Bottoms up!

Last night Dr. Amrit Bart -- the director of the Sustainable Livelihoods Program and my initial contact here -- invited me and his graduate students to dinner at his home in the city. He lives with his wife and their two young daughters on the 32nd floor of an immense highrise building in the heart of Bangkok. It was good to get off campus, if only for a few hours. Amrit's students represent a wide range of cultures: Vietnamese, Thai, Indian, Moroccan, American, and Chinese. His wife prepared a Vietnamese schmorgasboard with fresh baked bread - delicious! As soon as we walked in the door one of Amrit's students engaged us in a toast. I later learned that the putrid liquor that was the centerpiece of this toast was actually considered to be medicine in Vietnam. The brown liquid sat in a large clear jug with a tangle of ginseng roots and some other floating debris at the bottom. In Vietnam, people collect and add to this liquor various ingredients considered to have medicinal value: bumble bees, seahorses, roots, leaves, etc.... I have no idea what the different chunks floating in that bottle actually were, but they tasted like rotting prunes, a dead chipmunk, some used dental floss, and maybe an old sock. Whatever the "medicinal" items were, I don't expect to be getting sick for at least 10 years after two shots of the stuff.