from the line over into our window. this guy was smooth. i had no idea he had any intention of cutting us, until he had his head fitting UNDERNEATH the small glass enclosed window separating the ticket woman from the waiting ticket purchasing public.
the thing about all asian countries, with a particular focus on china and vietnam, is that the locals have no idea what a "queue" is. in fact, the chinese government has had to spend money on some type of program and announcements where they explain to the chinese public, with the olympic beijing games coming up in the very near future, what exactly a "queue" is, and they have to respect the position of the person in front of them.
i couldn't help but comment on how much cleaner and saner this train station was
----------> this is going to be awesome - i always screw things up when i say this
in post-journal analysis, i have no idea what that above arrow means.
----------> when we told a married woman, "you're beautiful"
----------> dudes ate gravel - 2 of them - while making a turn on the scooter. the guy in front had absolute roadrash all over his face. just another reason why there is no chance in hell i will be renting a motobike in vietnam
---------> a guy attempting to travel down a road which had a decline of 45 degrees, was not fortunate in his attempted descent. he crashed his bike, and the goods that had been piled and neatly chaotically efficiently packed on his bike, were all over the street.
(*) i found my pencil in my shoe. literally. i had lost my pencil, but then i checked my shoe, and there it was. only more physical evidence as to why asia is much better than any weekend at vegas.
(*) we bought train tickets to danang, but we could not buy any future tickets. the tickets cost 1,000,000 dong. myself & kristan got our money together, and could immediately be seen grinning from ear to ear as we held out 1,000,000 dong; much of this currency made of 10,000. we purchased something for 1,000,000 something. regardless of the currency used, it blew us both away that we were able to afford anything which had the label of 1,000,000. this doesn't seem impressive to you? fine. fair enough. guess you had to be there. but let me ask you this - have you ever held 1,000,000 of anything in your hands, minus balls of clay or granules of dirt? yeah. figured as much. game. set. match. and i'm moving on.
(*) on the walk back towards the hostel, we bought egg rolls (which were amazing) and bread, and then walked over wet cement on accident. so forever will our footsteps on some random sidewalk of hanoi be forged within the concrete heart of that city.
here is a picture of the egg rolls that are served to you on tree leaves as plates:
(*) back to the hostel. checked the internet. no word from the germans. went to a travel agency to see if we could buy tickets for the train. this travel agency was the main one at the downtown central intersection which was right aside to the lake. it was an extra $5 U.S. dollars for commission to purchase the train tickets in advance, unlike what we were able to do at the train station. this convenience charge was worth the convenience & peace of mind as the weekend over which we were traveling was the vietnamese new year. we then went and talked to a self-proclaimed "traditional girl" - she did not go to clubs. ironically enough, later on in the evening myself & kristan would run into miss "traditional girl" at dragonfly. even better, the only reason she was there, was because of her acceptance of an invitation extended by zee germans later in the day. haha. we totally got stonewalled by a local vietnamese woman. the score at this point was americans = 0, vietnamese female population = 1. after our invitation was rejected, zee germans ran into the tourist agency. we chatted quickly & told them we would meet up with them at the bridge running from the coast of the lake to the small little island in the middle of the lake, at 2.
(*) kristan & myself went to the bridge at 2. we took pictures of the ridiculous looking latinos on the bridge. this picture is so good, and so ridiculous, i need to show it again.
we also took a picture of a random local vietnamese individual holding a turtle the size of a quarter. we weren't sure what he was doing with the turtle. he would just wander back and forth this 25 foot long, 4 foot wide bridge, asking anyone he came into contact - the majority of which were foreign travelers - if they wanted to look at or touch the turtle. and he didn't even ask us for the usual pocket shrapnel as admission to viewing his small world inside his hand. it was odd.
