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The Final Day:

I woke up bright and early at 6.30am and walked out with Anh Nam for a cup of coffee in the morning as we normally did for one last time. A lot of the neighbors came over to have a drink with us and kind of just say goodbye to me as they all practiced, for the first time, the little bit of English that they know. It was a nice and cool morning probably only about 80 degrees with clear skies, which is very unusual for Saigon as you normally cant see the blue sky as it is covered with a blanket of smog. The rest of the day we just kind of hung out and spent the last few hours with eachother kind of looking back on the past few weeks.

That afternoon (Saigon Time) Ngoc, Vicki and myself got packed and ready to head to the airport. We said our goodbyes with neighbors who were crying hysterically, at times, and they gave a words of wishes for our safe trip home. I remember thinking, man these are just he neighbors what is it going to be like with the family. Somehow we got all the luggage into the small Geo Tracker like car and we were escorted with a motorcade of mopeds to the airport by the family. We were only missing the sirens for the full effect.

We got to the airport and pretty much all the girls were crying saying, what I would imagine to be "we're going to miss you, come back soon...ect ect". We gave hugs to everyone, even myself, as the were my family too for the past month or so. With all the girls crying even us guys were starting to get a little teary from all the commosion going on.

"Anh Chin, you better take care of my xe honda (moped) while I'm gone. I'm going to need something to ride when I come back," I said to kinda break the tension of sorrow.

Everyone laughed. What a trip its been. Seriously I had so much fun there. Besides the fun, the most important thing that I got from the trip was probably seeing how others live and how living here isnt so bad. Infact the poorest people in America have it better than the average person in Vietnam. It really gave me a lot of perspective and I am glad I went.

We headed off to our dreaded 3hr flight to Taipei followed by a 1ohr flight back to SFO. All was well, EXCEPT for that little shit who cried half the way home 3 rows in front of me. GOD HELP ME!