the first week

The past week has been great. After my stomach’s adjustment to chili sauce and noodles for breakfast, some kind of bean curd, and chicken foot soup among other things, Vietnamese food is not really gag-inducing most of the time. I definitely still have to get used to being served literally the entire chicken on a place; head, feet, liver and all. I’m craving cereal for breakfast. But I didn’t come here to eat fruity pebs every morning.
My family is super cool. The grandma lives with them and is constantly speaking full Vietnamese sentences to me, to which I just kind of shrug or smile. My brother’s 14 and the only one in the family who can speak English (thankfully there’s one person).
Today we went to the office of my mom where I was invited by the men to drink. After throwing down my first shot of whisky, they all gave me a thumbs-up and offered me more. Only the men at the table got to drink; women aren’t really expected to drink and in the cafes and bars you typically only see a table of men drinking. My friend Julia ordered a drink at a café once and they only served it to the other guy at the table and started angrily speaking in Vietnamese when she took the drink. There was a big dinner at my house when everyone at the table was drinking wine, though, so it depends.
The office was a company that makes prosthetic limbs and I learned that one of the men was a soldier in the “American” war and had lost a leg. My brother translated that he was happy that an American was coming to Vietnam, something that’s demonstrated by most of the people. They don’t seem to hold any grudges over the war, which is really impressive seeing as we killed around 2-3 million of them.