish originated among poor farmers who utilized broken rice fragments damaged during the milling process. During the mid-20th century enterprising South Vietnamese adapted it to cater to foreign visitors, even serving it on plates with a fork instead of in bowls with chop sticks. The com tam of today is usually a bed of rice with greens and different types of meat with grilled pork as the most common.

Vietnamese Iced Coffee (cà phê sua dá)

A beverage with French influence, is cà phê sua dá or Vietnamese iced coffee. This is strong coffee served with a generous serving of crushed ice and sweetened with condensed milk. We’ve tried this in restaurants outside Vietnam but have ended up disappointed for the most part. The best cà phê sua dá we’ve had is still to be found – no surprises here – inside Vietnam itself.

Egg Coffee (Cà Phê Trứng)

This is a relatively new concoction made with egg yolks, sugar and condensed milk. Some people will tell you it’s the best coffee in Vietnam. We’ve tried this just once along with coconut coffee in Hanoi. A more exotic coffee is civet or weasel coffee, an increasingly popular coffee in Southeast Asia and said to be the most expensive of its kind in the world. We didn’t try this in Vietnam but bought a few packets of ground coffee to take home but are now regretting this purchase. We learned later that while civet coffee was initially made by collecting coffee beans eaten by civets in the wild, many countries have turned to using civet cats held captive in deplorable conditions due to the high demand.

With several Vietnamese restos here in the Philippines hardly a month passes by that we don’t visit one, especially since Leo needs to have his banh mi fix at least every month. Even with the quarantine imposed due to Covid19 these restaurants can deliver dishes right at our doorstep ensuring that Vietnamese cuisine won’t be leaving our palates in a long while.

The post Vietnamese Cuisine: Healthy, Balanced & Tasty appeared first on Traveling Archive.

This trip was to be a genuine taste of adventure. When Royal Caribbean International invited me to be a guest on their Exotic Asia voyage to Southeast Asia, I couldn’t say no. The centerpiece of the voyage would be to locations barely on the tourist map – four-days in Vietnam, a day in Cambodia, and the added bonus of landings in the more traveled destinations of Bangkok and Singapore.

Embarkation on the 2,435 passenger Rhapsody of the Seas was in Hong Kong, with the next day spent on the voyage to the port of Haipong, gateway to Hanoi. This allowed us to catch up on our sleep and to become familiar with the seemingly endless amenities on the vessel, our home for the next thirteen-days.

In preparation for our landings, a guest speaker conducted seminars on what to expect in Vietnam. Today it is a communist nation with a free-market economy, and considered one of the safest nations in the world. With 84 million people, it is now one of SE Asia’s vibrant Little Tiger economies. A number of Vietnam War veterans were on the vessel, many returning for closure from the war (1959 to 1975), others bringing family members to share with them an important piece of their personal history. I later found that for most Vietnamese people, the war is past tense, and a let ‘bygones-be-bygones’ sentiment prevails.

As we took the 2.5 hour bus ride to the capital of Hanoi, there was an intensity of traffic;
bicycles, motorcycles, scooters and little cars chocked the bumpy road. I noticed virtually all women wore scarves (khau trang) covering their faces. I asked if this was due to pollution, but was informed that culturally Vietnamese women prefer pale complexions. The county’s pristine beaches are often empty until 5 pm, with locals waiting for the sun to go down.

Hanoi’s Old Quarter is located the heart of the original city, with its 36 streets named after the products for sale: Silver Street, Silk Street, etc. We were greeted with welcoming smiles from a populace that was just as interested in seeing us as we were of them. Waking across a chaotic car strewn street was akin to a brush with death. Yet, it was not unusual to see a younger Vietnamese gently taking the hand of a senior, with the words: “Uncle, may I help you across the street?” The French Quarter – a remnant of France’s 100 years of dominance – featured wide boulevards of tree-lined streets. Monuments to former President Hoh Chi Minh (1890 –1969) were seemingly everywhere. His body rests in a mausoleum where it has been embalmed for viewings. We also toured the former palace, which Hoh turned into an administrative building, preferring to live in the simple servant’s quarters in back. The day also featured regional delicacies such as pho, spring rolls, green papaya salad and baguettes; a gift from the French Indo-China era.

