I ate it, now it is eating me

When I flew home from Taipei last Thursday, my hair still smelled of the hot springs of Beitou, of salt and sulphur. The scent of my holiday faded fast, however, when a rash erupted on my limbs. Soon all I smelled of was medicated oil, ointment, insecticide and desperation.

On my last night in Taipei, I had some wild boar stir-fried with basil. It was fresh boar, fresh from the mountains of Taitung, fresh from a hunt by an aboriginal friend of a friend who had brought the pig back to Taipei. It was the wildest boar I ever had. Later, I would report to my mother I had just "one, two bites". But between you and me, it was ten, twenty bites - maybe many, many more - and it was yummy. So now I have a rash, an angry, itchy rash that looks like a pox or a Pollock - I am trying to be positive - and feels like an attack by guerrilla ants.

In Chinese medicine, I am yin and boar is yang, too yang for me. It has made my breath fiery. It is making fires break out here on my arm, then there on my leg. "Let it come out, let it all come out," says my physician, who has given me a potion for the purging of the so-called heaty poison. What she seems to mean is the rash has to get worse before it gets better, so for a few days now, it has been furiously worse. The rash - I can't call it my rash. I do not own it, it owns me. As the itch inches up and down, I have counter-attacked it with medicated oil, menthol ointment and a made-in-China cream that smells like insecticide. The latter, labelled Shun Feng Kang Wang Compound Ketoconazole and Clobetasol Propionate Cream, is lethal. It not just kills the rash - the rash has more than nine lives though - it also kills my skin a little, leaving it tingly and unnaturally tight. Ageing-Hollywood-actress tight. No thanks. Sometimes I give up and give my arms and legs a good scratch, even making myself bleed; I give thanks for pain; painful is better than itchy. Or I sit on my hands. Or I sleep on the floor, the cool, cool floor. I don't sleep, actually. I snatch some shut-eye between attacks. Today I have tried tough love (body scrub), then tender love (moisturising cream) - I will be all out of love soon.

Will I have boar again? Yes! But maybe not as many bites next time.

THE AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE | The greatest hits

Breakfast at...Maison Vanille, a world-class bakery at 49 Phan Chu Trinh Street. I have been a fan of the French bakes and crepes (right) here since my maiden trip to Hanoi. Now that Ms N and the children are also fans, they won't want to go to Delifrance again. Mon Dieu, what have I done?

Brunch at...1 Hang Manh Street. There is no menu here. There is no need. There is just bun cha (right), a humble, ass-kicking Hanoi lunch of grilled pork and rice noodles that kicks some serious ass with its green-papaya-in-fish-sauce dip.

Lunch at...Green Tangerine, a fancy restaurant at 48 Hang Be Street. I don't know if it was the US$6 lunch or the charming tile-lined courtyard that did it for my uncle. But before he even digested his first meal here, he wanted to come back for a second bite of the Tangerine. So we lunched here on Saturday and again on Monday.

On Saturday, I had sea bass and leek a la orange, then pear a la chocolate. On Monday, I had tri-coloured soup - it was green with vegetable, grey with onion and yellow with passion fruit - then creme brulee in red-wined apples (right)!

Dinner at...Wild Lotus at 55A Nguyen Du Street. A die, die must the moment one enters the manor and steps over a small man-made stream, into a little Buddhist palace of pleasure. Beige. Brown. Gold. Paintings. Pools. Statues. Steamed fish fillet with soya sauce and a herb that might or might not be dill. Peanut-crusted shrimp. Black sticky rice with vanilla ice cream. Mmm...

THE AWFULLY BIG ADVENTURE | And the quartet played on

For 15 fearful minutes on Friday, as I stood with Ms N at the entrance of the Sofitel Metropole Hanoi, waiting, worrying and waiting, I thought I had lost the children. We had been in Hanoi for all of two hours on the four-days-three-nights-nine-meals trip. I had tucked the four children into a cab, telling the driver, "Metropole hotel," before Ms N and I cabbed there to meet them for Meal No.1: dinner at Le Beaulieu. But where were they? Where had their cabbie taken them? Why weren't they picking up their phones? They don't speak Vietnamese. Three of them were new to Vietnam. The one who wasn't is very blur.

Yet - "who would want to kidnap such old children?" I tried to tell myself.

My phone rang. It was the children! The hotel - think French colonial-style Raffles Hotel but with more old-world beauty in the air - has entrances on Ngo Quyen Street and Ly Thai To Street. The children, i.e. my parents, uncle and aunt, had been dropped off at a different entrance. Aiya.

After all the needless excitement, our night at Le Beaulieu - a first-rate French restaurant whose head chef, Didier Corlou, has been called a "mad scientist" by the New York Times - more than matched up as a merry, mind-boggling culinary adventure.

The children aren't used to French food. I had to handhold them through the menu in Cantonese as a kindly kindergarten teacher might have. "These are entrees, and these are all the foods done traditionally, and these are all the same foods done innovatively...so this is salmon -" "I want fish -" "You want it in the traditional Russian or -" "Will there be rice?"

So first came the free entree: a ".........soup.........and salmon on a hot stone", said the waiter, drowning out the name of the soup with his accent. Is he a native of Hanoi? Ho Chi Minh City? Hao Binh? Was he speaking English? French-glish? Viet-glish? Heaven knows. The mystery soup looked like melted green ice cream. It was tasty, with a mystery seafood-y morsel in it which was fried and tasty, too. "Whatever that thing is, lip it up!" said my uncle.

Then came the entrees - foie gras, salmon and snails - we were all sharing. One of them looked like a UFO which had come all the way from Planet Kiwi, only to crash onto our table, spewing some of its green insides. We made giggly guesses. Ms N ate a bite of the UFO and identified it as a vegetable croquette with shelled snails inside it. On the far side of the dish, a fair limb was buried beneath some snails: a singular fried frog leg. My aunt, Ms N and I lipped it up.

Then came the mains. Beef and foie gras for the boys; a lovely, succulent lobster a la Tahiti vanilla and coconut for my mother; John Dory for my aunt; veal for Ms N; and duck and foie gras for me. (Guess which was my favourite main?) The mains were served with sides of brussel sprouts and potatoes in cheese. What scrumptious simplicity.

Last but not least, the desserts, including a soft cake which came under chocolate in the menu and was served in a bowl, beneath a candied canopy. We oohed and aahed at the artistry. Over our cacophony, a string quartet played on. Ms N and I went at the soft cake, which tasted of egg whites, and wondered where the chocolate was. Right at the end of the dessert, we realised the cake had been sitting in a white chocolate sauce all along. Monsieur Corlou, ladies and gentlemen.

US$40 a head was a steal for such fine food. Dinner at a decent French restaurant in Singapore could cost S$100 a head, sans foie gras. And above all, at Le Beaulieu, we learnt there was more to dining than devouring and paying - we learnt to pay attention.

LE BEAULIEU
Sofitel Metropole Hanoi
15 Ngo Quyen Street