From Mexico to Viet Nam

I am Deb
Deb in the City
wtf?
I feel so...shiny

World wide webs, please hear my desperate cry for help. OK, I am loving my new SoCal lifestyle, including my retirement to Champagne Village but I am really really getting fed up with my tiny responsibility, the reason I came here at all, The Child.

I want to stick with this job and all but she’s in a bad place. Her deadbeat dad is off globetrotting and I am here hung out to dry. But she’s just a little kid and so I went on a mission to try and broker peace with her. And I found what i was looking for in Old Town.

Fresh cactus, right on the bush but I did n't think it was right to just steal it out of the parking lot and I wasn't sure if it was the right kind.

So I headed to San Ysidro, down Mexico way. OK, it is fantastic there, and the streets are lined with stores that sell all things Mexican. I figured out a possible solution to my parent trap pretty soon in a fabulous supermercato.



Edible cactus, fresh and con espinosa, which I realized were a bit beyond my cooking skills. Ouchy. But lucky for La Gringa, safety cactus without the espinosa comes in a jar.

I cannot take the child to Guadalajara to see her father but I can bring a little bit of Mexico to her.

Wandering back north and once again taking the wrong exit, I ended up on the service road behind what turned out to be an entire strip mall that was Vietnamese. A huge beautiful supermarket awaited me there too, like a giant Ralph's but this one was full of all things Asian. Check out the instant noodle mesa.

And those were only the ones on sale. There is a whole noodle canyon down one aisle.

I wandered in the meat department which was huge and full of all parts of the animals. There were lots of feet.

They might want to consider calling it the Feet Department.



The produce section had all kinds of stuff I’ve never eaten.



This is a jackfruit. It looks so familiar to me, I have a feeling it must have been used as a prop on some low budget sci-fi movie I saw as a kid.

Lingering at the jackfruit I struck up a chat with an older asian woman, dressed casually for shopping. She was very shy spoke no English and I speak no Vietnamese.
She wore beautiful rings I tried to ask her about them but we only managed to exchange our names with the universal language of pointing. When she said her name was Fanny, in sort of husky voice, I realized she had not been born as Fanny but became her at some point.

Fanny the tranny. She gave me a sweet shy smile and took off. Jackfruit and Fanny, my strange, beautiful fruit of San Diego.

This is Deb in the City, surfing the diasporas, saying goodbye, adios and tam biet from San Diego, California