Play Date and Hanoi Hipster Friday

I don't know when the last time I had a play date was (excluding today)... But now I can safely say that at age 21, a junior in college, I had a play date today. Mind you, it took a little while for that element to become clear, but mark my words, it was a play date.

Two other guys on IHP are living with a family in Ha Noi that knows my host family, and last night it was arranged that they would come over today after class. They were unaware, and it was phrased to me as an invitation rather than a directive. This morning, I clued them in on the invitation. They called home and realized that participation in the planned play date was not optional, and my host brother Long sent a few texts to me during the day reminding me that we were meeting him after class.

We wound up going for some fried street food (chips, and I don't quite know what the other stuff is, though it is some kind of pork) with two of Long's friends from high school. Then came the fun part: getting back to my host home. Keep in mind that Long and I ride bikes to school every day (Long's school is a block or two from the Ha Noi School of Public Health), but Francis and Yoshi live much farther away and take the bus. This meant having them ride on the back of our bikes, which was attempted on an empty street, and didn't work. Yoshi and Francis wound up using a motor bike taxi to my host home, arriving a few minutes before I did on bicycle.

We ate a delicious dinner, and Yoshi and Francis realized just what I mean when I say Dung is trying to fatten me up... sooooo much food. It starts out a reasonable amount of food, and then new dishes come from the kitchen, and at some point you realize there's more food coming. After dinner they gave us some kind of fruit that looks like a big avocado when sliced, but tastes and has a consistency completely different from that of most fruit I am used to. Unfortunately my host family doesn't know the name in English of many of the native fruits we don't get in the States...

After dinner we drank tea and played cards for a while (a game called Attack/Defend), until their host family called my host family and Tang declared the play date over. It was a lot of fun, and it was cute how the Vietnamese host families arranged a play date for us youngsters. It would have been nice to know what was going on, but I gave up on that expectation back in Bushbuckridge, and everything works itself out.

In other news, Today was Hanoi Hipster Friday! which means nothing really, except some people in the class got a cake for HHF (the cake came from a tasty bakery across the street and cost 140,000 VND, or around 7 USD). It looks better than it tasted, but it wasn't bad, and was totally worth more than it cost in flavor and in meaning... Also, we walked past those cakes every single day, and it was really cool to finally have been part of a purchase of one (I think I gave the US equivalent of 50 cents to bring our cake dream to life).

Good night and good luck.