that vietnamese place no one can name.

so there are a couple of summer saskaspooning adventures i still have to write about (otawa and schryer's) but before i get to those i'll write about yesterday's trip to thien vietnam.

patrick turned up after a five hour drive down from pierceland yesterday, december 31st 2009. we decided to celebrate the ending of the decade with a final saskaspooning trip.

we gave the little ipod a shake and voila! we got thien vietnam , at 123 3rd Ave S.

"is that that place next to the red pepper?" i asked. "the place people go to when everything else is closed?"

"i think so," said patrick, resigned.

neither one of us was particularly happy about going to thien vietnam, mostly because it's saskatoon's fall-back restaurant where the food isn't particularly nice and the decor is rather depressing. there are lots of piles of newspapers everywhere and various members of the thien vietnam family sitting around reading them and eating delicious-looking things that are not on the menu and you can't have. actually, that sounds a bit like visiting someone's house. someone who isn't really your friend.

anyway. so patrick and i turned up and we found ourselves a booth. we got menus and we both decided that we didnt want to get vermicelli bowls, because frankly the vermicelli bowls there aren't that great. we decided to get other things on the menu so we could see if thien vietnam might just be the kind of place you'd pick first.

so i ordered a tofu-vegetable something-or-other and patrick ordered something with rice and peanut sauce. while we waited for the food to arrive we visited with a small boy who was playing with a stack of take out coffee cup lids. (one day he will be an adult and write a one-man show or a wryly humorous memoir about growing up vietnamese in the prairies, where his toys were styrofoam boxes and plastic lids, his chief playmate was his vietnamese gramma--also our waitress--and he took naps under the tables--he did that, too).

at this point we were very very hungry. the little boy wasn't entertaining us anymore (he was napping) and we needed some food. but the waitress/gramma returned to let us know, with her burgeoning english skills and some sign language, that in fact we couldn't have the food we ordered as the cook who knows how to make those dishes was at the bank and wouldn't be back for about 30 minutes.

we knew we couldnt go anywhere else--saskaspooning trumps all, afterall. "so what can we eat?" patrick asked. it turned out that all we could order were vermicelli noodle bowls.

so we each ordered one of those. they arrived. they were lackluster. and thien vietnam remains a last-resort restaurant.