Feature: Vietnamese cling on traditional festival amid goods price hike

HANOI, June 3 (Xinhua) -- Sitting in a 4-square meter room of a boarding house with sheet metal rooftops, kidney patient Nguyen Thi Oanh was enjoying a bowl of fermented sticky rice on a scorching summer day.

The fermented sticky rice the middle-aged woman was eating is the most typical dish of "Doan Ngo" (Duanwu in Chinese) Festival, also known as Double Fifth or Dragon Boat Festival, which falls on the fifth day of the fifth lunar month in Vietnam. It is similar to the Chinese dish Jiuniang, a mixture of partially digested rice grains floating in a sweet saccharified liquid, with small amounts of alcohol and lactic acid.