Hello, all--I guess I've been feeling a bit guilty about complaining about losing umpteen shoes to the dogs next door (Lord,) bless those dogs and their itty bitty teeth!). Any way, I've been thinking of so many blessings. One of them has been the situation with food.Not only has the food overall been great, but I am VERY thankful for our helper who does most of the marketing and cooking. My experiences at the market have shown me what a hard job it would be to have to find all the food for the meals at the grocery (it's harder than I anticipated to find things, and then to find them marked in English so you know what you are getting), then to prepare it in kitchen, which has no direct air access, and all the clean-up every day.

Bee has been trying out her version of American cuisine. We have had spaghetti with meat sauce (mostly meat, diced tomatoes, and garlic), hamburgers (each burger was about as round as 1/2 deck of cards and three times as thick); "fruit salad" which contained no fruit but was a delicious garden salad; potato salad which consists of mayo, boiled potatoes, carrots and some kind of green veggie I only met since we've been here; and today...french fries which were...perfect french fries. I am amazed that she works so hard to please us. I hope that I would be as gracious to someone from another country that I had the opportunity to cook for.I have been surprised that I now enjoy fish here, even if it does look at me from the plate.

Any meal we share with Vietnamese people has one hilarious note...the minute I pick up my chopsticks, the host JUMPS up and runs for a spoon. I guess they think I'm going to hurt myself. And I thought I was doing so well...Another milestone today...we have a book of Vietnamese phrases and I have been trying to read some things to our friends and see if they can understand my message. Today, our friend Linh actually understood me! My first intelligible statement in Vietnamese was "Taxi, do you know the way to the airport?" We laughed and laughed--she got it! Better go.