Fried Locusts and Other Culture/HANOI - VANG VIENG

To say that I woke up refreshed would be an understatement.  I woke up as the earthly avatar of Contentedness and Well-Being.  Rather than a hangover from a night of smoking and drinking on a swaying boat, I felt more refreshed and invigorated than I had in a long time.  Maybe Southeast Asia turns all that booze and THC into vitamins, or maybe I was feeling the effects of Eating A Goddamn Snake Heart.  Regardless, I felt great, with just a touch of existential hopelessness, because oh yeah I watched The Deer Hunter right before going to bed.

And the view waking up wasn't too bad neither.

One of our last sights on the tour is The Kissing Rocks, which, let me describe them for you, look a bit like two rocks kissing.  As we came near they kissed:

Like so.

And then parted.

Like so.  Oh, and there's a story about how this is supposed to be sad, if you want to feel bad about rocks.

Our last sightseeing over, the hosts of the cruise finally let us have our breakfast.  But first: cooking class!

Work for your food!  Di di mao!  DI DI MAO!

Guess what a bunch of tired white people on a tour don't want to do before they eat?  Learn how to roll the spring rolls they've been waiting to eat.  I wish I could've been cool like the German non-couple who abstained, but I wasn't.  I rolled a bunch of damn spring rolls while the snake energy coursing through my blood hissed and left me in disgust.

After eating breakfast, including the spring rolls we had collectively made (and for which I was complimented on my rolling skills by the tour guide, natch), our ship made for the mainland.  While waiting for the docking boat, an ambiguously gendered child of an Australian family wandered over to where I was drinking beer and playing my Nintendo DS.  S/he had never played Mario before, and was able to quickly and soundly defeat my theory that Anyone Can Play Mario Immediately After Picking It Up.

"Who is the turtle?" "He's evil, he stole the princess, and HOW DO YOU NOT KNOW THIS?!"

After about five minutes and a frustrated exclamation of "I HATE the mushrooms!", the boy/girl gave up on Mario forever.  Sad news, but dry your tears Shigeru Miyamoto, at least the kid seems to have found a strong anti-drug stance.

From the dock our group is taken by van back to our individual lodgings.  There's a conversation between some Aussies saying they came north to Asia for the heat, and an American man blown away by this revelation ("That's amazing!  We go SOUTH to get warmer!").  Shut up, you're judging him too.  Back at our hostel, we ask the front desk where's a good place to get pho.  After a week in Vietnam, somehow I'd still only had it the one time.  The restaurant Highway 61 is recommended to us, so we grab a cab and hightail our starving asses over there, and learn that pho is not actually on their menu.

So, instead we buy a bunch of son tinh liqueurs.  Same same?

Rather than pho, the menu is filled with an assortment of unusual items that at first I assumed to be targeted towards tourists, but a lot of them didn't even seem to be Vietnamese in origin.  Like, say, ostrich steak.

Not a bad steak, really.

And barbecued frog legs.

Legitimately delicious.

We did buy a local dish though: a healthy serving of fried locusts.

If you say you like these you're lying (but that's okay because I did too so I would look cool)

They were a little like popcorn, if popcorn had way, way more legs and tasted like dead bugs.  Sarah didn't want us to be "those people" though (the kind of people who order the wacky foreign dish only to not eat it and forever brand themselves in the eyes of the restaurant staff as White Tourist Devils), so rather than leave a shamefully unfinished plate of perfectly good locusts on our table, she wrapped up the remainder (re: 75%) in a paper napkin and stealthily threw the greasy bundle in an alley after we exited.  Offending the waiter and instigating a race war: Averted.  Image of a giant, bipedal locust standing on the side of the road and shedding a single tear: Terrifying.

After dinner we headed over to the Thang Long Water Puppet Theatre for their Water Puppet Show.

All three words of the title are startlingly accurate.

The theater was surprisingly packed, even though there are several performances throughout the day, and even the show is...kind of boring.  The show being in a combination of Vietnamese and song didn't make things easy to follow, but I do remember a bald man with a gigantic head:

In the upper right, with the gigantic head.

