A big bowl of soup for lunch......

It's cool and cloudy out. It's a great day for heading out to one of my favorite Vietnamese restaurants for a lunch of hot jasmine tea, a cold roll, and a bowl of their "house special" soup: rice noodles, broth, vegetables, chicken pieces, and shrimp. As far as I can tell, it's closer to hu tieu than pho. (Sidenote: According to athenawindsong, pho uses beef broth and hu tieu uses pork broth, which answers a question I had earlier here.) The only drawback is that the waitress is a practitioner of Falun Gong (also known as Falun Dafa), and is quite eager to share the practice with me. It's probably something I should look into, but at the same time, I don't want to get in too deep with it.

Not all hu tieu is soup. "Hu tieu xao" is fried rice noodles.