Today we had a slow start again, not being sure what to do we decided to check out Little Saigon, the largest Vietnamese Community in the U.S., just down the street from Croc’s house. What we found was an abandoned shopping center, which hopefully looks abandoned because shops didn’t move in yet, otherwise it would be pretty sad. We went into one of the few shops there and tried beef jerky.
Next to the shopping center was another purely Vietnamese mall, this time not abandoned. We found strange shops selling endless amounts of bootlegged toys and another tiny arcade with a very busted but working DDR machine. I can’t say no to DDR of course, so I played a round.
We also tried our luck at the Pokémon card vending machine, but were out of luck since the machine was empty and got our money refunded at least. For lunch we pondered getting something at the food court, but since we couldn’t read anything and had absolutely no clue what anything was, we ended up going to “Saigon Kitchen”, which at least had an English menu and got some very tasty spring rolls and sugar cane juice.
Since we had some time until meeting with Mitti later, we went to a UPS store downtown to look for a box, since 2 pieces of luggage wouldn’t be enough for all the stuff we’ll bring back home. No luck sadly, since the store was already closed. We decided to walk around a bit downtown, giving me a chance to be nostalgic about 2010, when we were at FC in the Fairmont. I remembered every single place where we were, Henrieke didn’t, but apparently I’m one of the most nostalgic people on the planet. We walked through the Fairmont and past the Johnny Rocket’s where I first had some really tasty burgers in a 50s ambiente back in 2010, then back to our car. After some searching, we found Mitti’s place where we met up for an art jam. Kyell Gold and Kit came too and we went to have some really tasty Pizza at Pieology. We spent the evening chatting, playing Super Amazing Wagon Adventure and drawing. I fell asleep on the super comfy American carpet at the end, they really know how to make their carpets soft over there!
