shellfish and tingly hands

So, last night's tingly hands continued from around 7pm until well past midnight.

Tingly hands after eating shellfish are not a comforting thing when you've spent a morning at the War Remnants Memorial (highly recommended for anyone in HCMC) reading up about the effects of neurotoxins like Agent Orange.

However a FB friend noted that tingly hands may portend shellfish allergies. D'oh! I love shellfish! But my body is accustomed to Australian standards of shellfish, which are probably a little more cleanly than Vietnamese standards.

This means I'm gonna be rather more cautious with the shellfish around here over the next few days...

(Dammit; I may no longer be able to tell people that I'll eat anything, so long as it's not trying to crawl off the plate - unless it's supposed to be trying to crawl off the plate, in which case, I'll give it a try at least once.)

Tuesday: war and peace

Breakfast was 'broken rice'; cơm tấm in the Vietnamese:



It's called 'broken rice' because the rice is little pieces, not the whole grains that we're used to in our packets of rice. The 'slice' in the front is a kind of Vietnamese frittata (egg filling, with various bits tossed in), the white wiggly things are pickled radish, and there are, of course, cucumber pickles there, the meat is pork, and I have no idea what the thing on the side was, but the texture was a bit weird and off-putting. And as someone who has no issues with 'texture' most of the time, that's saying something.

After breakfast, we went to the War Remnant Museum - the repository of photos and relics of both the Anti-French Resistance War (1945-1954) and the American War (1959-1975). They're more commonly known as the First Indochina War and the Vietnam War in the west, but war has two sides, and the Vietnamese perspective isn't one we look at very often.

( It's certainly not an easy museum to walk through. )

And, after all that, there was dinner:



This is bánh canh ghẹ - crab noodle soup. And I had an allergic reaction to it: my hands were tingly from about an hour afterwards until past midnight. Although the tingly was gone the next morning, it seems I'm going to have to be careful with shellfish in future.

Emotional rollercoaster post is draining. It was exhausting to write but it needed to be done, and I imagine it will be equally difficult to read. (And quite probably enraging for some.)

Finally, I don't feel like arguing with people about this post, so I'm turning comments off.