My Costco

(PICTURE: I'm bananas!)

One of the tried and true facts of life is that when you go home to visit your parents, you always end up leaving with more than you came with. Whether it be a few bucks in your pockets (my dad always gives me $20 before I fly back to whichever city/country I'm leaving in), Tupperware full of sweets or a case of ____ that mom bought too much of at Costco.

Well, the same holds true for visiting parents in Vietnam. Every time we go back to Huyen's house in Ha Nam, we end up with motorbiking home with a lot of extra food. This past weekend we got a sack of local rice, a pumpkin, a bottle gourd and a heck of a lot of bananas. Getting the bananas was truly a Costco-esque experience because Huyen's parents had A LOT of bananas. They had chopped down a banana stalk from their "front yard" (really just a sliver of land across the road from their house) and told us to take some bananas back with us. In order to get the bananas, Huyen's father had to basically chip them off the stalk with a machete and a hammer:

(PICTURE: Huyen's dad chopping part of the banana stalk. The original stalk weighed probably 60 lbs.)

After all the chopping was done, we had ourselves a bunch of bunches of bananas: