Won’t the Waves Crash on?

(Polish Mineral Water in Question)

    It’s been long since another blog has reached bay. By now I bet you’re begging for another water review to flood your feels. And boy do I have one for you. I’ve had the privilege of tasting Borsec, a polish mineral water that tastes straight from the caves 3/10☆.

    But alas, the semi-salty water reminds me of salt water I’ve had to wash my mouth with when it was bleeding, so I guess I have history with this kind of taste.

    While I was reading The Best We Could Do, I couldn’t help but feel personally connected while reading about Bo. Not because I experienced any of what he did, no… he just reminded me a lot of my own dad.

    Bo doesn’t look anything like my dad (or your dad either… Megan), but their childhoods had some parallels. When we were able to learn about the separate places that Bo and Ma had grown up in, I could see that contrast in my own parents. I visited my parent’s childhood homes while in Vietnam and my mom grew up in the heart of the city while my father’s home was more in a town where the roads were still made of dirt.

(I bet this water would kill the river fish)

    He used to enlighten me about swimming in the rivers for fun when he was young, just because I never learned to swim myself. A sort of “when I was your age…” kind of sentiment.

    My father was five when the Vietnam War ended, and I have never really asked about what kind of things he experienced. Maybe he’d have been too young to remember, or too reserved to reveal such things about him. I don’t even know where he works because he rarely ever brought that up.

    After peering into parts of his childhood and seeing how he grew up to be an unforgiving parent like Bo at times, really helped me to understand that he was also forced to toughen up when he was young.

    It was interesting hearing “Bo” be used for the word dad in Bui’s book, when I’m so used to calling my own dad by “Ba”. I guess that’s just one of the many things that makes theirs lives different from each other. Even if I couldn’t help but see how much they were alike.