crazy lunch spread

quy thanh, the sociologist who is hosting me while i am in vietnam, had me over for lunch with his extended family, they graciously had one or two veggie dishes for me, the whole spread looked like this:
















the best dish was this one:





filled with fake shrimp and fake sausage balls and morning glory and egg, pretty yummy ... (mmmm, fake meat!)

there was also a little bit of this:




which i was really stunned by, whiskey is everywhere in thailand, but here it seems like vodka is the drink of choice, i guess you don't have to spend much time thinking about it before you realize that geopolitics is really all about alcohol ... the us and its whiskey and the soviets and their vodka, you would never have local vodka in thailand ... and for lunch even, how nice!






finally, there was the new versus the old in terms of dessert, i mentioned to thanh that the vietnamese cream puffs across from bulldog news are like famous in seattle, here they face off against these rice crispy like tubes that were really pretty good, it may be colonial and all but the puffs win hands down!