Vietnam: Fates Worse Than Snake Oil (cont.)

First, the woman opened one of the clay jars on the stairs and poured out into two glasses a large amount of alcohol. She set the glasses and two additional shot glasses on a small table next to the larger of the two cages. Next, the young boy opened the large cage, fished around with his hands, and grabbed a large, three foot long yellow snake. The boy held on to the snake’s tail. The snake swung back and forth trying to bite the boy’s leg. I was asked once again if I was sure I wanted to do this.

I affirmed and the “ritual” continued. The boy lowered the snake until its head was on the ground. He stepped on the snake’s head, either crushing it to death or merely stunning it. The woman then grabbed the snake’s head. The two held the snake out, spread it as long as it would go above one of the tall glasses on the ledge. The boy pulled out a knife and began to slit the snake right down the middle of its underbelly. Snake blood began draining into the glass. The boy then reached his hand into the slit and with his fingers pulled out the snake’s heart. He dropped it into the shot glass. The woman then poured some of the alcohol and blood from the tall glass into the shot glass and handed it to me.

Now, I never drink. Chris commented on the idiosyncrasy between my lifestyle decision not to drink alcohol and this specific decision to drink snake blood. I drink so rarely that I can’t take shots properly. Instead of shooting my drink, it tends to be more of a hastened swallowing like someone hurrying to finish my glass of milk.

This was the first time that I had ever successfully shot a shot.

There was no way that I was letting a snake heart get stuck in my mouth. The last time I ever tasted blood was when I was a toddler and tasted a cut I had on my arm. I remember it tasting like banana.

My guess is that blood does not actually taste like banana, but even if it did, the alcohol it was mixed with was so strong that it completely masked the taste. The drink tasted like rubbing alcohol, and the heart shot straight down my throat.

At this point I thought I was done. But the little boy pulled out his knife again and continued to cut the snake down to its gallbladder. Once he sliced the gallbladder, the bile started flowing into the second glass. This, too, was mixed with alcohol, and I was offered a bile shot. However, after drinking a shot of blood, I decided to hold off on the bile.

The woman then took Chris and me upstairs into a dining area. There were several large tables, all empty except for one. Seven or eight Vietnamese men sat at that table, sharing food from a big pot in the middle. Smoking and having a good time, ethnicity aside, it could easily been mistaken for guys-night-out in Middle America. At the other side of the room there was a small television, turned on to a Vietnamese soap opera.

Over the next forty-five minutes, I was treated to a twelve-course meal of snake. Every few minutes, the woman would bring out a new snake dish. I had fried snake, boiled snake, snake meatloaf, snake with noodles, and grilled snake.

The snake feast was amazing in its diversity, yet also amazing in that, because I knew it was snake, each bite, whether grilled or fried, always had a snake aftertaste. The aftertaste was not so much a taste in my mouth but rather an acrid intellectual one. The group of Vietnamese men next to us seemed to relish in my discomfort.

At the end of the meal, I decided to go ahead and take the shot of bile. In the past hour, I had drank blood and had a twelve-course snake meal. I figured I might as well drink some bile as well.

I later learned that snake blood is believed to strengthen the eyes and the bile your stomach. In retrospect, the reward of better eyesight and gastrointestinal function in the long-term probably did not outweigh the risk of gastrointestinal dysfunction on my forty hour trip back to the States the next day, but I rolled the dice.

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