When I lived in Saigon, I had an apartment downtown on Tu Do Street. I basically only slept there, because during the height of the war, we worked long hours and often didn’t come home for several days. But I had a really great maid that took care of the apartment and looked after me — as best she could. Rarely was I home for dinner and she seemed to “worry” that I wasn’t getting enough to eat. She would always ask in the morning if I would be home for dinner. I usually said no, but occasionally I told her that I might…. in those cases she always prepared a very good meal and always much more than I could eat. If I didn’t make it home for dinner when she was expecting me, she always left it all prepared for me to just heat it up.
On one occasion, I was “up country” for a few days and the day that I was returning, she was going to prepare dinner. Well, as was kind of normal back then, I didn’t get back until later than expected and an associate that I was traveling with suggested we go out for dinner when we returned. I told him that I was sure my maid had prepared dinner, so I invited him to my place — he accepted, and even though we were both dirty and tired from the trip, went to my place to have dinner. We had a couple of drinks and decided it was time to eat. We went in the kitchen and there was a pan on the stove with some big lumps of meat and some rice in it. I turned on the burner and sat the pan on it — my friend said he though it was supposed to be soup and we should add some water. I figured that it was some kind of meat over rice and we should just heat it… but — my friend convinced me, so we added some water and had another drink, or may three, until it was heated. We dished it out and it actually had a pretty disgusting taste — which I thought was unusual, because the maid was a very good cook. We both decided that we should just go out for dinner, or at least look around the kitchen for something else. We opened the oven door and there was a really good-looking casserole, or something that looked like a casserole. Anyway, we turned on the oven, had another drink, or three, and whatever she had prepared and put in the oven was really good — I think we ate all of it.
The next day, my maid was terribly annoyed with me and finally she told me that I had totally messed up her cat’s dinner…..
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🤣 great story!