Hue (pronounced Hway), located on the central coast, is the original Imperial Capital, with many of its century-old pagodas, architectural relics and Forbidden Purple City – modeled after China’s own Forbidden City – still standing despite heavy U.S. bombings during what the Vietnamese refer to as “The American War.”

The first site in Vietnam ever listed in the World Heritage list, a visit to Hue offers an inside look at the Vietnamese monarchy during its most prosperous period. Lunch on the banks of the Perfume River was an unforgettable experience, with floating villages of water gypsies in the distance.

Ho Chi Minh City (formerly Saigon), just off the southern coast, is an urban frenzy of eight million people packed into a city of sidewalk cafes, cyclo-pedicabs, city squares, palaces and markets. The three top tourist attractions are the War Remnants Museum, Reunification Palace and the underground world of the Chu Chi Tunnels, with many of the tours conducted by former residents. Later we saw the remnants of the towers and temples of the now extinct Indian-influenced Kingdom of Champa.

Our time in Sihanoukville, Cambodia was brief. But it was easy to see a fledging nation still recovering from the genocide of the Khmer Rouge regime and their own war with Vietnam. Many in our group were stunned to see such poverty in this nation attempting to make tourism an important component in their infrastructure. Animals grazed in open garbage dumps, and derelict homes on stilts tilted towards the sea. Yet young children with open smiles rushed up to me to say hello in English. Like Vietnam, I hope it’s just a matter of time for them to join the modern world as well.

The post A Taste of Adventure in Vietnam appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Throughout our travels the past several years we’ve often tended to wander towards off-the-beaten path nature destinations, shying away from crowded locations as much as we can. But there’s something beguiling about the busy and chaotic setting that is Hanoi, Vietnam and its celebrated Old Quarter. Crossing a street with hundreds of scooters, bicycles, cyclos and cars headed off in different directions all at once can be overwhelming and even terrifying to the average tourist but it was strangely inviting to us.

We’ve been to Vietnam numerous times in the late 1990’s and early 2000’s and Leo had visited Hanoi and its Old Quarter – the city’s historic urban core and its former commercial and residential center – twice before so the helter-skelter traffic isn’t something new. But a lot has changed since then as tourists descended in droves on a more commercially vibrant Hanoi. Despite this the Old Quarter manages to retain its charm, with shops, restaurants and cafes sheltering in French colonial buildings. On our most recent tour we got to immerse ourselves in the Old Quarter’s history and culture much more than in past visits.

Just walking distance from our hotel on Hang Bon Street, Hoan Kiem Lake is the center of city life and a place where locals gather to rest, eat, play or simply stroll around. We spent a good deal of our time walking around the perimeter of the lake, savoring the scenery and enjoying a respite from the crowded streets.

Sitting on an island in the northern section of the lake is Ngoc Son, an 18^th century Buddhist temple dedicated to Tran Hung Dao, a brilliant military strategist responsible for repulsing two Mongol invasions in the 13th century. The main attraction in Hoan Kiem, the temple is accessible via an elegant red bridge. An interesting resident of the temple is an embalmed huge soft-shell tortoise, believed to be the last of the reptiles that used to populate the lake. This particular tortoise died in 2016.

Located just off Hoan Kiem Lake’s northeastern corner is the acclaimed Thang Long Water Puppet Theater. Originating from the 11^th century, water puppets were a form of rural entertainment in which villagers used rods under the water in rice paddies to manipulate puppets, giving them the impression of moving across the water. At Thang Long a water pool is used as a stage with puppeteers concealed behind a screen. Accompanying music is provided by live bands playing traditional Vietnamese instruments on both sides of the pool.

The Old Quarter is best explored on foot – something that could be exasperating to the first-time visitor as the sidewalks have either become parking lots for motorbikes or al fresco dining settings for food stalls. When we got tired from all the walking, however, we would just check in at any of the numerous cafes and restaurants scattered all over this part of Hanoi.