$.50 got us on to this island. it was, quite simply, a small temple with a huge dead turtle. legend has it, as does the hanoi scientific community (which may be one of the same), that there are the world's largest freshwater turtles living in the lake we were standing within in the middle of hanoi. that's difficult to believe not only because it never ceases to amaze me the oddest things local vietnamese would take pride in, but because of the inability to view a few centimeters into the depth of the lake. with the garbage and other forms of sewage resting upon top of the water, it was amazing anything lived in there at all - let alone turtles that were supposed to be something like 10 feet long. i wanted to push sarge in there, just to see how violently sick he would get, and prove once and for all the freshwater of the lake ain't (yes - ain't - not "is not" or "cannot possibly be as") that fresh.
while taking the 15 minutes to walk around the "island" in the middle of the lake - if you ever get the chance by the way just skip paying the $.50 admission and spend it elsewhere - ok that's a bit cycnical - it wasn't that bad - enough with the hyphen use - we ran into Rufus. seems as if zee germans ditched us. so kristan, rufus, and myself headed out to the prison museum, aka the Hanoi Hilton. on the way, we stopped at "Happy Guy's" restaurant. that was not the name of the restaurant. well, it could have been. we don't know what his restaurant's name, as we never could understand vietnamese. the point is, that was the nickname sarge gave to him after realizing how truly, truly, truly, truly happy this guy was that we, for i can only tell, had the courage to try and eat at his "restaurant".
look at this place:
that's the "restaurant" and that's Happy Guy in the background. we never did manage to get a picture of Happy Guy's wife - but that may have been b/c when we arrived at the restaurant, she had just gotten out of the shower in the back, and had come to serve us water or something - whatever it was being relatively insignificant - running out of the shower wearing jeans, a t-shirt, and a towel wrapped around her head. nothing necessitating such customer service, i assure you.
and if you think we were shitty with the doling of nicknames, then take a look at this picture. happy guy and rufus. game over.
here is one of the first pictures that will give you a relative feeling for the traditional, usual, hey-family-lets-go-out-to-eat-tonight vietnamese dining out experience. when i first wrote of KFC being high class, ironically, that was exactly what i meant.
at Happy Guy restaurant, i have never seen a man so happy, so hyper, and so content to serve 3 dudes chicken soup. which is what we ate. and let me tell you - it was the most delicious chicken soup i had in vietnam. not for its secret ingredients, although who knows what the guy added to the soup or forgot to take off from the chicken / rooster / hopefully it was some type of foul. it wasn't the extra beer he brought out to our table despite us asking for 3 - rufus laid off the sauce for the entirety of the trip. and i congratulate him for physically acting out that which my liver had begun to yell at that point. but what made it so absolutely delicious was the extra dose of TLC that man & his wife put not only into our soup, but the doling out of our beer and hot delightful tea for desert at the end of the meal.
after all of that, for which we paid maybe $4 - total - for all 3 of us - we left the "restaurant" giving the husband & wife team a firm handshake, silent bow, plenty of english and vietnamese gutted thank yous, and any other form of conveyance of thanks. then we had the delight in finding the museum closed at 4:30 and with the current time being 4:40, once again our ways had caught up with us eventually in vietnam. we hadn't planned a god damn thing, and once again we were late.
(*) the beautiful thing of traveling is, well, screw it. we never had a plan really to begin with, so there is no need to "change plans". instead, you just make a new plan. again. so we did. with the firebreathing motherfucking puppets playing at 5, i figured this would be a perfect opportunity to expose kristan to some culture, some fire, and some way to digest our food before drinking was to begin shortly. rufus said we couldn't make the trek back around the other side of the lake by the fire puppets in the 20 minutes allotted to us by the scheduling gods. we made it there at 4:58.
slowed down by the (a) non-queing sharky little bastard i failed to box out from the ticket office and (b) the currently slowly paying customer who couldn't figure out the correct amount of vietnamese paper currency, we got 2 aisle seats. this performance was much noisier than the first showing i was originally at. for either this reason, or b/c all the mystique of the firebreathing motherfucking puppets had gone up in blackmarketed vietnamese fireworks, i wasn't as intrigued by the performance.
here's a picture of the firebreathing motherfucking puppets, minus the fire. you'll see all the musical players up and to the left of the stage. those individuals also provide the voices. the puppets act on the main stage - the water.
(*) after the show, we traveled back to the hsotel to meet up with zee germans. they were to go again to the night market, and then martin was going to meet up with a german female friend of his who was traveling through Hanoi at the one and only - dragonfly. so while zee germans were at the night market, myself & rk needed something to do before we went to the bar. well, considering we knew of the best beer special in all of hanoi, and perhaps the entire civilized world - .15 cent beer night - we decided going to drink at the "Fam's Restaurant", before we would go meet up with people to officially drink at Dragonfly later in the evening, was only sensible. we stopped at the bakery bearing the infamous yellow sign before we went to Fam's Restaurant so we could have some food, i.e. delicate french-vietnamese pastries, in our stomach as a base before we would start drinking for multiple hours.
the "restaurant" we went to was Fam's restaurant. it is not actually a restaurant. well, it is. but it was way too expensive for our taste. it was like $4 a person to eat all the meat you could handle. yeah. so when you're paying .50 for noodles, and .15 for beer, you're talking dinner of 21 beers, including gratuity. so when we went there, we would always go to a table, sit down, and just drink beer, while some other customers ate, and most snacked on what was left from the meat buffet on their table. drinking however was the common denominator for all guests.
here we are at our usual table.
