An authentic night out
By Anna Lindblom
One Saturday night field staff member Sam arranged for some
Lao teachers to accompany volunteers to have a Lao-style dinner. This was an exciting new experience for most
of us because we were new arrivals (at the time) and not yet familiar with the
Lao culture.
They took us to a local restaurant which was like a big open
terrace with a roof but no walls. It was
nicely lit up by colourful lights. We
put together some tables so we could sit all together to eat Lao (communal)
style.
We left the teachers to order for us and we had a few
different dishes, 3 of each, and shared them.
This was a good idea because there’s often only one or two chefs in the
kitchen, so if everyone orders different dishes you never get the food at the
same time. In this way we ate one dish
after another. As we had finished one of
the meals, the next one was ready. We
enjoyed grilled fish, friend and stir-fried vegetables, duck ribs, rice and tom
yum chicken soup.
In Laos they usually grill the whole fish and you eat its
skin too. That’s actually delicious
because that’s where the flavour is.
The chicken soup was a bit scary, because they use all parts
of the chicken – the feet as well as the whole head (with the comb and the
beak!). We all cheered in frightened
delight when one Lao teacher, Xay, cut up the chicken head and ate its
tongue. None of us were keen on trying
it though!
After I thought we’d eaten every part of the fish we could
eat I looked away and 5 minutes later the whole head was gone! Another teacher, Chan Sipheng, had eaten it
all! He offered to taste the fish eye, a
Lao delicacy, which one of the volunteers did.
Emma chewed it for a while then looked surprised and spit out a hard
bit....apparently the cornea is a bit crunchy!
She said it had a horrible taste and a strange, jelly-like
consistency. But Lao people love the eye
over any other part. There was no
fighting over it at our table!
We shared some bottles of Beer Lao, and two guys playing
guitar created a really nice, authentic Lao ambience.
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