I had a very intense week a few back. Overwhelming. I made a kind of work-friend and almost immediately regretted it when she began emitting a steady Single White Female vibe, which is flattering maybe? If you're the star of a Lifetime movie and you haven't yet caught her wearing your clothes and being better friends with your mom than you are?

So, this lady's been friendly and she offered to take me swimming with her, so we swam laps at a public outdoor pool where we were two of maybe five women total. She, Thanh, told me that women don't like to go in the water because they don't want to darken their skin and being in water too much is bad for you, which is suuuch an asian concern. Like the certainty that white yogurt will give you good skin.

We had dinner at this delicious Hanoi-style place and I ate too much, but the bill was still under $4 for us both. Pork belly and flat little meatballs in a soupy sauce with rice noodles and piles of basil, lettuce, and lemon balm. We also had these....hm. How to describe. Long matchstick strips of something starchy and potato-like, not taro, pressed into bundles and deep-fried with whole small shrimps on top. Shells, legs, and heads. Then we had a third course of these delicious little deep-fried spring rolls, chả giò, which I eat every chance I get.

After eating, she drove us around the city for a while and I swear for several minutes we were in Chicago, it was so similar. We stopped at the Ben Thanh night market and I watched a woman grilling whole orange fish and then she threw live lobsters on the grill, like ten of them, and they were waving at me for help, and I saw a lady! with no eyes! aahhhh! her lids were pressed flat in the sockets and they were slightly open and I couldn't help it, I saw THE BACK OF HER SOCKET. I felt everything go out of focus for a second when I realized what I'd seen. It was WET and pink.

And THEN we went to a hospital, because why not, and it was across the street, and apparently someone from work stuck their hand in a pot of boiling soup (!), so she wanted to visit. It reminded me of the hospital in the Silent Hill movie, or like any part of the games. Worn wood and linoleum, chipped tiles, this overwhelming sense of things left to moulder, large open rooms with 8-15 beds in each one. Old and scary and humid and not at all antiseptic-looking. There, I could easily imagine dying of sepsis or bedsores or poltergeists.

The next day Thanh called me at work to tell me she was picking me up that evening. She took me to her house and fed me tamarind pods and durian, two things I somehow forgot are native to the region and accessible to me at their freshest. I love tamarind, and I've only ever eaten candies or paste, never the actual thing. I've never even seen it, just illustrations and pictures, and it, well, looks like poop (this is not a link to feces :P), or a boiled peanut, which also looks like a turd. She showed me how to crack the non-stem end and bite the sticky pasty stuff off the long fibers, and there are irregular black seeds inside to break your teeth.

I'm not even sure how to describe the durian. The only other time I've had it was when I was a kid and it was kind of a dare that I had to take because it was from my mom. I can still smell my grandma's refrigerator, like a damp, cave-y funk. Anyway, I ate this thing with bemusement because fruit shouldn't taste like pork and black pepper, but oh, this did. At least, some parts. There was squish, and firmness, and a weird skin-like outer edge? I don't know, you can sort of peel layers off, but then it's also stringy and attached to an inner seed. This is all underneath the spiny rind. The squishiness was uncannily porky and the firmer bits had more an essence of mango-ness underlying the pungency. It wasn't bad, but what kept me eating was that I couldn't believe what I was tasting, and the texture. I wanted to keep picking it apart and experiencing the weird.

Later that same night we went for a goat hot pot with Thanh's sister and sister's family. Goat meat, slices of taro, mushrooms, rice noodles, mein, mustard greens, and cow udder. Yeah. This was communicated to me by grabbing a bra strap and saying "cow." This is one of those things I never really considered as a possible foodstuff, though I should have known better since lately I've been eating a LOT of organ meat, fish scales, and pig's ear. It was pale gray, chewy beyond belief, and sooo delicious.

In between the eating are the motorbike rides, which I luuuuuuuuuv. I've stopped clutching the seat because in the city you never really go over 30mph, and the flow of traffic is random - completely - but that almost makes it easier. Road rules follow a basic principle: you can do pretty much whatever you want, realizing, of course, that you must also accept any consequences. The mayhem honestly works when everybody takes care of themselves because nobody's trying to kill you. I just switch off the part of my brain that worries about what it'll feel like if we crash and it's so fun.

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Soooo, all that said, I feel a bit like an ingrate because I've gotten to eat and do some cool stuff with Thanh, but she's been creeping me out to a worrying degree. She would track me down on the internal hotel phones when she didn't see me at work before she got my cell from somebody else, she won't let me pay for myself, which makes me feel like a sugar baby, she has this weird urgency to spend too much time together (hours, for multiple days in a row), and then she tried to invite herself along when my family goes exploring the country, and this all happened within four days, so I'm having to set some firm boundaries with a forty-year old.

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I had the best spaghetti of my life in the restaurant at work last week. I think the sauce had beef heart and liver in it because it was very rich-tasting, a hint of organ. The same cook also made a thai noodle soup. Spicy tomato broth with uuuge chunks of red chilies, big shramp, whole shallots and garlic cloves, and mushrooms that hadn't yet broken through their caps. MMMM!