A stroll along any of the streets at the Old Quarter is like a virtual food tour – or a shopping expedition (more on that below). Vietnamese cuisine is one of our favorites and we welcome any visit to Vietnam if only to dine on local fare. As the former capital of French Indochina and because of its proximity to China, Hanoi’s cuisine (and northern Vietnam’s as well) is significantly influenced by French and Chinese cooking.

We’re also raving fans of Vietnamese coffee. In the past we craved their iced coffee (cafe sua da) made using a strong brew poured over a tall glass of ice and with plenty of condensed milk. Nowadays we go for variants using little or no sweetening but on this tour we tried out the egg coffee and coconut latte which our tour guide in Ha Long Bay recommended. A particularly interesting café located along the northern shores of Hoan Kiem Lake, The Note Coffee offers both coffee variants. The café is named for colorful post-it notes that patrons stamp on the café’s walls and table tops. We weren’t able to sample the notorious and expensive but exquisite civet coffee, however.

Besides the colonial buildings, another remnant of French colonial rule in the Old Quarter is St. Joseph’s Cathedral, actually one of the first buildings constructed by the French colonial government in Vietnam. The Neo-Gothic style cathedral is one of the more recognizable landmarks in the city and was an easy walk from our hotel.

A little bit farther away and east of the southern end of Hoan Kiem Lake is a more notorious reminder of French colonial rule – the Hoa Loa Prison Museum. The museum is a surviving section of a 19^th century prison that the French built to detain Vietnamese revolutionary firebrands up to the 1950s. The Vietnam War brought a different dynamic to Hoa Loa when the North Vietnamese used it to incarcerate downed American pilots, including the late Sen. John McCain. (This prison is the famous Hanoi Hilton of the Vietnam War.)

Centuries ago, streets and alleyways thriving with hawker stalls at the Old Quarter have been named for specific trades. Some shops and stalls plying these trades are still there. However, Hanoi has become more of a tourist shopping mecca in recent years, selling practically everything under the sun. At the labyrinth of shops and stalls souvenirs may be found side by side with local products and export overruns at bargain prices. Some of the streets around Hoan Kiem Lake are closed off to traffic during Friday evenings and weekends which allowed us to do more shopping and sample more local street food. (In Vietnam street food can be as good as or even better than food in restaurants.)

Many writers will tell you that a visit to the Old Quarter is a must for any first-time visitor to Hanoi. We would say it’s a must for any first-time visitor to Vietnam.

The post Serenity Amidst the Chaos: At Hanoi’s Old Quarter appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Ramblings of My 2020

This is just a laundry list of my activities for 2020 so skip this if you are in a hurry. My intent is to see if you and I can connect in my other levels of interest. Most of you are silent subscribers so it’s a treat when I read your feedback.

INTERNATIONALLY

The new year is here. Many I’ve talked to are glad to be through with 2019 and understandably so. 2019 was a crazy year. I’m surprised nobody has really blamed the media for all the political tensions and violence — they were the ones who benefited from the scare tactics and rumor mongering. Expect an overload of that with this election year. Already I noticed some of the political Youtube videos have suddenly been labeled “restricted” — censorship, here they come. Japan will be hosting the Olympics. That should be interesting.

AT HOME

In case you are interested, here’s what’s in store for me at home.  The pet invasion is our biggest physical challenge. We now have 3 cats and a Corgi. My wife spends more time with the animals than with me. I didn’t know I married Doc. Doolittle. Oh, and our daughter will be moving back home for a while before she moves to Canada to further her studies. We will have a full house.

My wife and I will continue with our Biblical Counseling Course on Thursdays … where we believe in the premise that most of our emotional problems can be cured (not through drugs but) through a refocus on God — who He is, who We are and what is expected of us. If you know anyone needing emotional help, don’t hesitate to ask. We might also start a Bible study group in our home on Wednesday evenings. Invitation is open to all.

BUSINESS

WYNK (What You Need to Know): My marketing, graphic and web design company will continue to help with customized websites and marketing campaigns but this year, I’d like to focus more on book publishing and social media/SEO. One of my favorite clients wants me to design an original board game. That’ll be exciting.

