(*) we walked out of the hostel and onto the crazy fucking urban insanity (urbanity) that is the hanoi street. we found an atm. it worked. thank god. i took out a whopping 1,000,000 dong. yep. i have to be honest with you. i've never held that much dong in my hand in one moment. it was a lot of dong for one man to hold. granted that was a ridiculous amount of dong in my hand, but it was even more dong for one man to have in his pocket. my pocket was exploding with dong. i hadn't had that much dong explode out of my pockets before. i love dong. lots and lots of dong. i had so much dong, i did not know how exactly i should handle all my dong. i could go on with dong. but i won't. oh, and 1,000,000 dong is approximately $62.50. it was like monopoly money.
(*) we (from here on out meaning myself, sabine, martin, and rudak) went in search for food. on the way, i bought a pink Hello Kitty towel. i needed a towel, as i had forgotten to pack that during the 25 minutes i was preparing in chicago for my trip half way across the world. yep - it took me 25 minutes to pack for a month and change halfway across the world. either i am professional traveler, or an idiot. your call.
so, i figured why go half ass ridiculous when i could go full blown circus clown ridiculous with the purchasing of a ridiculous towel for 20,000 dong. which is about $1.25. at this point, i'm scoring deals all over hanoi. the first food place was too western - i.e. i think it served hamburgers and pizza. f that. the 2nd place was non-existent. i have no idea what this means, but it is what i wrote in my journal, so it goes down. the 3rd place was too expensive. the 4th place served only fish. the fifth place was similar to the 3rd. at this point, i'm thinking its almost time for me to light up a cigarette as to chain smoke my way through this food adventure. but then, there it was: gourmet salvation. it was a place with small plastic, dingy kid's chairs and tables. the place only had 3 tables. it was no longer wider than 8 feet. i ordered a steak & green peppers plate with kick ass hot sauce. the first beer i had with the meal was called "hanoi beer" - it tasted like root beer. the 2nd beer i had, was much better. here is a picture of the family as we enjoyed dinner with ourselves.
the guy on the top left is Rudak. actually, i don't know what his name was. he traveled with us for a few days. he was an incredibly intense traveler. army boots, crewcut, willingness to go up to locals and invite them to lunch/dinner that he would pay for just so he could practice learning the local language - the whole 9 yards. the top right is martin. the bottom left is sabine. the bottom right is our israeli friend roy. i think his name was roy. eh. i forget. roy, if you're out there, is your name roy?
(*) reenergized & refreshed, we headed off to the lake in the middle of the city where we quickly learned the name of the survival game - walk INTO danger. when you're crossing a street in vietnam, you quite literally have to step into danger. the thing with vietnamese "rules of the road" are, well, they don't exist. the only thing red lights mean within this cramped city is to remind you that the color of blood is red, and that is what will be oozing out of your freshly cracked spine if you do not pay attention. from what i could finally understand, only cars stop at red lights. and being that cars make up 10% of the local vietnamese commuting alternatives, red lights really mean jack shit. i chose to swear there because a word of lesser profanity really does not come close to driving the point home. if you are ever crossing a vietnamese street, you need to cross at a steady pace as the local drivers will actually drive around you. it is when you hesitate or begin to walk quicker when you throw a motorbike driver. as the motorbike driver is encompassed by an ocean of other motorbike drivers piled on top of each other, one false move by a pedestrian sends a ripple effect of possibly disastrous consequences out towards the other unsuspecting motorbike riders.
so if you ever are faced with the prospects of it being your first time crossing a major intersection or street in hanoi, take my advice: close your eyes, and slowly put one foot in front of the other until you have reached the other end of the street.
