Souvenir Belly

I’ve been away for the last three weeks. I visited my parents and put on 5 kg in 5 days. My mam was secretly feeding me chocolate on a drip, perhaps hoping that I would be too fat to leave the house. Then I went to Vietnam and lost the 5 kg by drinking dodgy water – oh, the slimming benefits of poor sanitation!
There were no chocolate drips in Saigon. All the ladies around me were slim and elegant in their traditional silk Ao Dai. That is until I got to the airport for the flight back to Melbourne where a mob of Caucasians had gathered in the departure lounge, all dressed in tracky bottoms and spare tyres. Many of these fashion fatalities had on the unnecessary conical hats that they had haggled for in the Chinese markets, clearly trying to be streetwise. Those hats will no doubt come in useful when these people get back to working in the rice fields of Collins Street.
Souvenirs generally annoy me. Partly because the word is difficult to spell, but also because they take up too much space at the back of wardrobes. If all the unworn sombreros and fishermen’s pants from all the wardrobes of the world were gathered up, the space created would be big enough to make a giant incinerator theme park where tourists could burn the sarongs and batique clothing that they once thought they would actually wear.