And in puppet form.  Horrible, smiling puppet form.

And then at one point some of the puppets were on fire, but the thrill of danger was dashed on account of the whole show being in water.

Whomp.

After a long night of cultural appreciation and annoying fellow theater-goers when cracking smuggled beers, we spent our last night in Hanoi and left in the early, early morning for Laos.  At the airport I'm stopped because of a bottle of sunscreen in my carry-on that's over the liquid limit, so I tell them "It's only half-full."  Somehow, that works, which I'll be honest, I've never seen before.  But then, the security lady did have eyes that could see my body and face and skin.  At this point, sunscreen was pretty much my spirit animal.

From the Vientiane airport we book a bus to Vang Vieng, where we'll be staying the next few days.  We wait for a bit at a nearby cafe for our ride, while I eat flan and notice that my debit card isn't working.

Also the cat at my feet had huge tits.  I'm painting a portrait, guys.

I had enough money for the next few days, but it was still a concern.  But, there was nothing I could do at the moment, so I got on the bus and hoped the ATMs in Vang Vieng might work instead.

The ride takes about 4 hours, which was sufficiently uncomfortable and tiring enough that once arriving in town we rented a room at the first inn we came to.  At eight dollars a night, not too shabby.  Granted, the room did have a giant, dimly-lit stone bathroom with paint peeling everywhere, so it looked like our room was adjacent to the set of a Saw movie, but hey.  Eight dollars.  I take a nap, and get ready to go out.

Vang Vieng is famous for its river, which is lined with water-side bars and perfect for tubing, but it was far too late in the evening by now to check it out.  Now, everyone was wandering around the banana pancake stalls and Friends bars, another credit to Vang Vieng's fame.  Friends bars are restaurant/bars where you can lie down on pillows and watch old reruns on Friends.  Why Friends?  Because there's nothing more comforting to an overprivileged white tourist high out of his mind than an old episode of Friends.  Why is he high out of his mind?  Because most of the places here also serve drugs, that's why.

My opium-den fingernails were ready.

Some travelers will warn that, despite the prevalence of weed and what have you, rolling papers are exceedingly rare.  I'm here to tell you this just isn't true.  We saw them at a number of convenience stores, and even being sold at the front counter of our hotel (the same one that put a sign in our room warning not to smoke narcotics).  We wandered through the main strip for an hour or so, and I took note that Family Guy and Two and a Half Men had done a good job of supplanting Friends on many of the TVs.  If you want to know what it felt like to be the world's most pointless social archaeologist, it was making me hungry.  So we stopped in a restaurant.

Not the typical tablecloth for a hive of scum and villainy.

Sarah and I are each given a menu, but Sarah's turns out to have a little something extra inside it.

HELLO!

Fighting the urge to just order "one of everything", I get a pizza and a "strong happy shake".

Strong=Tastes like sipping on a bag of lawnmower clippings

The pizza was a disappointment, but that shake...I went comatose.  For the rest of the night, everything looked a little like this:

...Phoebe?  Is that you?

I Heart Vietnam/HANOI - HA LONG BAY

I decided to buy some drugs.  Sarah had made arrangements for a Ha Long Bay tour starting the next day, and I wanted a little more weed than the decoy crumbs I had been suckered into previously (Never Again, goddammit!).  This time, I was going to be cool, suave, like those handsome celebrity drug buyers you see on the TV.  But in the middle of Hanoi, where is a reliable source to turn to for drug trafficking?  I spot a young man of indeterminate age selling books on the street.  Bingo.

As it turns out, the theory I had developed in Ho Chi Minh City of "Fucking everyone around you is selling, always, yeah even that guy" held true.  As soon as I threw out an inquisitive "Tai ma?" his eyes lit up in the way that betrayed his true vocation.  Problem was, the stuff was back at his place, and he could only take one person on his scooter.  I turn to Sarah.

