At night

Last night, Sean and I ventured out into the city. We sat on kiddie stools in the street with other tourists and locals alike and drank Bia Hoi into the wee hours. It's local draft beer, mini-brewed at small shops around the city. When finished with one beer, the woman at the pony keg dumps the swill into a bucket and pours you another. Just wondering...where does the swill go? Is it twice brewed? Ah, who cares. The beers work out to about 15 cents each.

After a kebab, a small triangular meat sandwich, we moved on to a "proper" bar and joined several teachers for a drink. Each of them mentioned how rough it was teaching in Hanoi, wink, wink. Apparently, the situation is good enough for them to want to prevent word from getting out. A bit of bumping and grinding on a few of the teachers' parts, and Sean and I moved on again.

In the doors to a small bar with a pool table, we snuggled into a booth with four locals, Linh (lean), Duc (dook), Tho (tawh) and Hai (hi). Vietnamese is a tonal language, which stumps me. Hai, for example, can mean some six different things in Vietnamese. It means the number two. It can be a proper name. It may be used as an adjective. The meaning depends upon the tone and emphasis on syllables. Hai's name refers to him when pronounced in an arc of sound. Woah, where to begin? A few hours into our discussion, we were shushed, the doors closed and gates of the bar locked. From what I could discern, bars are supposed to close at a certain hour. Police cruise the streets to ensure cooperation, at which point all the bars simply close their gates and quiet all customers. Interesting. In Banos, Ecuador, the cops would enter the bars and send everyone home, the nightly raid. In Hanoi, they don't seem quite as vigilant.