The cooking class outside Hoi An

Mrs Thu has been cooking for most of her life, but she only started teaching other people five years ago. Her small cooking school is in a village just outside Hoi An, a town that attracts huge numbers of visitors every year. Each morning, a minibus brings eight or ten tourists from their hotels to her house, which is surrounded by vegetable gardens.

The session always begins at the market. Mrs Thu guides the group between the stalls and explains what each thing is: different kinds of herbs, fresh rice noodles, fish sauce in large plastic bottles. Many visitors have never seen some of these ingredients before. She encourages them to smell and taste everything, and the sellers, who know her well, are happy to let them try.

Back at the house, the real work begins. Everyone gets an apron, a chopping board and a sharp knife. In about three hours, the group prepares four dishes, including fresh spring rolls and a noodle dish that is famous in the area. Mrs Thu does not use written recipes. Instead, she shows each step slowly and asks everyone to copy her, which leads to a lot of laughter and a few strange-looking spring rolls.

According to Mrs Thu, the cooking is only part of the experience. What visitors remember most is sitting together at a long table and eating what they have made. 'For many of them, it is the first time they have eaten in a Vietnamese home,' she says. 'They leave with a much better impression of our culture than they get from a restaurant.'

Running the school is not always easy. Tourism depends on the season, and during the rainy months she sometimes has no guests for weeks. Still, she has no plans to stop. She enjoys watching people from Germany, Korea or Brazil learn to roll rice paper for the first time. In her view, food is a simple way for strangers to understand each other, even when they do not share a language.