"This is your deal.  If you want, you go get it."  Dammit.  Now, I'm not exactly a professional when it comes to evaluating, buying, or even smoking weed.  If you asked me the difference between a joint and a spliff, I'd probably just vomit nervously.  Sarah senses my apprehension and gives me some advice: "Just make sure it's green and smells good.  You'll know the smell."  Not exactly Yoda, but better than nothing.  I gesture for my newfound dealer/book merchant to lead the way.

He takes me across the street, and then motions for me to wait.  "I go get my bike, okay?"  Okay.  I'm in front of an alley, flanked by old men squatting around their drinks.  One stone-faced local offers me one of their tiny white plastic stools.  Oh man.  As I squatted with them, I felt like the coolest motherfucker for miles.  I was James Dean buying pot off Frank Sinatra in a fedora.  But, in a completely ignorant and slightly fearful way.  My ride pulls up on his scooter, and I hop on.

I've never been totally sure on the accepted etiquette of riding bitch on a scooter taxi, whether I should put my arms around my driver's torso, or grab their hips, and the problem seemed compounded by the illicit nature of this particular scooter ride.  Opting to play it as safe and awkwardly as possible, I grabbed the back of the scooter behind me and spent the trip looking "casual" with both shoulders stiffly locked and chest out.  My driver spends the ride being legitimately casual, almost disarmingly so.  After the usual "Where you from?" and "This your first time Vietnam?", he starts to brag about the varied westerners he keeps as clients, in particular one girl "from Chi-ca-go" who buys a bag every single week.

"I can get pounds if you need!" he shouts back with pride, veering in-and-out of oncoming traffic.

"Thank you, but I only need a little bit!" I shout back.

He doesn't reply, and goes back to talking of the girl from Chicago.

We enter a dense housing development, and suddenly his mood shifts.  He preemptively hushes me.

"Here you no talk.  They think I just a book seller.  No one know I sell to you, okay?  I don't want to pay police ten, fifteen million."  I nod my consent.  500 bucks seems to me a stiff bribe, but what the fuck do I know?  If this guy wants to keep his (obviously solid) book seller cover, I wasn't about to blow it for him.  Clearly, his neighbors hadn't heard my theory.

He takes through a labyrinth of rickety, narrow staircases to his studio apartment, which despite being barely one room is still almost devoid of possessions.  He goes to the closet and from a coat pulls out a large plastic baggy.

"This is Thai stick."  Inside the rumpled bag is a 3" by 1" bar of what looks to be densely compressed marijuana.

There's no way on Earth I can smoke that much in the next three days.  Hell, smoking that much in a month would require a perseverance and determination that, ironically, smoking weed does not tend to instill in me. But: "You want to try?"  Well, I don't want to be rude.

He breaks off a piece and lights it in his fingers, cupping his palms around to contain the smoke.  "Alright, you taste."  I put my head in between his hands and breathe it in.  It...tastes like pot.

"It's good, but I don't need this much.  How much for, I don't know, half of it?" I ask.  His face washes over with displeasure.  "No, you buy all.  Very good, yes?  I give you good price.  1.5 million!"

Seeing as how I was leaving the country in a few days, and trying to keep to a budget after Australia bled me dry, I just couldn't justify spending 70 dollars on an impossible amount of weed.  I insist: "I can only spend...Three hundred, maybe four hundred thousand."  But my host was not going to be satisfied with an offer of 20 bucks.

"No, I can only sell all.  For you, 1.25 million!  Very good price!"  Maybe it was a good price, but my resolve had strengthened from so many bad deals.  Never Again.  Mercilessly, I tell him: "I'm sorry, but no thank you.  Can you take me back to my hostel, please?"  And he does, to my insane relief.

However, he is not the type to give up so quickly.  A trait that could come from either the book selling or the drug dealing, really.  The entire ride back to the hostel, made infinitely longer by my having no idea where the fuck I was, he's knocking down the price little by little down to 800,000, pleading his need to sell and be rid of this really really great tai ma, and so buy food and English books and educate himself further in the King's tongue.  Finally, to dissuade him I say that it is Sarah who won't let me spend the money, as she's my girlfriend, you see, and you know how girlfriends don't let boyfriends spend money on things like premium Thai stick and such.  He thinks about this, and replies "You ask her!  I will stay here."  And thus he parks his bike in front of the hostel, where to my dismay both he and I can see Sarah through the window, using one of the computers in the lobby.  "I'll uh...I'll go ask her," I say, heavy with the opposite of confidence.

