The Stuggle for Breakfast

Who needs breakfast, anyway, really? I know it is suppose to be the most important meal of the day and I use to get mad at my old roommate Jessica for not eating breakfast. I always ate breakfast, sometimes 2.

This makes me remember a time when I was in Uganda with a Dal study program in undergrad and we visited a small rural school. There was art work decorating the classroom and some of the drawings were the children's ideas of foreigners. One drawing which I remember vividly, was a crayon picture of a mazungo (white person) and it said he eats breakfast. Eating 'breakfast' is a meal of the developed world and eating three meals a day was such a strange idea to the child. I am not dissing breakfast, but I had breakfast for the first time yesterday since I've been here ...

Eating breakfast in Hanoi is not expensive, but a bit of a hassle to get. Typical Vietnamese breakfast food is similar to what you would eat for lunch: noodle soup or rice, so when you are already eating that twice a day, your palette just wants to taste something else. I was discussing the troubles of getting breakfast with my Cdn friend Scott and his solution is having a cigarette (which is suppose to suppress your appetite) with a cup of coffee.

My first plan was just to wait it out until lunchtime. I don't get to work until 9/9:30 and we usually have lunch at 11:30, that I thought I could just wait since I am not expending that much energy anyway. But I was starving once I sat at my desk for like 5 minutes. So I when I realized starving my self was not going to work, my second plan was to buy fruit from the local stands and juice. However, everything is sold by the kg and I would just want to buy 2 bananas. I really didn't have a clue how much it should be and getting strange looks from the vendor when they didn't understand what you are saying, just does not make you want to go back for more. The boxes of juice and soy milk I bought tasted horrible and I know now not to buy those brands.

What I really needed to find was a grocery store, which I finally found 2 days ago! I was able to buy cereal (which is actually expensive because it is imported for people like me) and milk (but the milk is in those tetrapacks, so I won't be getting any fresh milk while I am here), plus yogurt. My colleague, Ms. Linh, took me to a market today and helped me buy some fruit. So now I know how to order it and have a better idea of how much it should be. The struggle for breakfast has finally ended and I am much more productive at work now ...