Drinking Snake Blood in Hanoi!!
Trip Start
Feb 12, 2007
1
59
80
Trip End
Aug 23, 2007
Hanoi, Vietnam
Saturday, June 30, 2007
We (the french guys and I) arrived here with a sleeper bus from Hue. It was a rough night because we didn't sleep much (the music was on all the night, and on top of it we didn't quite fit on the beds- the guys had more troubles than me though!), but the experience was fun enough!
We walked around the city, and yesterday we met some vietnamese guys around here. The particular thing of these vietnamese guys is that one (Zum) has been living 12 years in Munich, Germany, speaks fluent german, and he feels foreign in his own land. The other (Dong), his father lives in Sweden (he married a swedish woman), and plans to move in September with his swedish girlfriend in Stockholm! Anyways, we decided to have dinner together, and they wanted to bring us to a special place... we said we didn't want to eat dog (..no way!), and they said something of a "steak house", so we answered that it was allright!
In the evening, they picked us up, we took a taxi, and we drove to a place out of town. When we arrived, they showed us some snakes, the owner took 2 of them (one of them was a King Cobra!) and brought us to a some sort of restaurant-living room with some tables prepared for dinner. Took one of the snakes, hit its head against the floor, opened it with a razor, took the blood out and poured it into a bottle full with alcohol, took the heart out, and did the same with the other snake!!! At that point we were completely amazed!!! and we didn't understand absolutely nothing! We all were expecting some sort of steaks (being with me one french argentinian, and the other two having been living in South America too, all of them really keen on eating a good steak...).
The owner put the bottle with the snakes blood on the table, and poured a bit of it in glasses, and told us to drink ("...never refuse an invitation"). Martin and Dong took the glasses with the hearts in (the others didn't want to swallow the heart and me neither!!), cheered and swallowed. Clement did not even want to try it, so he facked a sim, and Amaury, Zum and I cheered and drank! The texture was different, cannot say like what... but it was viscose. It was not as warm as I had expected, and it tasted rather sweet!
But as if that was not enough adventure, the owner asked us how much snake did we want to eat... at that point we understood a bit: the vietnamese guys meant "Snake house" and not "steak house" (F**cking vietnamese english accent!!). We asked for the price, and the owner said: 15$ (yes!$), for 100gr!!! We actually didn't want to eat snake...so we rejected, but he said that he had killed the 2 snakes for that reason... then we started a whole dialog about how could he know what we wanted, there was not even a menu or anything! Then the owner said that if we didn't want to eat that was fair enough, but we had to pay for killing the snakes, which was 1.500.000 dong (almost 100$). We discussed about it, our vietnamese friends got really nervous, even one of them went to vomit (he was not feeling really well after the snake blood, and anyways the whole mess was too much for him!). We tried to negociate the price, but the owner was a mafias guy, so after 1,5 hours talking we decided to pay and without eating the snakes (otherwise it would have been even more expensive, and we really weren't keen on eating them!).
When we left we realised that we had been closed on the house -I guess the owner thought that we might try to run away or something... we didn't think about it, of course not! You don't wanna mess around with a snake-man like that!!!
So we left, completely perplexed, and with 250.000dong (around 15$) less in each of our pockets! We went for a beer, or two... just to chill out and assimilate what had just happened!
That was a good shot of adrenaline, I can tell you!!