Inside, once Sarah is close enough I start to rapidly whisper "Thedealer'soutsidebutIdon'twanttobuyanythingsoIneedyoutopretendlikeI'maskingbutyou'resayingnosojuststartshakingyourheadandsayingNoreallyloudlyokay?"

And to her infinite credit, she does.  Sarah mimes an angry refusal, and regardless of whether the dealer saw, my spine grew back enough to walk outside and lay the news on him: "Sorry, man, she says no.  You know how it is.  Girls, right?"

He accepts the news, but still insists on being compensated for his time.  "I drive you to my place, to here, I give you sample.  You give me something?"  I fish around in my pockets and find about 10,000 dong.  In USD, maybe a couple quarters.  I give it to him.  He grumbles unhappily, and finally drives off.  Back in the hostel I fill Sarah in on the rest of the story, assuring her of what she had already guessed.  I am really, really bad at buying drugs.

Sarah suggests we get dinner and I agree, having been made hungry by a long night of leading on a poor (?) book/weed salesman.  Using one of the hostel's computer, we scan Hanoi's wikitravel page for food options, and I come across this particular passage:

"The suburb of Le Mat (aka the Snake Village) has numerous restaurants specializing in cobra foodstuffs. Live cobras are stored on the premises much the same way one would find live lobsters at a Western seafood restaurant. If one orders cobra blood wine from the menu, the waiter will take a live cobra, kill it on the spot, drain the blood into a shot glass of rice wine, and top it off with the cobra's still beating heart for you to gulp down!"

I don't think I've ever had a goal so clear in my mind as that moment.  If, by the end of the night, I had not feasted on a snake's living heart, I would consider myself a failure to me, my family, and a God I don't even believe in.

After asking around the hostel for some general directions, we grab a taxi and set off to eat the coolest fucking thing possible.  Le Mat was a little outside of town, and it was either really late or they didn't receive many visitors, because as we walked along the street we were flanked on all sides by surprised, curious expressions and children screaming hello.  I was mildly concerned we wouldn't be able to find the right restaurant, on account of the whole not reading Vietnamese thing, but the prevalent snake pictures nestled in store signs cleared any confusion.  Finding one restaurant with their lights on and customers out front, we enter.

Somehow, it has to have flickering fluorescent lighting.  It just has to.

Some of the "customers" from the table in front get up and proceed to take our order, and I realize they're actually the family that owns the restaurant eating dinner.  Regardless, they're certainly open now.  As one woman waits on us patiently, our eyes scan their menu for the Vietnamese word for "horrible snake organ feast."

If I had to guess, the one with the most accent marks.

Luckily, the woman speaks first: "Cobra blood?"  We nod, trying to look as casual as possible.  You know, if you've got some cobras lying around that'd be cool, no biggie.  Whatever.

She barks a few commands towards her family, who rush off to the back of the house, some coming back with small dishes of appetizers and seasonings.  Meanwhile, Sarah goes to the use the bathroom, and I'm left to admire the decor in such pants-filling anticipation as can scarcely be imagined.

The Merry Christmas banner in March was perfect.

While Sarah was away, the boys in the family had come back, clutching a large, writhing sack.  All I could think was "Sarah's missing this!" and "Oh my god I should be filming this".  SO I DID.

And you are welcome forever.

Eating the heart was similar to eating chewy shellfish, but with an aftertaste of raw totem energy.  And it wasn't over yet.  There was also the matter of the blood:

OH YEAHHH

If you'd like to know how a shot of blood tastes, I refer you to this series of time lapse photos:

If you've ever licked a cut, it tastes like a shot glass full of that, mixed with a little bit of vodka or some kind of noxious moonshine.  For flavor, no doubt.  Now that the night's "white people do quirky native thing" ceremony was finished, the family's daughter returned from vomiting in the bathroom, and the many, many snake dishes started to appear.