(*) sabine is suckered into a picture with a woman carrying 2 bags of fruity + "authentic" vietnamese hat. it cost her & martin a bag of fruit. the small local scam is as such. all women wear the traditional hat featured in the far right of the photograph below of the ridiculous tourists. they asked ryan to take a picture of them, and laughing at my disdain for tourists such as these (it just rubbed myself & kristan the wrong way, and we could only explain it to you after 6 rounds of .12 Hanoi beer), i took out my camera & took a picture of them. the woman immediately said, "oh, you can take a picture of us." i told her i already had. moving on.
the women wearing those type of hats is carrying fruit on an enlarged scale lady justice hangs onto while deciding the fate of certain individuals. the one side is weighed down by fruit. they balance the scale on their shoulder as they walk around hanoi. there are certain ladies carrying this fruit which scopes out those white foreigners, such as us, wandering cluelessly around their beloved city. they stalk you, and then when the time is right, they come at you full force and insist on you taking a picture wearing the hat & carrying the scale. after you do so, they then insist equally as forcefully, if not moreso with their added ammunition of you getting a picture out of the deal, to buy their fruit.
moral of the story = if you are not hungry, skip out on this scam. if you are hungry, you can always get a serving of fruit with a side of a ridiculous tourist picture you can save for the rest of your life.
(*) kristan & myself decide we will travel to da nang & nha trang as our two cities between hanoi & saigon. this plan, like the majority of our trip, will not turn out as we first decided.
(*) and i'm quoting from my journal, "i bought 333 beer from running woman". i don't remember a woman running selling beer. "333" beer is a brand of beer in vietnam, much as PBR and Schlitz are brands of american beer. it was entertaining when kristan and myself were traveling with murtha because "3" in vietnamese = "bah" pronounced "bah". "beer" in vietnamese is "bia", pronounced "bee-ah". so when us 3 were together the first thing out of our mouths was "bah bah bah bia". this became even more entertaining after a few rounds. then after a few jacks it sounded like we had just puked their language out of our mouths.
(*) we walked around the lake at night & took a few pictures. i bought some batteries. took a few pictures. here is a small offering of both the lake @ night and an attempt to convey to you, my delightfully bored reader, what the reality of a hanoi intersection / street crossing escapade consists of.
(*) our attempt @ finding a bar lead us to "dragonfly". we did not know this at the time, but dragonfly would become our bar for the next 3 evenings in hanoi. it was a place with a foosball table. the place itself can somehow best be described half way between a crappy club and a crappier lounge with shite american pop music being played. that first night with our group of 5, we headed upstairs to the crappier lounge where the waitstaff was all but too happy to wait on us & practice their english. one thing the asian continent really does better than any other place in the world on a continuous basis, is how they deal with their customers. their customer service uber-owns all american attempted customer service. not only do they do offer you, the customer assistance, but shockingly and nauseatingly enough - they seem to actually enjoy being kind and nice to you. its quite a culture shock to my own personal experience of existing within, and interacting with, the various customer service sectors of the american economy.
up in the lounge we played "bonko", which us americans would know by the other common name "jenga". the happy hour was 2 for 1 hilada beers. i don't know who makes hilada beer, or where the vietnamese get the hilada beer, but for 15,000 dong for 2, it was a delightful deal. i had 3 rounds. talked with sabine. here is her beer infused biography:
she is a runner who tore her achilles heal, and broke her elbow and wrist. yes, she broke her elbow. i still am not sure if this is a medical possibility. she runs for a club team and wants to study sports economics. she once trained ten times a week, which she believes lead to her injury. she lives in the bavaria portion of germany, in a city pronounced the same as "foot". her city and the pronouncing of "foot" is same same, but different. its a suburb outside nurembourg. she works in nurembourg for adidas, which actually is pronounced ahh-dee-das in germany.
the chinese talker, aka rudak, left early.
here are a few pictures from the lounge.
after the boozing, we decided to walk home. the scariest / dangerous / exciting portion of traveling is walking home from a bar, wasted, in a foreign country, to your absolutely foreign home away from home half way across the world. but we got there, by the grace of god.
here is what our hostel looks like in the day.
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