Alpha, my residential property management business will be taking over a new condo complex. The former managers appeared to be charging the residents too much and I’m determined to bring their HOA (Home Owner’s Association) bills down. As our tag line goes: “Bring us your tired, your poor, your disgruntled HOA members and we will give them rest.”

I’d still like to continue doing live caricatures for non-profit organizations. I am one of the most prolific caricaturists in the world (I think I’ve done over 1,700 caricatures in my lifetime) but even this will one day come to an end. Dude, if you don’t have an original “Raoul,” you’re missing out.A day will come and I will do my last caricature because my hands and eyes will no longer coordinate with each other.

I’ve recently been toying with the idea of putting up a new business — producing a special vinaigrette which i concocted. If you like pork chops smothered with vinegar, this is a perfect match. It’s my wife’s favorite food. So far I am in the research and experimental stage. I’ve studied distribution and packaging but I think I might have a problem preserving the spices.

With all of these, I wonder if I will still be able to join my college chums for a week and a half road trip from the West coast to the East coast. We’ve been planning this a few years now. We want to do this before our backs give in, our teeth fall off and our memories wander into the windmills of our minds.

Mama Lou, my aunt, told me (when I was a teenager) that she noticed that I was always busy doing something. I think I am starting to believe her. Isn’t life great?!?

TGIF people!

Raoul

Joke of the Week

Thanks to Peter Paul of S. Pasadena, CA for sharing this joke.

Don’s Puns

Sent by Don of Kelowna, B.C.

Video: Cheapest Travel Rate

Art of Sierra Madre, CA shared this hard-to-believe discount country. You might want to consider this as you plan your travels this year. Can you guess where it is?

Video: This is 2020

Peter Paul of S Pasadena, CA shared this very apt video to welcome the new year.

Parting Shots

Thanks to Don of Kelowna, B.C. who shared this:

Here’s another one from Don:

The post Gettin’ Old appeared first on Traveling Archive.

Since this web site focuses on travel and food I try to deal with topics that include both.  “La cucaracha” is found just about everywhere and there are people who actually like to eat them.  But I am getting ahead of myself. Wait, are you actually singing that song?  Did you know the Spanish folk song, “La Cucaracha,” is about a cockroach unable to walk because he has lost one of his six legs?

Let me tell you what this chapter is not about.  It is not about all the strange things people eat.  There are so many they can’t possibly be listed.  It is also not about the grossest things people eat.  Some things eaten around the world are really not worth mentioning and can be very disgusting, even depraved, so I won’t be mentioning them even though I have seen some of them.

Some people have eaten unusual items to win a wager like the man who ate his automobile by grinding it up and putting it in his mash potatoes.  Isn’t there an easier way to make money than proving you can eat your car?  And the list is actually long for that type of culinary challenge.  One man ate a coffin, another a Cessna airplane, one consumed thousands of light bulbs and one person ate his bedroom (yes, even the doorknobs and blinds, drywall and carpet).  Next time he tells his mom he is hungry she will listen.

But this is the first of several stories about odd and often funny moments in our personal travels that have to do with food.  No doubt many of you have stories to tell since you are travelers and food in one culture is not always what is thought of as food in another.

The Merriam Webster dictionary defines food in a lengthy and technical fashion including words like “carbohydrate, and fat used in the body of an organism to sustain growth, repair, and vital processes.” I won’t bore you with the rest.  But in my 70 plus years of life and travel I have come to a simpler definition.  Food = anything.  At this time I cannot think of much that man has not eaten on this planet. If possible, someone would even try to eat that.

When I grew up it never entered my mind that one day TV programs would exist that were built around people eating tarantulas, rats, scorpions and hissing cockroaches.  Things are definitely less shocking today. I was thinking about what is the most important thing to carry with you when traveling in the impoverished regions of the world.  The answer is a sense of humor.  I was once laying on a wooden board on the ground tying to fall asleep in a remote region of the Philippines with insects crawling on me.  So, what was funny about that?   My friend was sleeping in a wheelbarrow.  Now, that I think about it, I may have been jealous.

