《Eating Vietnam: Dispatches from a Blue Plastic Table》Graham Holliday

    I'd taken over the rent from a friend who had worn out his tenure in Viet Nam after a two-year quagmire of failed relationships, lost money, and drunken brawls. He'd shipped west, to Bangkok, to repeat the process.

    Vietnamese people were always preparing something to eat, cooking something, buying something to cook with, talking about what to cook, eating something they'd cooked, eating something somebody else had cooked, talking about how good or bad what they'd cooked was - always eating, cooking, and talking about eating and cooking.

    I had very quickly grown bored of Hanoi's nightclub scene.  Unlike pubs and clubs I had known in the UK, it didn't offer an escape from anything, but rather served as a reminder that my fellow expats were almost exclusively losers, psychotics, deadbeats, junkies, and alcoholics.