No doubt...Sài Gòn is the place to be. You can go shopping, eat, bar hopping, get mugged by people on motorbikes in the middle of the night, pretty much everything you can do back at home in the states but 10x better. Because underage drinking makes everything even better. LOL.
I also met chị Hoang-An--my now adoptive chế. hehehe. We were pretty much spoiled. We got a nice ass hotel, free breakfasts, bomb-ass food, some True-Religions---you name it but the three missing parts of this experience was Chị Mốc, Lena and Thầy Gerard.
After thirteen years, I finally got to see my cousin, chế Ngọc, again. I remember when I was seven, my family and I were staying at my aunt's house for a few days while we were in Cần Thơ. When the electricity in the neighborhood went out, my brother was playing games on the computer. He got so scared that he leaped from the desk to the bed but he fell short and his head hit the bedframe and split his eyebrow (a little above the forehead). We called for a taxi and drive him to the hospital because he was bleeding pretty heavily and needed stitches.
Besides her giving me these puppy figurines from her room. I remember growing up, every one called her lazy. ). I wanted to ask her about our family history but she didn't know much. The sad thing was that what she knows about our family history was what she heard from the children of our family friends that she hung out with. She told me that the only time she saw or talked to grandma was when she would come over to bring her food that my aunt had just prepared.I didn't really know her much, but as I learned this time around, she started her own business selling bedding and mattresses in Sóc Trang (my mom's hometown). After a long conversation with her, I think that she's grown to appreciate more of what she has and longingly regrets the fact that she was not so close with the family.
I think that a lot of this has to do with the fact that she was heavier than most girls in Vietnam and she also grew up without parents as my aunt passed away of cancer and my uncle died of depression not long after my aunt's death, leaving my cousin with one older sister in Vietnam and another in California.
A lot has changed since I was last in Cần Thơ. Apparently the house that my aunt own is located on property that the Vietnamese government plans on taking to widen the roads, thus many resident in that area now lease their home and are afraid to do any renovations to the house as it might be teared down. A lot has changed, the circumstances has change, but all in all Cần Thơ is still my home and I love it, despite the night life and places to go and things to do. I enjoyed being in the little comfort of home.
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