Drinking snake blood in Vietnam
by dwbOnly in Vietnam can you eat a dog and a snake in the same day.
Against our better judgment, we stopped at snake restaurant (yes, they have those here) to buy a snake, kill it, and drink its blood for power. Or something like that.
The crazy looking Vietnamese man who owned the joint took us to the back and let us choose the snake. Of course if we’re going to do this, we’re going big, so we pointed to the biggest looking fucker they had. He said our choice was a poisonous snake, but fuck if I know. When your drinking snake blood, a snake is a snake.
All I can really say about what happened here is that it’s all fun and games until you almost vomit and snake blood literally shoots out of your nose as you gag. It’s not a pleasant experience, trust me on this one.
The blue pill looking thing you see in one of the photos below is the snake’s gall bladder. Yea, really. The person who pays for the snake is the lucky fuck who gets to eat it. Sometimes it sucks ass being the boss. And while you don’t actually chew the gal bladder, you just swallow it with a drink of blood. Then you can take the rest of the snake home to skin and eat the meat.
I passed on the gall bladder and gave the meat to my Vietnamese friend. I gotta draw the line somewhere. We were only here for the snake blood, and that’s as far as either one of us are willing to go today.
What does it taste like? Well, they mix the snake blood with rice wine so it has a little bit of an alcohol taste, but make no mistake about it, you clearly taste the blood. Ever have your nose busted and had the blood pour down your throat? Remember that taste? It’s like that, plus rice wine, plus snake funk, with just a hint of good old fashioned Vietnamese communism.
There are more photos of this, but Bin took them and his camera was stolen a few hours later. Yea, really. I just snapped these on my camera. Now I’m wishing I had shot them all.