Somehow, our appetites had shrank from all that snake power coursing through our veins, and we were hardly able to finish half of the plates on our table.  And they just kept coming!  I started to think maybe I had rushed into this before thinking about just how much food could be produced from a four foot snake.  Then we go to pay.  I don't want to say how much it was, but I could have bought a great deal of Thai stick for that amount.  But of course, then I wouldn't have a snake spirit giving me all that, I dunno, stamina, probably.  It's always stamina.

The next day a bus picks us up and we're taken to the docks for our Ha Long Bay tour, but it almost feels anticlimactic after last night's fuck-you to the cobra gods.  

I don't get up at 7am for anything less than a Natural Wonder of the World.

With us on the tour is a number of French and Czech backpackers, some Korean and German tourists, an Australian family, and our guide: a diminutive Vietnamese man with confidence issues and a nervous smile.  It's a two days, one night tour, and our boat for the trip turns out to be surprisingly nice.

Also disappointingly un-dragon shaped.

Sarah and I make small talk with a couple of German ladies who were traveling together, and I'll save you some time, it turns out they weren't lesbians.  Before long, the boat is moving, and we slip into the blue fog of Ha Long Bay.

Amidst the splendor of the limestone peaks lifting from the water, as if hazy, hoary giants were stretching awake from the green sea floor, I'm struck by how fucking chilly it is.  No longer is the weather hotter than two rats screwing in a wool sock.  No sir, for this I've got to bust out the microfleece.

More like UNESCO World Brrr-itage site!

After about an hour of moving through the bay, we're taken to one of the larger rock islands for a tour of the cave system.

Where we got a good view of the bay within the Bay.

Our guide probably said a lot of neat facts about the cave as we were about to enter, but no one cared because a cute dog was hanging around the front and biting our feet.  His frustration at our group's apathy was palpable, but what can you do.

PUPPY!

As our guide's dreams of being a cruise ship director were crumbling in front of his eyes, we're led up the rock face and inside.

The cave is packed with artificial lighting, old graffiti, and French douchebags.  Disdainful glances, sneering at the sound of English being spoken, and of course they're wearing scarves.  In the tropics.  The cave is also full of more penguin trash cans, just like the rest of Vietnam.

Only these ones are a little more insane asylum-themed.

And, there's a giant red penis rock:

It seems angry.

All in all, not a bad cave.  If you'd like to throw your money away, there's even a rock shaped kind of like a turtle if you squint a bunch that has a "head" you can rub.  For good luck, or stamina, or something.

It's always stamina.

After the cave tour, the group splits into pairs for kayaking.  Sarah and I paddle around the karsts for awhile, take pictures, and watch a dog hanging out at the dock shit in a rowboat.  There are some things that you don't realize you've never seen until they're happening right in front of you.

Evening soon falls and dinner is served back on the main boat.  We sit at a table with the German ladies who aren't lesbians, but are awesome.  They refused to kayak and, when told about the spring roll...rolling class that will be held tomorrow morning, they refuse that too.  They just want to drink beer.

Dinner is a delight, but I can tell we unsettled our server when we ate the vegetable garnishes in the middle of the table cut to look like flowers.  They were, we found, just for display.  After everyone had finished their meal, our tour guide decided to kick this party up a notch, and brought out the karaoke.  You know what a room full of white strangers being overcharged for drinks doesn't want to do?  If you said karaoke, you are hereby overqualified to be a Ha Long Bay tour guide.  And I think you hurt his feelings.  I steal a beer can and, together with Sarah, head back to our room to smoke drugs.

And not do any of this.

Sarah had managed to scrape together what few real bits of weed were in the tobacco scam-bag into a reasonable amount that two people of modest expectations might actually be able to get high on.  In our miniscule 3' by 5' bathroom she also fashions a beer can I had nicked from dinner into a pipe, and then MacGyvers up a blow tube using toilet paper, perfume, and the cardboard from a toilet paper roll.  She's quite a lady (uh-whoa, whoa, whoa...).  We smoke up a decent buzz, although in the process I burn a finger because the can was- You know what?  No one cares about the complaints of someone smoking pot.  No one.

