Yeah, I know what I said. Eat the street food. It’s amazing. Drink the cold bia hoi. Also amazing. And if the cold bia hoi isn’t cold, go ahead and throw in a couple of ice cubes. The beautiful beer girl will bring you some in a small Igloo-like cooler that she’ll place next to your tiny table. You will love it. 

“But, but,” you say, “I read that I should definitely avoid the street food, check to make sure the ice is made by a machine, and even brush my teeth with bottled water, which is cheap and plentiful. Because sanitation. And, and, even the fruit. Aren’t you only supposed to eat fruit you peel yourself?” 

What are you? Some sort of pussy?

And that’s how I felt about that. In fact, that’s how I continued to feel about that for about the first week of eating all the street food we came across. And I ain’t just talking bánh mì, here, that tastiest of pate and other stuff sandwich on slightly crusty and light and chewy bread that puts pretty much any American sandwich to shame (and, yes, I’ve had, and love, a good-old Tampa Cuban). I’m talking about stuff like the dreaded bún dậu mắm tôm, the extremely funky shrimp paste with fried tofu and rice noodles dish that earns you some serious cred with the locals if you eat it, and which you can get on our block at the same place you can get fake dog meat. Sure, there’s no hand washing-station in sight. Or refrigeration, for that matter. And there certainly aren’t any of those creepy thin plastic gloves they use in American sandwich shops when handling food. My reasoning went like this: If they were out here poisoning people, they wouldn’t be in business very long. Plus, look at me: I’m fine. Fit as a fiddle. 

And I was fine. For about a week. Sure, after coffee and the morning phở, it was pretty much best to stay close to home. There is no Starbucks or Barnes and Noble to duck into in case of emergency. But that’s normal enough. After the usual mid-morning extreme-emergency situation, I was fine for the day. What do we eat next? And isn’t it about bia hoi-thirty? 

Then I got sick. This was a slow buildup that started with a cold type of thing. Sore throat. Congestion. A little fever. No big deal. Sleep for 15 hours, and I’m fine. But I wasn’t fine. The infection that started in my throat moved up to my left ear. My fever increased along with the aches and pains. I had the ague, clearly. But none of this, I’m sure, was food related except for the extreme-type-my-god-I-wish-there-was-a-Barnes-and-Noble-type-emergency situation that’d come on about 10-15 minutes after eating anything. But this got worse, too, as the ague situation escalated. And though none of this type of situation is great, it’s especially bad when you have my sort of level of vanity and are staying in relatively small apartments where the really-pretty-serious-type bathroom emergency sounds travel right through the walls and when I come out my wife who still loves me gives me this look of total concern and acceptance and love and care and asks, “Are you okay?,” which despite her good intentions doesn’t help. 

Plus, this ear ache. 

One of the many great things about being in country is that you don’t need to go to a doctor for a prescription. You just find a pharmacy and get your drugs over the counter, which, think what you want about Vietnam otherwise, I’m pretty sure any American mom who’s ever had to drag their kid to the doctor so they can get a prescription for those drops they give you to treat pink eye—which is all of them, American moms, that is—will appreciate the ease and practicality of this system. So too will anyone who’s ever had a painful discharge after a night of bad decision making and wants to be spared the indignity of a totally unnecessary examination. You know what it is. You know what you need. Who needs to see a doctor? 

So we go to the pharmacy, where we notice you can not only get the antibiotics for my ear infection, but you can also get cold medicine with codeine, which we gave a hard pass. So this antibiotic is meant to get into the system quickly. And it does, apparently by starting to dissolve in a gushy ballooning out sort of way as soon as it comes into contact with any moisture. So basically as soon as you put it in your mouth, which sounds fun but is decidedly not fun because it is intensely bitter and gross-textured. In fact, it is so bitter and quick dissolving, I was convinced it’s a suppository. But it’s not. I double checked. 

After a few days of pretty-darn-urgent-type of emergency bathroom situations and gross mushy ballooning-out antibiotic doses and fever and ague and sleeping a lot, we decide that what I really need is some good old Kentucky Fried Chicken and a bottle of red wine. So Gina wanders out to procure the fried chicken and red wine, cuz I ain’t wandering nowhere at this point, and she scores big time: two two-piece meals of spicy fried chicken goodness with coleslaw and mashed potatoes and gravy with Pepsi Zeros with lime. Pus, she stopped at the local Winmart and picked up some ketchup for my chicken—this, by the way, is why the comments on this blog are disabled: I like to dip my chicken in ketchup, and I don’t care what you have to say about that—and so we feasted. Big-time.

And that’s about when the slow buildup stopped being either slow or a buildup. In fact, it was a little like a kung fu documentary I saw recently, Everything from Everywhere, All at Once.  

Our American predecessors in country had an acronym for when the shit was about to hit the fan again, BOHICA: bend over, here it comes again, which, as I lay there on the tile floor, which at least had the benefit of being nice and cool, in between rounds of vomitus eruptus, struck me as particularly appropriate to the situation. 

“They’re gonna want details, Kampff,” whispers the writerly voice inside my head. “Show, don’t tell.” And who am I to deny the writerly voice? Nobody. That’s who. 

So probably the most depressing moment over the two days of pretty constant BOHICA action was when the two pills my wife who still loves me had procured to help relieve the vomiting and other bathroom-emergency-situation situations came up with the vomit and floated there in the toilet amongst the bits of god-knows-what and partly digested greens that you mix in with the broth and noodles here, totally undissolved, which meant they didn’t even have a chance to begin to do what I pretty desperately at this point hoped they’d do for me, which was to bring to an end or at least mitigate, even a little, the constant BOHICA action that had plagued me for two days, and, in my fever-induced delirium and total desperation, I briefly considered retrieving the pills, Trainspotting style, and swallowing them, maybe using the sprayer bidet that was within easy reach next to the toilet to wash them down, because any relief at this point was welcome. 

Too much? 

“There is no such thing,” says the internal writerly voice.

Point is, I still urge you to eat the street food. Wash it down with some cold bia hoi. And if the bia hoi happens not to be cold, go ahead and throw in a couple of cubes. You’re in country now, FNG. You will love it.