Salty Plum Soda

Many things can be said about the Vietnamese: short, communist, rice paddies; but all my uncultured stereotypes aside we can perhaps add a new word to our Indochinese related vocabulary. Maybe, ingenious?

It seems that while the Western world is still fiddling with adding shots of vanilla and cherry to its sodas or vitamins and dyes to its water, the Vietnamese have taken it to an entirely new level by combining soda, salt, and fruit all into one remarkably vile beverage. A short while back some friends and I went to dine at a local Vietnamese restaurant which we heard was both generous with its portions and cheap on price. It turned out to be both, but what carried the day was not consumer economics but rather the restaurant’s drink selection. I originally purchased what we will, for lack of a better word, call a “coke” for a friend, but in the end we somehow all had a little bit of a taste of what is officially known as “salty plum soda.”

To be brief, it tasted like a mouthful of the Pacific Ocean. The plum, mostly dissolved, from what I could tell only served to give it the texture of what I imagine vomit mixed with mineral water would feel like. There was no hint of plum flavor, fruitiness, or even sweetness. Just the corrosive mixture of a couple table spoons of salt stirred in to your favorite carbonated beverage.
The waitress asked if there was something wrong with it. We told her it was fine as I imagine it tasted exactly like it was supposed to taste like. That being the worse liquid I have ever willingly put to my lips. I would gamble to guess that if it we stuck in an IV bag and stuck it into someone’s arm it’d cure what ails ya. No electrolyte problems too big with salty plum soda in the house. And perhaps that’s what it was intended for by its original creators so many generations ago: a third world treatment for hyponatremia. But beware the random bout of central pontine myelinolysis (http://www.emedicine.com/neuro/topic50.htm)! Or, perhaps, the Vietnamese just have weird tastes in horrible drinks.

The drink was a disaster, but like much of our third year of medicine it is the times of suffering that bring us together. After tasting the drink and paying the bill we all agreed to remain: best friends forever!