Fam's Restaurant is short for Family's Restaurant because sarge & myself eventually discovered it was all run by the same family. our guess is that Sarge ran the place. please note this woman, Sarge, took Sarge's name before Sarge knew his name was Sarge. so to prevent any future confusion, Sarge will stand for Sarge whereas female Sarge will refer to the woman who owned Fam's Restaurant. Female Sarge never smiled. that's why her nickname was brilliant. i'm guessing, and this could be completely stereotypical but sarge & myself think we have a basis to make such what seems to be a politically unpopular statement - we think female sarge was part of the north vietnamese who, only 25-30 years ago, had just finished shooting at people who looked exactly like myself & sarge. she never served us - her sister, who we are guessing is the american equivalent of matre'd or however the hell you spell it or a restaurant manager, always seated us & would always talk to us. i would catch female sarge at times simply staring at us.
and the final reason is that here is a picture of the fam from fam's restaurant.
you'll meet the remainder of these characters from the fam later, but notice for now, the woman on the far left. that is Sister - no creativity points for the nicknamers on her, we know. but who is painfully missing from this photograph is Female Sarge. that's cause at first, she refused to get into the group picture. even with the entirety of her family attempting to waive her into the picture - both Sister and the younger females of the family doing so - she refused to do so by simply frowning at the rest of the family and kristan & myself. 4 days of drinking at her restaurant, and after a good old fashioned communal fascist cultural stereotyping enhancing drink from the communist keg of the restaurant - which will be explained more fully in the next day's journal entry as i can foresee the future - i eventually got this van gogh of a picture portrait with Female Sarge. check it out america. i could make a crack about how if you are anywhere between the ages of 40-60 and fought in vietnam, you may way want to skip the next picture, but i won't. because this experience changed my perspective on social interactions and relationships overall.
here's Female Sarge:
notice Sister on the left hand side of the picture laughing her ass off. she loves the fact that i managed to get a picture with Female Sarge and that, what's more, Female Sarge is almost ALMOST cracking a smile. my perception of human interactions and relationships became fissured, fractured, and reformed after that picture because i realized no matter how truly, for lack of a better precise phrase based in the english language, how truly fucked up something can be between two individuals of completely differing geographical locations, genders, skin colors, governments, and religions - people can still share the same space and truly enjoy one another.
despite my being from half way across the world, male, white, capitalist, young, and a symbol of a regime that to her, within her recent history, was (in her view) responsible for the murdering and torturing of her family & friends - we were not only able to get along in a completely civil fashion for 4 days, but in the end we were able to share a smile in each other's presence.
i always idealistically believed such crap as i wrote in the above paragraph, but until i got into that situation, i never actually realized how so many of the barriers which supposedly exist that prevent people from interacting with each other in a harmonious fashion are placed there by certain hierarchies in society - whether they be government based, economically based, or politically based. when it comes down to it, despite being unable to speak the other person's language minus a word or 2, i came out of that interaction with a positively life changing experience. huh.
getting back to the non-existent completely made-up point, we arrive at Fam's Restaurant. the, we would later learn, 19 year old daughter drops off 2 beers as we sit @ our table. its the 2nd night there, and she already knows what we want. sarge cracks a joke about going to the same bar in his neighborhood in LA for a year straight, and only recently have they figured out he enjoys a newcastle. we toast the local veitnamese guys, who seem to be our age, across from us several times. they looked much like a group of us would at a bar directly after work on a friday in the states. 4 to 5 beers later, we leave to use the pisser at the hotel, then we head to Dragonfly.
we walk through the night market, again. this time our steps are slightly more in tune with the speed and fluidity of the market. plus, there was no jackhammering going on - as such, our concentration could be placed more squarely on the job ahead of us - which was getting through the pedestrian traffic - instead of the questions of, "what the fuck are they doing jackhammering at 11pm at night?". we arrive @ dragonfly. the night has just begun.
