Birthday Celebration - "I'm feeling 22"

It was Thang's Birthday a few weeks ago as he turned 22 this year. We had a party with a few people from the church and their families. It was a lot of fun! One of the branch presidents in Hanoi has two kids and they are very smart and a lot of fun. The photos below are of me braiding their daughters hair and we played Barbie's. We ate dinner using a hot pot, we had so much food! It was all very delicious especially the mushrooms! We had shrimp, pork, many vegetables, tofu, noodles, and so much more! I'm going to miss Vietnamese food when I leave, it's all so fresh!  Also going to be so weird not eating with chopsticks!

Of course we had cake to sing to Thang for this birthday and so amazing ice cream that a family made from my branch. They have some really good ice cream with some very new and exciting flavors like black berry and cinnamon. This night I did learn more Vietnamese words because one lady is an online English teacher and helped me so much! This language is very hard but it's starting a little bit to make more sense.

Fruits

Hers is an example of one of the women who sell fruit by the side of the road. This picture was taken in Long Bien. There are so many of these stands along the road with women that sit out here all day, everyday, selling these fruits.

The fruit here is very fresh and delicious! I'm in love with dragon fruit and mangos, I have them every morning for breakfast. There are a lot of fruit stands but also stores that look like the photo below of women selling fruit.

They have a fruit here call Durian or the king of fruits. The size of this fruit is bigger than a watermelon and is spikey.  It smells really disgusting like bad body odorn which is why a lot of foreigners don't like it at all. I have found that people either love it so much or they can't even stand the smell of this fruit.  I tried it in a yogurt mix which isn't as strong as eating the actual fruit but I though it wasn't the best or the worst things I have tasted. However I didn't like how the taste stayed in my mouth hours after eating it.