Afterwork Snacks

Most of the time when I get home from work it's about 5pm and I'm hungry. But often my family doesn't eat until much later. I can never figure out what kind of snacks people eat, it seems like you just eat a lot at each meal and not at all in between, unless it's fruit, which my house doesn't have a lot of. So a few weeks ago I attempted asking my family if they had any ideas of something small and not too filling that I could eat as a pre-dinner snack. I suggested something like peanuts. They looked at me like I was crazy. Eventually Cô Sa (host mom) said she would get some cracker things for me, which she did and they've been just great.

Fast forward to two nights ago. It was just Cô Hue (house helper) and I at dinner and there was this peanut mix thing that you can put with your rice. Cô Hue and I struggle to understand each other most of the time, her Vietnamese being quite different than many other peoples and much faster. My Vietnamese on the other hand is just so bad that she never has any idea what I'm trying to communicate. At this meal though, we rather successfully talked about a few different things. One being that I think peanuts are "ngon" (delicious, the only word one uses to talk about food!). The next day when I got home from work she had made me a bowl of roasted peanuts! I'm not sure why a month ago what was a crazy idea is now perfectly normal, but I really appreciated it. Despite our sparse communication, and her sometimes intimating demeanor, Co Hue is a really sweet woman. It is moments like that where I feel like I'm a part of a family.