(*) martin & sabine meet us there a bit later. sarge & myself get there for happy hour. we buy 4 rounds each of halida for a total of 8 beers. remember, at dragonfly happy hour its buy 2 halida for 15,000 dong - i.e. buy one get one free. so we walk to the back of the bar & to take care of business, and order 4 a piece.
its odd. in vietnam, there is no limit to the specials. normally if you go to a bar in the states, and a bar has a special - say $2 jack & cokes - when the normal is $4, there is a limit. usually, you can order 1, maybe 2, jack & cokes at a time. not in vietnam baby. they give more power to the paying customer - its a beautiful exercise of capitalism in honor of communal ideas. we had the waitress bring over $8 for 8 beers in a relatively classy vietnamese club in a relatively classy portion of hanoi. that type of heaven doesn't occur in chicago. and the only time it does, not that i don't love these places, but they are usually called "dives". trust me, i love dives. but it is just so odd to have that same type of price mixed with the atmosphere and customer service theology of a nice chicago club. as per the rest of our trip - simply mindblowing.
after the beers were all laid out on our table, myself & sarge got involved in a foosball game of vietnam versus the usa. we won the game. don't worry america - we fought for you. the most entertaining portion of the evening occurred when a song by the illadelphia hip-hop group "the roots" came on called "the seed". being as myself & sarge were already somewhat charged with our drinking at the Fam Restaurant, i was happily transported in some way to a even further soul removing trip of nostalgia to my undergrad days where hours were spent listening to music from a crap boomboox while playing foosball and talking shit to some of my best friends.
becoming lost in the moment, i took the time to take my hands off the game (i was playing defense, sarge was providing the offense) and lit a cigarette. hey, i admit, we were playing with confidence. at the end of the cigarette, i admit i was a bit too focused on the song's bass line, wailing guitar, crashing symbols, and effortless lyrics - i shot from the back row & in the process flipped my cigarette to sarge's 3 man - for you non-foosball players out there i flipped my cigarette almost into the other team's goal.
with "you idiot" being shouted by my alter-ego at my own brain repeatedly, sarge calmly picked up the cigarette, gave it back to me, and i continued to smoke it, in between laughing and kicking ass.
here are a few pics revolving around the infamous dragonfly's foosball table:
team usa versus team vietnam action shot. notice the size of the crowd.
we were both surprised to find such a nice table in vietnam. later, sarge would ruin one. that will be discussed later.
this is what opponents saw of team usa. this is also, most of the time, what team usa saw of team usa.
more team usa versus team vietnam. team vietnam, and its fan, definitely gets the edge however on fashion.
(*) vietnam's team B played next. they did not want to pay for drinks, but just for fun. respek'. so we played. and we won. after the 2 glorious wins, we at this point just wanted to find techno / electronic music. sabine made the call, which would later go down as the call of all calls, to go to "Q Club". since it was to far to walk, i made the next call of all calls, and decided the group should take a motorbike. sarge & myself got onto the old man's bike which kept sounding like it was bottoming out. sarge was sitting in between myself & the old man - i laughed then, but eventually i got the same seat in sweet karmic fashion on the ride home. we fell behind the motorbike of sabine & martin because the guy's bike's battery died. we think it died. we're actually not sure what the hell happened. the only thing we know for sure is that as the scooter raced its way through the hanoi streets, the dashboard's light all began to blink in unity, and the motor went to a top speed of maybe 3 mph. after a few moments, a few vietnamese swear words, and a few kicks to the side of his own hog, we were back, and throttling through the streets of vietnam to meet back up with zee germans at "Club Q".
here is a dangerous picture taken - dangerous b/c sarge may not be using any hands to stay on the bike, and we have both taken our eyes off the road & left our lives with the motobike driver. never a smart thing to do. this is a picture of 2 men on the brink of death.
we were dropped off far from where we usually traveled within hanoi at a 5 star hotel. we walked to ornately decorated hotel's bar - i felt like i should have taken my shoes off before i walked into this mega hotel - only to find a violinist & a pianist. not necessarily the "house music" sabine's german travel guide to hanoi referred to. after giggling amongst the 4 of us like little school girls, we were punched in the face with the reality that (a) this place was far too classy for our kind and (b) club q had to be around here somewhere. we asked reception, who pointed us out the doors (obviously), to the right, and past the pool. like idiot meandering backpackers, we followed the directions as literally as possible.
