Our friendships with our students have opened up so many exciting adventures. Shock and horror in the public schools. Drunkenness and laughter with bankers. Grass skiing with some corporate students. Recently, some students from another class took us to enjoy some fine Vietnamese cuisine: dog. Dog is a dish mostly enjoyed in Northern Vietnam, but you can still find restaurants in Saigon that serve up canine. Some students Brian and I took us to one such restaurant…

We entered a run-down restaurant full of strange smells, all of which inspired horrible things in our imaginations. Our students ordered some dishes and some wine – actually, a vodka that is commonly drank when eating dog. Whether it’s intended to enhance the subtle meat flavors or fortify resolve, we’ll never know. We just know that we were excited to have some help digesting this experience.

Suddenly, the first platters were plopped before us: cooked meat that looked relatively innocent, minus the fact that our students called it "doggie." We wrapped it in lettuce, dipped in a foul smelling sauce, and chewed our way through it, doing our best not to think about doggies. The worst looking dish came in Round II…

We were later assured that these weren’t dog drumsticks, just dog sausage wrapped in dog intestines and put on a bone. But for a moment or 2, both Brian and I reached for that special wine to fortify our failing resolve…

The thought of eating doggie was bad enough, but the kicker to it all was that dog tastes horrible.
 
It smelt bad, looked bad, and tasted bad. Dog sausage, dog liver, sautéed dog, dog with noodles – none of it was delicious. We wanted to find something redeeming about dog meat, but we couldn’t. To those that enjoy dog – more power to you. But Brian and I will never eat dog again…

Oh, and we had to ask where they got all this dog meat. Well, turns out that Ho Chi Minh City has some stray dogs. Sometimes, people catch these stray dogs, then carry them off to special markets, where restaurants like ours purchase them, and people like us eat them…