Alisa

For the last week and a half, Scuppy has had about six little French kids to play with in the pool outside our rooms at the hotel. They are part of an extended French and Vietnamese family that comes back to Hue every year for a few weeks. We learned that two Vietnamese brothers in the family are martial arts experts who come back each year for competition and to visit some relatives. They married French women and so a large extended family has followed them, with the boys catching frogs in the garden, kids playing tag and marco polo in the pool, and a coiuple of the little girls like Alisa smothering Scuppy in attention. Scuppy picked up a little French as a result, with words like "au revoir" to add to her Vietnamese. Her alltime best buddy was Alisa, pictured here in an ao dai on her way out to a farewell dinner for part of the family heading back to France tomorrow.