we passed an extremely long swimming pool - which we would later learn is the longest swimming pool in all of vietnam - and arrived at the front door of "club q". it looked gorgeous from the outside - it was softly lit and extremely inviting.
we walked through the front door and were immediately hit smack in the face by the vacancy of the entire place. already sabine is getting a shit eating grin from myself b/c we told her she could make this decision - but that all its consequences would fall on her shoulders. like the brave person she is, she was willing to subject herself to the sarcastic and often times irrational torture of the linquistically cunning americans.
we sat down @ the bar and ordered 55,000 baht "333" beer. yes. 55,000 "333" beer. yes, those are the same beers we purchased on the street for 8000 baht. we were officially in a tourist trap. sabine gets shit eating grin #2. there's a straight faced bartender & one cashier. and for all of the club's elegance, its most important and expensive drinks, some Louis the Sometingth, rests on a rolling room service cart. nice. you stay classy hanoi.
after all this hits and infiltrates my brain, i get to next concentrate on the music. at least god let there be descent house music. what's that? wait? what? nice. shit eating grin #3 shot @ Sabine. a celine dion love song. this was entertaining for multiple reasons - but for the icing on the irony cake - fast foreward to the chapter entitled "Indian Sings Mekong Delta Karaoke" if i have already written that.
with 3 shit eating grins shot @ sabine by sarge & myself, the shit talking began. then the dance floor came to life with some sort of neon light system underneath the glass dance floor. i looked around one final time, and there was not another soul in there. i would be willing to bet if reviewed upon a mathematically correct farmer's almanac, this was a thursday or friday night. maybe even saturday night. so we were not completely out of our minds for expecting some company this evening. however, it seems "club q" may not be the hanoi hotspot we imagined.
i needed to take a piss, so i explored. i walked up to the 2nd floor where i saw 4 rooms total. behind door #1, i found a man & a woman with a blue cocktail dress cuddling on thee couch. door #2 was marked "dj room". at least they spelled room correctly. go them. behind door #3 was nothing. you would not wanted to have chosen that one if you were on "lets make a deal" - a game show not given the full respect of which it was ever due. door #4's window provided the vision of a woman in a cocktail dress singing karaoke while within a man's embrace. "Odd" is all i remember thinking at that point. just that word. actually, it was more of a, "well, that's fucking odd." no pisser on this floor. down to floor numero uno. found a bathroom with suddenly an old white guy in there.
upon walking into the bathroom, seeing this old white guy, and seeing this old guy seeing me seeing him, i laughed out loud. for any male, you understand why this is unsettling. for those of you of the female persuasion, i'll let you in on a little man law. i shouldn't be doing this, but i am. men don't talk to each other in the bathroom. anything beyond a simple grunt or inaudible "hello" - even hello is too formal - it needs to be a "hey" - is too much. its not right. unlike what some whom are uneducated would have you to believe, it has nothing to do with sexual orientation. its simply unsettling. i'll talk to you when you're outside. there is nothing you need to tell me, at that moment in space and time, which is so important, that i need to know at that point. unless you had information that i would piss fire. in that case, i wouldn't mind knowing. then conversation is allowed.
so the fact that me & this guy locked eyes & i let out a short laugh - not just any short laugh - but a judgmental type "muahahaha" laugh - that was odd. but i was drunk, so it was completely legitimate. the truth is, i didn't now why i did it at the time. i was somewhat drunk, yes, but the truth of the matter was i saw into the future. here we were at this classy hotel's baller club, and i run into a 55 year old combover white computer i.t. guy from wyoming whose mother dressed him for the night out on the hanoi town. i'm positive that somewhere underneath his shirt, he had one of those "passport wallets" with his real passport and emergency money just in case they took the 20,000 dong out of his front collared shirt. so that was a bit harsh, but that's how i felt at the time. i didn't know i would be doing humanity a huge favor.
you've been reading for a while. here is a picture from the trip.
here's another one. you deserve this one.
