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Havana, Cuba. – The Vietnamese have a symptomatic proverb, that turns them, perhaps, in the darest people in the world regarding cooking preferences, whether it is from the kingdom animal or the vegetable one.

The above-mentioned proverb says that everything that flies, except airplanes; everything that runs, except automobiles; everything that crawls, except railroad; and everything tthat sails and it is not a boat, is food for the human being.

For that reason, in any place of the you can find some restaurants of unusual specialties, as dog meat, the strangest birds or over-elaborated molluscs or batrachians.

But the most expensive restaurants in the Indochina nation are those with dishes made of snakes.

The Chinese taught them

In Hanoi there is a village of international fame, known as Le Mai and located fame in the peripheral district of Gia Lam, about 10 kilometers from downtown.

In "the village of the sneaks", as it is known popularly, there is an endless number of restaurants specialized in snake meat, but it is also the center of the most important breeders in Vietnam.

Villagers say that before they only raise reptiles to take them to Hang Buom Street, where there was a good Chinese clientele, and that those were who taught the Vietnamese to eat that kind of meat.

The Chinese, who also took snakes from Hanoi to Hong Kong, taught to the Vietnamese that cobra meat is very good for health, as well as the wine prepared from the essence of the reptile. Until they tasted it and they were convinced.

All kind of dishes

With only one snake you can make a soup, to make cracklings with the skin, their parts with small bones are used for stews, and the meat is decorated and cooked in many ways.

The worst thing in a dinner is to be chosen as the honor guest. The boa´s raw heart, still trembling, is brought to him to taste it with a snake liquor.

In the Vietnamese village of Le Mai they worship pythons, that has the divine gift of having saved the own youngest daughter of King Le Thanh Tong in the neighboring Thien Duc River.

According to the legend, it happened in times of the Le dynasty, in the fifteen century, on March13. For that reason in Le Mai takes place a traditional celebration in which the cobra dish outstands.