There are 4,000 species of cockroaches in the world. They are one of the few things that survived the Hiroshima atomic bomb.  Here are some random, interesting facts about this uninvited house guest:

A cockroach can live for a week without its head.  So, if you manage to accomplish that be sure to pull one of its legs off as well.  At least it will only run in circles. It can even survive being submerged under water for half an hour. Roaches can run up to three miles in an hour, even a one-day old baby the size of a dust speck.  They are born on the run and spend their lives that way. The American cockroach has shown a marked attraction to alcoholic beverages, especially beer. This is sounding more like that uncle all the time. The world’s largest roach (which lives in South America) is six inches long with a one-foot wingspan. I don’t know about you but the most troubling word in that description is the word, “wingspan.”  Yes, some cockroaches fly and can fly about the length of a tennis court.

They make a loud whirring noise just before they land on your neck. From personal experience I can describe that sound in more detail if you like.  They can also live without food for a month but only a week without water so you usually find them around wet areas. Prisoners in WW2 ate them to get some protein. While living in Asia, we kept all food items in the refrigerator, nothing on our shelves, or roaches would get into them.

The World Health Organization (WHO) adds some additional encouraging news. They report that cockroaches are carriers of salmonella, typhoid, dysentery, cholera and many more diseases and that they will eat book bindings, glossy paper, shoe linings, hair, and even the nails of sleeping babies and sick people. Having said that it would be hard to imagine anyone eating them wouldn’t it?

We had a cat in the Philippines that used to eat cockroaches where we lived. So, for all you cat haters, they do have a purpose.  But there was one drawback.  In the middle of the night when I was in the deepest sleep I would be awakened by this gentle purring sound in my face and the smell of horrible cockroach breath.  I guess our cat was so happy eating the disease-ridden varmints all day that she just wanted to share her joy with us.  I have never smelled a cockroach in America, but in Asia we had that strong, unmistakable odor in our cabinets, rooms and just about everywhere.  And on our cat.

A friend of mine, was drinking milk in a restaurant one day and said he thought the milk was staring to turn, but he finished it anyway and at the bottom of the glass was a giant cockroach. When he told me what had happened, I forgot to ask if the roach was still alive.

There is a woman in China that has 100,000 cockroaches in her home and she breeds them and calls them her children.  The one thing I can’t figure out with that story is how does she keep the number to only 100,000?

Asian cockroaches are much larger than the ones you see in America.  We used to have a cockroach of the week contest for our five children to at least make a fun time of sharing our space with the critters.  One night one of our young children woke up crying and said a cockroach bit her.  We had not been in the country very long and we told her not to worry because they don’t bite.  The next morning, she had a large red swollen area on her leg with a white spot in the middle.  We asked a missionary friend if cockroaches bite and she said, “Oh, yes, and they make a swollen lump with a white spot in the middle.”  We quickly apologized to our children and it was mosquito nets all around after that.  I bet you didn’t know they bite, or fly.

When the kids got older we stopped using the nets, just too much trouble.  Cockroaches would get in our hair at night and many times one would crawl across my face and startle me awake at night.  After several years we learned to just pick them out of our hair at night, crunch them in our hands and toss them on the floor and go back to sleep.  As missionaries we worked with the poor and we lived near the poorer clusters of the people, so we had to deal with these dirty little buggers. But when we saw what cockroaches fed on and how they lived the one thing we never considered was eating them. I mean how would you prepare them? Would you boil them and make soup stock?  I bet that would smell just delightful.

“A research team based at the Institute for Stem Cell Biology and Regenerative Medicine in India believes that the “milk” from the Pacific beetle cockroach – the protein-rich crystals that the insects lactate to feed their young – could make for the next great superfood. Now, maybe you’ll think twice before squashing that pesky cockroach in your apartment.” (CBS News)

No, let’s be clear, I will not think twice before squashing the pests and the only way I will milk one is with the bottom of my shoe. That brings me to the story I want to tell.  You needed some background information to appreciate it.

