The story that I came to know can be traced back to the point when a young Vietnamese man named Francis who fled his country during the Vietnam War. He settled in Germany and learned to be a chef. Decades later, he came back to Vietnam and started this school.
He named it after a Catholic priest, Father Maicen (from Czechoslovakia, I believe), who came to Vietnam and started a Salesian school, which Francis attended before he became a refugee.
The Salesians is a Catholic order started by Don Bosco, to serve the underprivileged youths in Italy more than a hundred years ago. I happened to attend a school run by the Salesians in Hong Kong, before I went to the USA to study on a scholarship offered by an American university.
This is perhaps why the bistro that the school runs offers both Vietnamese and German cuisine. And this is why our family had Vietnamese and German food for breakfast this morning. Both excellent.
We visited a number of places during the day, much of it about the war. Just when we were getting into our homestay place at around 9 pm, we were interrupted by a Vietnamese man. He turned out to be the Grab driver who took us to the homestay from the airport the day before. He came to return a water bottle he found in his car after he dropped us off. It turned out the water bottle was not ours. But the driver’s kindness touched us greatly.
We encountered so many good people in one day. We feel so blessed.
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