My original plan had been to get high for sunset over the Bay, but it was far too cloudy and also I forgot, because I was getting high.  Now that night had set in, it was time instead to watch a movie neither of us had ever seen before, a movie that would perfectly encapsulate the experience of being afloat amidst this magical interplay of earth and water: The Deer Hunter.

And so we did.  All one hundred and eighty two minutes of it, our stoned eyes glued to the screen as we shared pulls off a bottle of Smirnoff Sarah had smuggled aboard, De Niro and Walken yelling about...something.  Meryl Streep crying.  Vietnam.  It felt like we had accomplished something profound.

Probably not though.

Apparently after everyone cleared out of the room as fast as they could, the Vietnamese servers just fucking jammed out all night.  There's...there's a tinge of regret.

Resort Relaxation/VUNG TAU - HANOI

Sarah and I were headed to Vung Tau on the southern coast, where Sarah had booked a room at a resort for 2 nights.  Even though Ho Chi Minh City was hot as hell, polluted, and louder than eighty skeletons fucking on a tin roof, somehow, I was going to miss it.  For our departure, I insisted on the most shamelessly touristy travel option available: cyclo rides.  Compared to scooters, these bicycle-rickshaws are not only slower and more expensive, but you also get a terrifying front-row seat to the oncoming walls of traffic you'll be defenselessly pedaled into.

From the river we take a hydrofoil to Vung Tau, where we flag down a taxi who only takes 3 tries to get us to the correct resort, charging us all the way.  Now, when Sarah agreed to come traveling with me, one of her stipulations was that we spend at least a few nights in a nice hotel, where she could relax and sunbathe and generally have an actual real-person vacation. Somehow, I had acquired a reputation for more...uncomfortable traveling, and she wanted at least some respite.  Nonsense, I say.  I like a good resort as much as the next fucker.  Bring on the Thuy Duong Resort & Hotel, and I'll luxuriate with the best of 'em.

Bring it, you Gilded Bitch.

When we try to check in, we are a smidge disconcerted to find that the front desk staff don't speak English.  That's cool, Vietnam and all, but the front desk?  At an international resort?  Whatever.  They scrounge up one guy who knows some nouns and verbs, and we're shown to our room.  On the way there, we discover that all of the hotel facilities are closed, and the place is almost completely deserted.

Additionally, no one smiles, ever.  Maybe it's a rule, or maybe this is the Vietnamese Bates Motel.  Either way unsettling, and a little rude, especially if we die.  Our room is out of range of the wifi, which Sarah makes fun of me for getting upset about, only to discover that clouds have moved in over the private beach, making sunbathing impossible.  Oh, and you can't swim in the water either, because the waves are too dangerous.  Before he leaves the bellhop tells us if we need anything we can just call room service, but there's no room service book or number to be found.  At this point, I wouldn't have been surprised to find the phone cord cut anyways.

With little else to do, we take a nap until dinner, and discover that they didn't bother to turn on the pathway lights, leaving us an ominous darkness to tiptoe through back to the main building.  The hotel restaurant is overpriced, in addition to being cavernous and empty, but there are no other options.  We ask about getting a taxi into town, and are told that the resort is too far away and no cars come by here.  One worker does offer to take us on his personal scooter, if we give him 10 dollars.  And he could only take one of us.  Lucky for Sarah, I've seen both Hostel movies and opt instead to eat in the quiet, echoing restaurant.  By this point, I think I had only seen two other guests the entire day.  But to be fair, they could have been ghosts.

On the way back to our room, I stop off at a bathroom, and it was more or less what I expected:

You're doing it wrong.

Four star luxury.

On the bright-ish side, during our stay they upgrade us to a nicer room, that actually has a room service book, and wifi, and even a little bathtub.  I especially appreciated that we were not murdered in any way.  In fact, on the day we checked out a couple of vans pulled up full of Vietnamese vacationers, and just like that the resort was suddenly full of people.