(*) so i return from my trip and sit back down at the bar. i relayed my findings. after a short discussion, we were interrupted by the sound of heels. yes, the sound of heels. many heels. not just 2 heels, as if stemming from the same female, or in the case of many asian countries, same male. no, these were 15-20 pairs of heels clickity clacking their way down from the 2nd floor - where i had just been - down to the first floor - dressed in tight traditional dresses with numbers pinned to their dresses. their own indvidualized 3 digit number.
i could neither stop laughing out of disbelief, nor staring out of wonder.
these were real life high society hookers. for those of you who saw rush hour 2 - remember where chris tucker goes to hong kong & jackie chan takes him to the spa & the doors open up on the front floor, and the head mistress asks chris tucker to pick whichever woman he wants from the 30 provided? same idea here. except no doors.
there was a moving parade past myself & my 3 beloved friends of high priced hookers.
they paraded down the stairs from our right, and to our left, where they congregated in an awkwardly formed circle on the outskirts of the 1980's end of the disco era a go go dance floor. they then put their hands in the air, giggled with each other, and started taking each others' clothes off. i'm kidding. they didn't take each others' clothes off. but the encounter was just as stereotypical. they did this for what seemed an excruciatingly long time - perhaps b/c it was just all so surreal. one would assume, a male in the primitive jungle of a slightly hazy friday night - could stare at prostitutes from a safe distance for any amount of extended time. however, this time, i felt i was watching one of those channels on your tv numbered anywhere from 80-120 when you have the inability to pay for comcast & can afford only bunny ears. and this channel was the crazy asian channel that i could not understand, for the life of me, what the hell was going on, nor could i determine the principals and theories which were driving the forces being played before my eyes. as with that asian television channel, i could determine only 2 universal themes before me existed: (1) young asian females laughing & giggling, and (2)horrible dancing.
i swear to you my journal and inexplicitly you my reader, god, and joe pseci, i stopped staring at them, after an extended period of time, to determine whether or not they were good looking enough to be considered true prostitutes for a 5 star hotel. i mean, what do 5 star hotel prostitutes look like? do they truly resemble the lovable julia roberts in her heart mending performance of pretty woman? do they appear to be manufactured only with the good financial auspices of plastic surgeons? are they born naturally? would i be able to tell?
after labeling each of the 15 as "hot" or "not" in the span of maybe 10 seconds - proof that men can work extremely quickly and efficiently under demanding, pressurized situations - i felt awkward. ok, the novelty had warn off. some were hot. some were not. as you learn quickly, especially in vietnam, most women - even those you do not believe to be street prostitutes - and they very well may not be - are looking to you for mostly one thing. money. so long as local individuals can determine whether or not you are a tourist (which quickly & visually is based upon skin color), you are treated in near rock-star fashion.
these people are so poor, and have so little, that what seems like nothing to yourself, and truly is nothing, is a half day's pay to them / a meal for their entire family / an entire week's pay / school fees for their children. although it works out extremely well for those individuals who come to the country to visit, it is a power which must be wielded with proper force because as a sharply-sided double blade, 2 alternatives persist. wielding the blade with too much aggressive force, and running local producers' profits into the ground for the gain of your uncle in the form of a trinket, ultimately destroys the local producer.
the other side of the blade has the hunger existent on the producers' side. locals have all those concerns to pay for, and we as tourists have the means to provide them to the locals with such ease. as such, locals seem to be willing to both go to greater lengths and stretch the line of what is moral / correct / respectful further from most individuals' medians. point being - throughout my travels - and this was the beginning of my lesson from naivity - any woman who is attractive in vietnam and is spending her nights in places filled with tourists who are known to throw money around, get drunk, and make irresponsible decisions - must be dealt with caution.
but still. their dancing. my god was it horrible. eventually, the heels parade once again past martin, then sarge, then sabine, and then myself. i was still unable to get over the numbers attached to each of their dresses. literally. instead of a pin on some customer service agent's collared shirt which reads their name, they had a number.
here is a picture, snaked by sarge (who was always good in special ops) of the prostitutes. its not much, but you can see their true image. zombies. prostitutes must know the reality of their situation - that they are an extremely odd entity - because of the spectrum of adjectives they may conjure: everything from sad and depressing to entertaining and erotic.
the 5 to 7 prostitutes which stayed there played a masterful game of pool. i don't know if all prostitutes are like this. but i've never seen such luck in a prostitute's playing of pool. they could have filmed a very instructional, and probably a fairly profitable, film that day with the shots they pulled off. martin & i were shooting pool with the prostitutes. during our "game", sabine took a picture & got yelled at by the prostitutes. as sabine was being yelled at by a prostitute - an individual not necessarily existing within the realm of legal scripture either - sabine stated as truthfully as she could that she was only taking a picture of martin. what is hilarious about this is the underlying assumption: that one would seemingly come to "club q" just to play pool. in any case, well played sabine.
