Flavor Boulevard

Around noon time, in front of the smaller-than-a house’s door gate of the old Pho Thong Nang Khieu high school (notice they don’t show you the gate in that picture…), came an ice cream man. The typical street vendor, with a big styrofoam box on a bike, maybe a couple of buckets on the sides, I’m not sure if I remember correctly the details here. He sold kem ong, i.e. ice cream tubes. It’s something I’d never had before and possibly will never see again.

His ice cream had a skinny tubular shape, about a foot long, stick to a long skinny bamboo stick. The ice cream is actually contained in aluminum tubes, from which he quickly pulled out when we asked to buy. I usually went for the jackfruit kind (kem mit), where you have little strips of jackfruit hidden inside the ice cream, quite a treasure to chew as the vanilla milky bits melt on your tongue. For VND1000 a stick, the kem mit was sold out within 15 minutes or so. He also had kem dau xanh (mung bean ice cream), kem dau do (red bean ice cream), and a few other types, but I don’t remember getting those. It was a very nice treat for lunch break between 5 hours of morning classes and a few more hours of afternoon ones. It’s fun to share with friends too, since the tubes were so long and took you longer to eat than it to melt.

Does he still sell ice cream there, anyone knows? If you can take a picture of the ice cream, please do, and send me a link! I’m dying to just look at them again…

Side note: This post was originally written to explain the idea behind Eistube, my old little blogging corner. After moving, I feel oblige to keep the ice cream content with little editing. It was just too sweet a memory to erase from a food blog.