The most blingin' of vans.

The facilities were opened, and I imagine after we left the pathways even had light at night.  Maybe the staff even smiled, just a bit.

Just the way this lady and her powder blue power suit would have wanted.

I would also be remiss if I didn't note that this hotel was the first time I saw the penguin-shaped trash cans that would soon become ubiquitous throughout my time in Vietnam.

Vietnam and the penguin have a rich cultural tradition that goes back thousands of years.  Or, it's kind of like their crying Indian, maybe.

We hydrofoil back to Saigon and grab a taxi to...well, we didn't quite now.  Hanoi was the plan, but up until now I hadn't given any thought to how we were actually going to get there.  Now seemed like a good time.  The train apparently takes about 33 hours, so that was out.  As Sarah and I discussed the possibility of plane tickets, our driver chimed in (while idling the car with the meter running, naturally), saying that he knew a guy.  Good enough for me!  He immediately gets on his cell to someone whom we assume works at a travel agency, and soon our cab is booking it through the afternoon traffic to pick up our tickets.

As it turns out, the guy he knew was nothing more than that, a guy with a scooter who drove to the travel agency before us and picked up a couple of tickets.  While we pay out our inflated taxi fare and give a tip to our driver, and to his friend with the scooter, we're treated to a stern lecture on how we should book our flights earlier in the future.  Now someone tells me.

At the airport, we wait as our flight time gets changed twice, from 8pm to somehow 7:40pm, then to 8-ish.  The television screens in the terminal are playing the fight scenes from Fearless on a loop, which I watch while booking a Hanoi hostel for the night on the shitty (but complimentary!) airport internet kiosk.  With plane tickets in hand and a decent hostel booked for the night, you'd think Sarah would be content, but I could see in her eyes a fear forming, with a tinge of trepidation.  So traveling with me isn't the most reliable, but it's never boring!  And that's what's important.  Right?

On the plane we're seated (again in the emergency row) next to a fidgety Vietnamese man who was clearly a flying-virgin.  Sarah had the window seat, and offered it to him without hesitation.  He accepted, but soon wanted back in his original seat, perhaps made sick by the view of the naked Earth we were rocketing past in our metal affront to gravity.  However, before long he was back in spirits and asks to switch seats yet again to get more of that precious window.

Upon landing, we make it out of the airport with minimal fuss, and the notable sight of another white dude, with a rugby shirt, two popped collars, and traditional fisherman pants, arguing with his angry girlfriend, who was dressed in the same awful mix of backpacker fashion.

Pictured: Locals?  They must be, with that authentic pantwear.

We're picked up by an employee of the Rendezvous hostel and soon shown to our room, which for 10 USD a night is somehow better than the 30 buck a night resort suite we just came from.  The Rendezvous Hotel in Hanoi, ladies and gentlemen.

With our stuff stashed away, we become eager to get out on the town.  I consult wikitravel, which mentions Ma May Street as the place to be, and off we go.  The most immediately striking feature of the Hanoi nightlife is the silence.  Where in Saigon there was chaos and volume, Hanoi adheres by a curfew (to ensure that students can concentrate, or something to that commendable and lame effect).  Instead of drunks stumbling to and fro, the sidewalks are instead occupied by worker families sitting and taking their dinners.  The only open venues were foreigner-centric, and one in particular caught my eye:

The EZ Rider bar, inspired by and decorated in tribute to the movie Easy Rider.  There, we eat, drink, and listen to a table of loud expats smoke hookah and bitch about their jobs.  If I had a dime, etc.  Next, we stop by a bucket bar creatively named Bar Bucket where Sarah and I order, naturally, a bucket drink.  For the uninitiated, a bucket drink is where you take a bucket, like those you might make a sandcastle with in your youth, and fill that sucker up with rocket-fuel booze and whatever tooth-rotting slurry you call a mixer.  Once we felt appropriately sloshed, we leave the bar and run into some locals outside.  The kind of locals who hang outside foreigner bars in the middle of the night asking if we need anything.  Well, it just so happened I was planning to go with Sarah to Ha Long Bay in a couple days, and I had read somewhere that marijuana was just the thing for a Ha Long Bay sunset.  I ask one kid: "Tai ma?", being the man of the streets I am (and having read on webehigh.com what weed is called in Vietnam).

