We? WE will talk to you later? I mean, this is perfectly understandable if there are multiple people on the phone--or even in the same ROOM-- all talking to someone at the same time, but when it's just Mano-a-Mano.... well, it sounds ridiculous. Like if I'm just sitting in the same room, minding my own business and in no way at all taking part in the conversing going on with the other person in the room, that person SHOULD NOT include me in the promise to talk again tomorrow. Because if I'm not partaking in the conversation right now, what makes you think I will be LATER?
Anyway, this in not why I started this entry.
Why then, did I? you ask.
Well, to impart the tragic (and somewhat smelly) expedition that my Uncle, my Aunt, and I took to a Vietnamese restaurant. (The only element missing is a Priest, and we would have ourselves a terrifically offensive stand-up-comedy joke.)
Here's how it all started....... (queue flashback music)
Instead of going out to the usual Thia place we frequent during my summer visits, my Uncle suggested we try this Vietnamese place right next to the hardware store he goes to. (This was our first mistake... Why we would ever think that a restaurant right next to a hardware store would be delicious, I do not know. For example, after you pick up that snake you need at the hardware store, you can stop next door and have a quick bite to eat before you have to go home and unclog the pipes of your plumbing system. Not exactly appetizing.) But we DID think it would be delicious, and we figured we would try something new.... So we went.
Looking back at the evening, I call to mind a conversation we had before ordering. It went like this:
Me: Wow, look! They have a whole page dedicated to vegetarian food. (I am a vegetarian, if you didn't catch that.) Hmm, there are so many choices... I'm not used to this plethora of options....I don't really know what to order.
Aunty: Well what looks good?
Me: I don't know. I don't know that much about Vietnamese food...
Aunty: Well you'll find out, won't you?........ (ominous swell in music, followed by an undercurrent of agitated orchestral humming.)
Little did we know that this comment would prove so prophetic. But this is a piece of literary work, so I suppose I'll just call it foreshadowing.
From here we ordered a couple of different appetizers, thinking we'd start out small and see if the food would prove to be good. You can often tell by an appetizer the quality of the food you will be ordering.
But in this case, we had the wool pulled over our eyes. Because the first course was delicious.
It wasn't until the main meals started to arrive that we realized what a huge mistake we had made.
I should start our by telling you what everyone ordered. I ordered some obscure fried noodle dish off of the vegetarian menu, something that I have no hope of ever pronouncing correctly. My Uncle ordered the curry chicken. And Aunty, after some debate, decided on the lemon chicken.
We should have know what we were getting into when the pork salad showed up at our table.
The waitress (a pretty, if not a little clueless and negligent, girl in her late teens) plopped a giant bowl with shriveled lumps all over the top of it and a small dish of fish-sauce in the middle of our table, and proclaimed, "Who had the pork salad?"
We all stared at it for a minute, lost for words. She asked again, "The pork salad? Hello? Anybody?"
We all quickly denied any association with this pork dish, Aunty and I both going so far as to deny all consumption of pork products in our daily lives. The waitress, looking confused, pulled out her note pad, and told us that she had definitely written down that someone had ordered the pork salad.
We shrugged. By looking around the place, we could tell that the waitress hadn't mixed up our order with another table... We were the only customers in the whole place. Disowning the order, we shrugged again, and she took it away, looking upset. But she did leave the little dish of fish-sauce, sitting right in front of me, stinking up the place.
Despite this, soon the other main dishes (the ones we had actually ordered) arrived, and everyone had a meal in front of them...except for Aunty. She insisted we start without her, ignoring our protests. So my Uncle and I dug in.
If your expecting me to tell you about how I took one bite of my meal, then immediately spit it out all over the table through me nose... Well, you're going to be disappointed. Because my food wasn't that bad. The only unsavory part about it was the tofu that came with it, which I had not been expecting when I ordered it. (If I had known it came with tofu, I probably would have ordered something else; I hate tofu, despite the popular belief that all vegetarians like to eat "tofu and shit." I would strooooonnngly oppose this ignorant statement.) And My Uncle claimed that his curry chicken was alright (But he would later recant this statement in favor of a more comedic anecdote about the pathetically mediocre curry chicken he had wasted his money on).
No, the real fun began when Aunty's dinner showed up.
Everything looked fine, we all had a plate full of what seemed to be delicious food before us. And then the smell hit. And boy, did it hit HARD.
We sniffed in horror, but with each whiff we cringed and gagged... Well, not quite. We were to polite to do that. But inside, that's what we were doing.
What did it smell like? Well, if I'm being perfectly honest.... smelly chick crotch.
At least according to my Aunt, who has always been eloquent with words.
But, man, did she really hit the head on the nail with this one. You know those people, those women, who don't shower for days on end, and they wear the same pair of pants for WEEKS without washing them... You know the odor that emanates from them whenever they walk past you or sit next to you on the bus and don't bother crossing their legs...
Well... there you go. It smelled exactly like that.
No, I'm not even kidding. I wish I was, but I'm not. My Uncle took one bite of it, and then proclaimed, "It tastes like it smells."
Ewwwwww! Gross!
After that, things went down hill, as I'm sure you can imagine. My Uncle wouldn't stop cracking crotch jokes, My Aunt kept telling him to shut up or the waitress would hear him, and I couldn't stop laughing. (What can I say? I have a weakness for crotch jokes, I guess. I mean, he kept saying, "Lemon-grass chicken? More like Lemon-ass chicken..." I mean, what's a girl to do?)
Do you remember that dish of fish-sauce I mentioned earlier? The one that got left behind? Yeah, well it didn't help our case of the giggles when, while reaching for the soy sauce my Uncle spilled that dish all over the table and onto his lap.
Now, in addition to the crotch chicken smell that was already permeating our nostrils, the table smelled like fish. Quite pungently.
We were officially the fish-crotch table.
Eventually we had to move the dreaded plate of chicken to another table because it kept wafting over to my nose right as I would take a bite of my food. And we managed to wipe up the fish-sauce, even though the odor lingered. Needless to say, Aunty went hungry, because she refused to even try her food. She spent the rest of the meal texting the rest of our family about the smelly crotch chicken, while I giggled, and my Uncle complained a little too loudly about the service and finally excused himself to wash the fish-smell off of his hands. It was a good time.
Don't get me wrong... We aren't bigots about ethnic food. In fact, I LOVE trying different kinds of foods from all kinds of different cultures. So does my Aunt and Uncle. Really, we are a few of the most open-minded people in our family.
But something was wrong with that food. I don't know if the cook was mad that he had to waste a perfectly good pork salad, or if the waitress gave him attitude, or if he was just having a really REALLY bad day..... but we suspected dirty play.
Needless to say, we won't be going back there any time soon. And they didn't even give my Aunt a free meal like they said they were going to, due to the pork salad mix-up.
Man, sometimes life's a bummer.
Observation of the Day:
It's disturbing how many commercials have pigs in them.
Anyway, if this little story wasn't enough to make you chuckle, then I guess all I can say is that you kind of had to be there.
Here are a few videos in honor of the mysterious Pork Salad. Who ordered it? Was it just a mix up, or was it something more... sinister. And will one of the unsuspecting pigs in these commercials someday be made into a salad?
