Soon after Bangkok I booked a trip to Vietnam to catch some old college friends. The big city in the north is called Hanoi and that is where I found myself after a hellish situation with my visa. The first thing I noticed about Hanoi in relation to Bangkok was the size and architecture of the buildings. Bangkok is filled with opposing cultures and architecture, from bamboo huts to enormous modern condo structures. Hanoi, on the other hand, is less modernized and is largely composed of two story buildings with commercial storefronts in front of EVERY building. At least, that’s what I witnessed in the 3 days I was there.
The streets in Hanoi are narrow and the traffic is incessant. There are virtually no traffic laws or signals. When crossing the street you literally just have to walk/run into moving traffic. It’s as if a handful of gravel was thrown into a blender: people drive on opposite sides, on the sidwalks, and they run, stop, and speed through all manner of unholy traffic situations. Miraculously, in the four days I was out and about, I did not see one accident.
A lot happened on this leg of the journey so to keep this post manageable I am going to focus on two Masters. One in this post and the other in Hanoi Park II. By Master I mean, someone who knows who they are, and is comfortable. Masters don’t settle for the mundane, they are curious and excited about what life has to offer. They don’t subscribe to the conditioning and boundaries of society- they create their own. These are the people I seek out, to hear their stories and to learn from them.
When I arrived at the Backpacker Hostel there was a pub crawl in its early stages. My college buddy was there with a Canadian guy he had met in Laos. I had woken up that morning at 3am to get to the airport, and had to deal with an abundance of Babylon bullshit at customs so when my friend and the Canadian handed me a beer you could say I was ready to laugh or cry. Then the floodgates opened and the bar crawl began.
A big hairy Australian who worked at the hostel led the crawl. He had just lost a bet in a card game and subsequently had to put on the clothes of his successor. She happened to be a petite blonde in a dress so you can probably imagine what that looked like, a lot of stretched material and tangled hair. The Australian brought us to another hostel that was basically a night-club. From there we went to an actual night club with a dj booth, several bars, hookas, and a number of twitchy Vietnamese. By now we had gathered numbers and drinking momentum. The Canadian had somehow found himself a colorful Mexican looking poncho which added to his “Dude” like appearance in accordance to the scruffy beard, flip flops, and cigarette that perpetually hung out of his relaxed jaws. He is the first Master of Hanoi. For those of you who haven’t seen “The Big Lebowski,” you should first, be ashamed of yourselves, and second you should watch it. It’s Cohen Brothers comedy at its best.
The Canadian was similar to “The Dude,” the main character in the movie albeit not physically. The Canadian is tall and skinny with combed back dirty blonde hair and a perpetual warm smile that is not consigned to just his mouth, his whole face smiles. He is supremely positive whether he has just gotten his wallet stolen, been shut down by a lady of interest, or collapsed headfirst into the gutter. He isn’t worried about what will be or what he should do. Whatever happens, he approaches it with a smile and an affirmative nod. In my experience this is much easier said than done. I know meditation instructors who don’t have this much alacrity towards life.
After using the bathroom I spotted him across the bar with one of the Vietnamese in the club who was particularly jittery. The Vietnamese guy kept rolling up his sleeves to flex and then he would laugh hysterically. I’m not sure if he was making fun of the big bros on the crawl or if the weird little pink bags he was sucking on and peddling to everyone had pushed him over the edge. The Canadian, my college friend, and I stayed until close, about 12:00am. That’s when the police drive around Hanoi shutting down everything from food carts, to markets, to night clubs. Many have lookouts at the ends of streets to warn you when they are coming. It’s normal to see a whole block go dark all of sudden when this happens. When the cops pass, it will light up again. This can be very entertaining when you’re drunk. At our club, however, they came in full force and shooed everyone out.
You might be wondering why I’m writing about a bar crawl. Bar crawls full of drunken westerners abroad are like embarrassing drunk uncles at Christmas dinner but there is some significance to this in relation to what I observed of the economic structure of Vietnam so bear with me.
After the cops kicked us out rumors of the “mafia bar” circled through the group like STDS in a whorehouse. Before I knew what was happening a group of us was led down a series of dark alleys. As the alley’s got darker and more eerie people began to fall back and go home but The Canadian, my friend, and I, dared forth. After hopping fences, ducking under alleyways, and crossing a highway on foot, we found ourselves at the side of a river. You could see the lights on in one building; nothing else as far as you could see was lit. Thumping music wafted out of the seedy cement structure like fumes out of a tailpipe. Outside, food carts, and nitrous balloon hustlers waited for us. Inside, there were two custom built bars, a pool table, a small dj table, and a strange back alley room. The host told us that an organized crime group ran the bar and that they paid off the cops to run their clandestine operation whenever they wanted.
In the back alley room, under dim blue light stoic Vietnamese families sat bobbing their heads. I saw more than one baby rocking back and forth on a bouncy lap at 2am to house music. It was there where I met another Master in the making who I ended up running into several times throughout Vietnam. But she is another story.
At the end of the night my college friend and I tried to find our way home but after turning down several alley’s we realized that we were lost. I heard barking by the river and saw shadows darting between the trees. The wild dogs were closing in and we were unarmed, in the dark, in Nam.
Stay tuned for Hanoi Part II