"Yeah yeah, I can get for you, no problem," my nefarious associate responds, pulling out a cell phone.  "Just need to call my girlfriend, she can get, you know?"  After a minute or two of what I assumed to be congenial Vietnamese on the phone, he motions for Sarah and I to get on the back of his scooter.  Well, I didn't quite now, but somehow this felt right.  Maybe it had something to do with the literal bucket of alcohol I had just ingested.  Or maybe I was just a streetwise go-getter.  Off we went on the drug dealer's scooter.

After scootering a few blocks, our driver/dealer stops, pulls out his phone, and has another conversation.  "She says she can no get, I'm sorry."  We convey the appropriate disappointment, but then our host is struck with another idea.  "But I know friend!  Maybe he can get?"  I look to Sarah, she shrugs her shoulders.  We've come this far.

A few minutes pass, and another Vietnamese guy on a scooter pulls up to our darkened street.  He walks over and has a hushed conversation with our driver, presumably so we cannot listen in to the rapid Vietnamese being spoken.  Our driver walks over to us.  "He has tai ma, 500,000.  You buy?"  500,000 VND was about 25 bucks, which seemed a little steep for a couple grams.  I tried haggling, but this guy wasn't having any of it.  With the utmost discretion, he pulls out a bag, and holds it up for me to smell.  In the dim light of the sidewalk I can't see the contents, but I certainly smell weed.  I look to Sarah again.  "You want it, it's up to you."  Having come this far, fuck it.  I buy the bag.

And that is the story of how I bought a bag of tobacco with a little bit of bud at the bottom (for the smell) for 25 dollars.

The next morning, Sarah takes off to explore the city by herself, and I decide to check out the sights.  First, since it closes the earliest: The Ho Chi Minh Mausoleum, where Ho Chi Minh lies entombed, for some reason in Hanoi and not his namesake city.  I hop in a taxi, but the driver instead takes me to the Ho Chi Minh museum.  By the time I get to the mausoleum, it's closed.  So much for seeing that sweet, sweet corpse.  I sigh dramatically and, after a Vietnamese man insists on having a picture taken with me, head back to the museum.

Which just so happens to have some of the weirdest displays I've ever seen, in a museum or otherwise.  For example, the Coc Bo cave, where Ho Chi Minh engineered the Vietnamese revolution, presented in the form of a human brain:

I present to you a series of photos of other displays, sans commentary:

After the museum had left my mind sufficiently fucked and maybe brainwashed just a little bit, I headed to the One Pillar Pagoda, which turned out to be in comparison pretty boring.

Might be better with more pillars.

I head back to the room at Rendezvous, but Sarah isn't back yet.  Feeling hungry, I head out to get food.  As it turns out, a number of spots in Hanoi serve Bia Hoi (fresh beer), a locally brewed preservative-free beer that is both refreshing and dirt cheap at about a quarter a glass.

It also isn't always made in the most sanitary conditions, but you're not gonna live forever anyway.

It also turns out that the drinking hole I wander into has roasted pigeon on the menu.  Well, I haven't tried that before.

And no longer want to.

At 5 dollars, it was awful and overpriced.  No one should eat pigeon.  There is a reason we have turned our chickens and turkeys into monstrous steroid-ridden meat blobs.  It is because pigeon is an awful, awful bird to eat.  

Although I never did try the intact head or feet.  Perhaps an explosion of flavor awaits.

I console myself with several more glasses of bia hoi.  Outside, some old ladies ride by on a scooter and wave at me.  Meanwhile, outside it's quickly turning to dusk, so I head back to to hotel where Sarah is waiting.  We decide to get food, and see a puppet show.

Things get weird.