Breakfast
Diễm was at the door, and Tina and the rest of the group were ready for breakfast. They had refused to eat any airline food the whole time we were flying and they were hungry. I wasn’t exactly not hungry myself, I was just more tired. No rest for the weary. I sucked it up, put on my shoes, stumbled downstairs, and fell into the back seat of an SUV-style taxi, and away we went back into the noisy, chaotic streets of Da Nang. We stopped at a place serving breakfast. It was an open-air restaurant, apparently, they all are. 
I will say the Vietnamese know how to eat breakfast. Being on the non-sweet side in the battle for breakfast supremacy. It has long been an admiration of mine that one untrained in the subtleties of Vietnamese cuisine would have difficulty distinguishing breakfast from dinner. This was a cuisine after my own heart! It did have an egg, so it must be breakfast, right?
The first course was a pate of what I could only get specifically described to me as “meat, you know, meat”. It was steamed in banana leaves and freckled with peppercorns. I was in such a jet-lagged haze that I couldn’t even open it. Diem had to show me how. Even then, it was hopeless. They were delicious. I ate three out of the pile they brought, and the main course was served. It was a plate piled with egg rice noodles, fresh greens, bean sprouts, and other fresh components, as well as a hot pot with a yellow broth and chunks of stuff. You were given an empty bowl which you built the fresh stuff into, then dumped the contents of the hot pot onto.
I dumped the hot pot into my bowl and examined its contents. Half an egg, a chunk of eel, a piece of some sort of coagulated forcemeat, a piece of fatty pork, one head-on shrimp, and a whole small animal of some sort. There was, of course, a condiment tray on the table, which I used in its entirety: ground Chile and garlic, fresh limes, fish sauce, and a few things I knew not. As I began to devour this delicious and wonderful bowl. Something strange happened. As I was eating the little animal, as of yet unidentified, I thought something about this was familiar. Then it hit me: I had a frog leg in my mouth. Except this time, it was looking at me. I suddenly could make out his mouth and tiny little fingers. What now, I thought, well, I must do what any self-respecting, self-proclaimed lover of all things edible should do. I popped the little guy in my mouth, chewed him up like sunflower seeds, and spit the bone out. 
The egg in the dish was about as rich an egg as I’ve ever had. And the dish was all in all remarkably good and better than any Vietnamese-style soup I’ve had in the States, as it should be. We finished breakfast and walked a few blocks to get a Vietnamese Coffee.
A shot of Vietnamese espresso is poured over condensed milk. Ca Phe Sua Da. It’s a shock that gets you both ways, a jolt of sugar and a blast of caffeine. We sat at a table on the street corner for a while as I took in the sounds, smells, and sights of the streets of Da Nang. It was barely 10 in the morning.