One day, a friend who had just returned from Cambodia brought me something as a gift. It was a menu from a restaurant where he had eaten.  On the menu, one of the main entrees, was “flying cockroaches.”  So, this restaurant must have gotten bored with their contest of the week and starting eating them and it became so requested it earned a place on the menu.

A week later after getting that menu my wife and visited our youngest daughter who had used her school break to work at a Vietnamese refugee camp.  The camp was about 4 hours north of the city of Manila where we lived. It housed about 18,000 Amerasians. These were the “leftovers” from the Vietnam war.  American servicemen had fathered children and returned to the USA after their assignments leaving children with no fathers but more importantly, no country.  They became a rejected people in Vietnam, viewed as a mixed-breed.  Remember, we lost that war and left the country.  As one writer has written “Many ‘children of the dust’ fathered by Americans were abandoned, taunted, abused, and left unschooled after the last of the U.S. military departed after the fall of Saigon.”  The presence in the Philippines of several large American military bases also produced and abandoned over 50,000 Amerasian children when the bases pulled out.

A US government congressional act would later allow 23,000 Amerasians and 65,000 family members to settle in the U.S.

It was an Amerasian resettlement camp where our youngest high school daughter worked that summer. So, what does that have to do with cockroaches?  I’m coming to that. We arrived at the camp for our allowed visit.  They were careful not to make the Amerasians a tourist site or photo op.  It was a difficult place to visit.   While there, we met the people our daughter stayed with and the people she worked with.  One of those was a Vietnamese cook who prepared food for an American family that helped direct the camp operations.

At one point I was alone with the Vietnamese cook and my curiosity had gotten the better of me and I just had to ask. The memories of that menu with flying cockroaches was still fresh in my mind. I told him about the menu and I asked if he liked to eat cockroaches.  He did and so I asked how he liked to prepare them.   He described carefully slicing them up and frying them in brown sugar.  I then asked if he liked them any other way.  He revealed he like to eat them alive and when I asked him to expand that answer he described in detail how he picked off the wings and then tossed them in his mouth like you and I would eat peanuts.  He seemed disappointed the American family didn’t share the same interest in what he liked to eat.

I had one more question for him.  “Is there anything the American family eats that when you watch them eat it, it almost makes you sick to your stomach.  At that point he looked around to make sure no one was watching and said in a quieter voice,  “Yes, there is one thing.  You know those potatoes that they mash up?”  All I could say at that point was,  “Yes, I know the exact thing you are talking about.” He eats live cockroaches and mashed potatoes makes him want to puke!  The guy reminded me of Olle.  He was a missionary from the Faroe Islands who, like us was working in the Philippines.  We were at his house one day when he kindly offered us some of his personal stock of whale blubber.  The Faroes are somewhere near Iceland and they mostly eat stuff that comes from the sea. I could have said fish but whale blubber is not fish, it is stuff, and ugly looking stuff at that.  Olle actually brought that stuff in his check ins when he traveled back and forth to the Philippines. I don’t know why Customs didn’t shoot him when they inspected his bags.  When we refused to eat his private whale blubber stock he tried to entice us by saying it was three years old, really seasoned.  That explained the thick green ick growing on the yuck.  I finally said, “Olle, how do you eat that stuff?”  He said, “Well, you eat peanut butter!”  I guess he saw the strange look on our faces so he continued,  “And you know what it looks like?”  I think Olle would have gotten along well with the Vietnamese cook as long as they didn’t mix peanut butter in with mashed potatoes.

I am reminded of one college frat person trying to be “macho” who ate a cockroach on a dare and then shortly afterwards his thoughts began to torment him and he quickly grabbed a plastic trash can in his room and emptied the contents of his stomach into it.  He said afterwards, “I didn’t think I had lost it too bad, then as I looked in the can I noticed that one of my socks was at the bottom!”

I did say I would give you 101 things you can do with cockroaches so here they are:

1. Eat them.
2. Milk them.
3. Squash them.

Repeat number three 98 more times

The post 101 Things To Do with Cockroaches appeared first on Traveling Archive.