Yesterday we went out to Vietnamese with Chu, Grace and Bryan. We thought they were going to take us to a new restaurant, but really, they took us to a mall.
A Vietnamese Mall.
We sat down in the food court and Grace took Alicia to several different shops and ordered different items from each place. Now, I know you're thinking - Mall food sucks. Well, American mall food might suck, but Vietnamese Mall food does NOT. It was amazingly fresh and DAMN GOOD.
We were a little out of our element, but it was somehow oddly familiar to that feeling we had from traveling / living in Asia. How awesome is it that they have such a large community of Vietnamese out here that they made a MALL entirely focused on them! Yeah, cities have "China-town" and "Japan-town", "Little Italy" and the like, but those are really areas or neighborhoods where people of similar ancestry gathered and lived, set up shops and generally communed. This is a MALL built specifically to service the Vietnamese population of the area.
Somehow it struck me as significant because out here in the Bay Area white people are kind of a minority. I mean - not really, but when you've grown up in the mid-west where whites are definitely the majority, it's a nice change to have such a solid mix of the world here. I think people are used to there being a "China Town" in a city simply because 1/6 of the world population is Chinese. There is going to be a Chinese group formed anywhere and everywhere. It's a given. But it's not every place that has a large enough Vietnamese population to warrant a mall devoted to their shopping pleasure.
I like that. There's a Vietnamese MALL here.
Anyways - on the drive back, I needed to get on the highway heading South and somehow we started saying "South, baby. SOUTH!" Over and over with gusto. We were just messing around, but Bryan has turned into a little tape-recorder at the wee age of two and MAN was he funny repeating us. He had so much fun saying "South, baby. SOUTH!" That he just kept saying it over and over all the way home.
We had fun.
1 comment:
Vietnamese food is also easily vegetarian friendly... which makes it an ideal candidate for a quick bite.
As for Bryan, we literally have to watch what we say and what we see on TV... or else there'd be no stopping on him picking up something and repeating it till the end of the world...
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