clever.
after giggling in the corner & watching these prostitutes make continuously lucky shot after ridiculously lucky shot, i decided, "self, you'll never get the chance to play pool again with 5-7 hookers". so, i jumped in. still, their luck continued. i made a few shots, as my inebriation had fallen off from the price tag of $7 for the equivalent of a PBR (even i have my borders and beliefs). eventually we all took off & left Club Q.
later upon meeting two individuals who will be introduced as "the trees" b/c they both graduated from stanford university whose mascot is the tree - zee germans and us americans learned Club Q is run by the vietnamese ministry of interior, which can be considered similar to the state department for the u.s. regardless of that statements' veracity, sarge & myself shot sabine a shit eating grin upon our exit.
------------> hotel receptionist walking up to the 2nd floor. i.e., the hotel is a knowing pusher of these prostitutes. if its not the vietnamese state run whore house, its certainly allowed to exist by the local police force.
-----------> old white guy & asian guy paying at the bar's cash register - you can see it in the picture of the prostitutes - but they never bought a drink or played a game of pool. i wonder what they paid for.....
-----------> if that's true, prostitution is quite literally on the books of this hotel. this 5 star international chain created by outside influences hotel.
-----------> one of those guys paid with a visa credit card. and it was accepted. i wonder what the payment description read.....
(*) last step. we had to get home. we had no idea where the hell we were in hanoi, and this time we knew we were way over our heads & about to get taken for a fiscal ride by a street motobike hustler. after a bit of bartering, and a pretty laid back "go ahead, take us for our money, just bring us home" negotiation process, all parties involved agreed to 40,000 baht. the ride home was fun and fast. as midnight had already struck, the streets were dead, empty, and quiet. after several huddles, are drivers eventually figured out how to get us home.
we got off the bikes, shook hands, and then gave 40,000 baht a piece. then they start yelling at us that we said 80,000.
here's a picture from the trip, right before our home stretch:
after continuously haggling over every item in your day, from necessities to bonus life items such as liquor and motobikes, you WILL eventually snap. and it feels great. wow, what a rush. you go off, and you really control the situation. you'll walk away with 3 thoughts (1) wow - was that me, personally who just kicked all that negotiable ass back there (2) i feel sorry for that guy/girl - i just spiritually violated him/her and (3) wow was i a complete jackass now i feel pretty bad.
that's what happened to this poor motorbike driver who was just pulling his little hustle once more. here is a summary of the conversation. this is all said with motobike guy yelling with a mighty force at me in the middle of the dead 2 street intersection in the middle of hanoi at 3 am right outside my hotel, and me speaking loudly, sternly, but with a smile and a shit-eating grin about to burst into a laugh.
him: 80,000 baht a piece! you lie!
me: fuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck you (dead pan)
him: you lie! you say 80,000. i no do it if 40! you lie!
me: (half laughing half extremely pissed) buddy, i've been fucked enough times around here tonight financially. i've been nickeled here, dimed there, and haven't said a fuckin word. it stops here my friend. i'm sorry. fuck you. take the money.
him: you lie!
me: i just got done playing pool with prostitutes. i want to go to sleep. you don't understand any of this.
him: give me 40 more! per person! you said!
me (while extending the 160 total from all of us)(with sincere smile & staring into motobike man's eyes) fuck you. here's 160. fuck you very much. good night.
he takes the money, and then starts laughing. all of a sudden we're friends again. once the exchanging of money took place, everyone was buddy buddy again. we give each other hi-5's and do the hip hop "show respect and give each other a pat on the back" type thing. we then shook hands. wow. that ended 180 degrees from where that could have.
i want to take this moment on the internet to thank motobike man out there, wherever you are, for teaching me a very important lesson in vietnamese bartering. yelling & the sternness in your dialect is not to be taken personally. it does not have a negative connotation in terms of a "i'm gonna cut you after this conversation" as it would in the english language on an american city's street. instead, its merely a passion which is all part of the great play & stage tactics that is bartering in asia.
yeah, i told the guy off. a few times. but: (1) it probably helped he had no idea what i was saying and (2) i said it with a smile and with the body language of a friendly guy.
after holding our ground, fending off the motobike hustlas, and befriending the motobike hustlas, our crew woke up the sleeping security guards to the hotel and went to sleep in the Blue Star Hostel.
good run.
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