(PICTURE: We bought grapefruit from this lady a couple of times during the week.)
Huyen has one uncle who lives outside of HCMC. During the week we drove about an hour to go see him and to have lunch with him. On the afternoon before we departed HCMC, he drove into the city to meet us and to give Tet gifts for their family. There were basically two gifts: 1) a few million VND in freshly printed money. This is the traditional gift for elderly family members and little children during Tet. 2) 19kgs of grapefruits. For those who are metric-moronic like me, that's 42lbs. Yes, he gave us 42lbs of grapefruits to fly back to Hanoi with!!!!
Due to the last minute interview warning from the US government, we had to buy tickets that were twice the price of normal tickets. The one advantage of this is that we were allowed to check baggage (on our flight down we couldn't check baggage). We took full advantage of this and checked our 42lbs of grapefruits.
Now you might be saying to yourself, "Don't you have grapefruits in Hanoi?" Well, yes we do. However, the southern grapefruits are unarguably juicier and more delicious. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining at all about carrying 42lbs of grapefruits because a) I ended up eating about 20lbs of them b) It makes for a no brainer blog entry.
